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 My Secret Garden (1973)

  I save my fantasizing for when I’m alone. I wait till evening, take a couple of drinks, and curl up in bed with a sexy book. Then when the drinks take hold I can imagine my hands are those of my lover. Other fantasies are just daydreams, which I have constantly. My favorite daydream is of me cooking or washing dishes, my lover comes in, puts his arms around me, and as we kiss and press against one another and our passion builds, I just reach behind me and turn off the stove, the dishes are forgotten, everything left wonderfully unfinished in this very interrupted state, as we go off to the bedroom to make love. [Interview] MASTURBATIONNot all idle minds drift to sexual fantasy, as not all sexual fantasy (and idle hands) leads to masturbation. In fact, it’s the old chicken-and-the-egg routine. Fantasy and masturbation: which comes first? But one thing seems certain: that masturbation without fantasy is unlikely, unhappy, unreal. Masturbation doesn’t just require fantasy, it demands it. Without fantasy, masturbation would be too lonely. I don’t even want to think about it. In my researches I didn’t find one woman who said she had never masturbated. You could say that this has something to do with the nature of my subject, that the kind of people who talked to me were bound to be more sexually candid. Perhaps my surprise at finding that all the women I talked to masturbated is more a comment on me than my contributors. Possibly. But you see, it wasn’t that I didn’t expect women to masturbate—to have tried it or stumbled upon it at some point in their lives—I simply didn’t think my own experience was all that universal. It goes back again to how little women know about one another, how inclined we are to feel isolated, different, not like the other girls, because we don’t know about other girls. We all know about men; they masturbate. Little boys and masturbation are a normal, even charming part of the women’s magazine stories as to how little boys are. I suppose that’s it; we’ve all read so much about it, about little boys discovering it, and being discovered. It’s charming. But women? We’re as hidden as our clitorises. By the time we’ve found them, hidden away up there, we’re guilty at having located them. If it were meant to be found and enjoyed, wouldn’t it be in the open, hanging down and swinging free like a cock? (No wonder little girls suffer penis envy.)

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I don’t pretend to know what makes people work, but I’d be willing to bet that if more people were more open and let themselves go during sex, their brains as well as their bodies, the world would be a better place. I doubt that so many people would be so aggressive and power-crazy if they found a suitable sex partner who would accept all of them. If people could free themselves of deep-rooted sex guilts they’d spend more time becoming good lovers and wouldn’t have so much time for revenge and wars. Good sex makes my husband and me very mellow. Who would think of hating and fighting and plotting to get someone else if they’d just been very sexually satisfied… no matter what means they employed to reach that happy goal? Not many, I’ll bet. So I’m ending up defending my “dirty” thoughts! Believing in them, I guess is what I mean. [Letter] LilI only fantasize when I masturbate, and I suppose what I think about is typical. I imagine it is a man making love to me, that he kisses me passionately all over my body, concentrating most of his ardor on my cunt, teasing the outer lips, loving me totally and expertly. I simply lie there in ecstasy, which makes me feel a little guilty later at having such a selfish fantasy, since I never even imagine touching him. [Letter] AlisonWhen I was fourteen, I had the usual relationship with a close girlfriend (I think most girls have them). In my bedroom she would pretend to be the madam of a house and I would be a virgin girl. She would dress me in a sort of sexy bikini made of chiffon scarves. She would then be the customer, a rowdy seaman who would take me against my will. She would lie on me and rub her vagina against mine. I experienced very intense orgasms (more intense than from any man). After she moved away I never had the chance of another relationship like ours. Now when I masturbate I usually think that I am being seduced by a pretty female. However, if it ever should occur again in reality, I would need to be seduced by the woman in order to control my embarrassment.

• From The Art of Memoir

  automatically? You’ll have to read the book to find out, for Conroy manages to make even the most quotidian event mean. Nobody’s rendered a teen’s cynical morning haste any better. And the rhythm of the paragraph: the long sentence—three lines—followed by a short sentence—two—leads up to three perfunctory words “End of breakfast.” This is an outlaw boy scrabbling for small sustenance, and the authority of the fat fridge door and his seminal voice—in the context of the rest of the book—lines up with Conroy’s cool, I-can- take-being-neglected persona. So powerful is Conroy’s voice that—at the zenith of his powers—he’s able to sexualize the throwing of a yoyo: That it was vaguely masturbatory seems inescapable. I doubt that half the pubescent boys in America could have been captured by any other means. . . . A single Loop-the-Loop might represent, in some mysterious way, the act of masturbation, but to break down the entire repertoire into the three stages of throw, trick, and return representing erection, climax, and detumescence seems immoderate. Conroy puts himself into a trance practicing the yoyo, thus disassociating from his family’s profound lack of care. Finding that “cool” spot—in the old hep-cat jazz sense of finding a groove— means finding order, silence, a place where time can stop. In such instants of cool, the boy-in-pain Conroy can vanish. He’ll later find sex and music and liquor and driving too fast as other modes of escape into selfless silence. Having taught Conroy’s Stop-Time for some thirty years, I can testify that students seem to trust this voice. They believe it—that it won’t lie or mislead, fabricate events or pander, confess the lesser sin to hide the greater, bore or beg for pity. Ergo, in literary terms, it sounds true. Again: voice grows from the nature of a writer’s talent, which stems from innate character. Just as a memoirist’s nature bestows her magic powers on the page, we also wind up seeing how selfish or mean-spirited or divisive she is or was. We don’t see events objectively; we perceive them through ourselves. And we remember through a filter of both who we are now and who we once were.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  EXPLORATIONThe next three fantasies are from women who are sexually happy in their beds. At least they say they are, and I’m prepared to accept what a woman tells me about her sex life. The alternative is to say that because each of these women fantasizes beyond what is actually happening, it follows that the real sex is inadequate and she dissatisfied. But that would be playing more than amateur psychiatrist, it would be playing God. No thank you. For many women, fantasy is a way of exploring, safely, all the ideas and actions which might frighten them in reality. In fantasy they can expand their reality, play out certain sexual variables and images in much the same way that children enter into fantasy as a form of play, of trying out desires, releasing energies for which they have no outlet in reality. Thinking about it, even getting excited over the image, doesn’t mean you want it as your reality… or else we all, night dreamers that we are, would be suppressed robbers, bisexuals, murderers, or even inanimate objects. KarenI have this fantasy quite often while Ben is fucking me. In fact, I’d say I have it during our best sessions, when my body is most relaxed and inventive. Ben gets so excited when I’m into this fantasy it’s as though he were having it too. Yet I know if it were to really happen it would scare the hell out of him—and out of me. I don’t think we have any room in our lives for any kind of group scene; it simply wouldn’t fit in; we wouldn’t know how to handle it. But in fantasy, it’s fantastic.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Even then, the tail looped over the edge and burnt. It was the meatiest fish we ate that night, with the greatest proportion of white flesh to spiky bones. Lecia and I ate it while he worked up a skillet full of thin-sliced red potatoes along with Vidalia onions he’d quartered. I can still see Daddy scraping at those potatoes, which would keep the smoky fish taste from the lard. He was singing “Goodnight Irene” under his breath, staring into the skillet with that faraway look. Watching the sky arch above us through pines, I thought about a passage I’d read in the encyclopedias Grandma bought us, how the Rockies were formed by glaciers sliding across the continent to rake up zillions of tons of rock. I pictured one moving slow as white silk across where we sat. Maybe God dropped that boulder off right there , I wrote in my diary the next day, for us to cook on. (Comfort makes fools of us that way, and a kid gets faith back quick.) At one point Daddy said to hush, and through the far pines, lit by a three-quarter moon, we made out the blunted antlers of a moose, which struck me as noble in its bigjawed ugliness. It chewed in profile slow as a ballplayer. Sometime later, a bobcat even yowled, close enough to make me scoot up under Daddy’s arm, which fear made him laugh and say nothing was going to bother me. And I believed him. After we ate, Daddy stoked the fire again. He lay back on a jeans jacket he’d balled up and sipped at a silver whiskey flask. Lecia and I undid a couple of wire coat hangers for marshmallows. I roasted three at a time, dipping them right in the fire. They blazed and cooked black outside, but inside were nothing but goo. Lecia was more even in approach: she toasted them singly to a pale gold color. She even bent one end of the hanger, so it had a rotary handle she could turn like an honest-to-God spit. For once that difference struck me okay without sinking me into a swamp of worry about how it might augur about my character, or lack of character. She even told me while she sat twisting her spit that mine was one helluva fish, and Daddy agreed. We fell asleep beside him on that unlikely cold stone, both full as ticks on fish and potatoes, each snuggled under an armpit, our heads on his chest. He still smelled of horse. A few times some coal crumbling in on itself caused me to jerk awake; then I saw sparks surge up in a tower and felt Daddy draw our football jackets up over our shoulders. Otherwise, he lay still, the flask balanced on his breast bone at the perfect angle so he could sip steady without lifting his head or spilling down his chin.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The noblest type of an apostolic deaconess, which has come down to us from this period, is Olympias, the friend of Chrysostom, and the recipient of seventeen beautiful epistles from him.470 She sprang from a respectable heathen family, but received a Christian education; was beautiful and wealthy; married in her seventeenth year (A.D. 384) the prefect of Constantinople, Nebridius; but in twenty months after was left a widow, and remained so in spite of the efforts of the emperor Theodosius to unite her with one of his own kindred. She became a deaconess; lived in rigid asceticism; devoted her goods to the poor; and found her greatest pleasure in doing good. When Chrysostom came to Constantinople, he became her pastor, and guided her lavish benefaction by wise counsel. She continued faithful to him in his misfortune; survived him by several years, and died in 420, lamented by all the poor and needy in the city and in the country around. In the West, on the contrary, the office of deaconess was first shorn of its clerical character by a prohibition of ordination passed by the Gallic councils in the fifth and sixth centuries;471 and at last it was wholly abolished. The second synod of Orleans, in 533, ordained in its eighteenth canon: "No woman shall henceforth receive the benedictio diaconalis [which had been substituted for ordinatio], on account of the weakness of this sex." The reason betrays the want of good deaconesses, and suggests the connection of this abolition of an apostolic institution with the introduction of the celibacy of the priesthood, which seemed to be endangered by every sort of female society. The adoption of the care of the poor and sick by the state, and the cessation of adult baptisms and of the custom of immersion, also made female assistance less needful. In modern times, the Catholic church, it is true, has special societies or orders of women, like the Sisters of Mercy, for the care of the sick and poor, the training of children, and other objects of practical charity; and in the bosom of Protestantism also similar benevolent associations have arisen, under the name of Deaconess Institutes, or Sisters’ Houses, though in the more free evangelical spirit, and without the bond of a vow.472 But, though quite kindred in their object, these associations are not to be identified with the office of deaconess in the apostolic age and in the ancient church. That was a regular, standing office in every Christian congregation, corresponding to the office of deacon; and has never since the twelfth century been revived, though the local work of charity has never ceased. To the ordinary clergy there were added in this period sundry extraordinary church offices, rendered necessary by the multiplication of religious functions in large cities and dioceses:

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  However much we may decline to believe that monasticism is a higher form of Christian life, we must give due credit to these men, or deny to a series of centuries all progress and good whatsoever. The times were favorable for the development of monastic communities. If our own is the age of the laic, the mediaeval period was the age of the monk. Society was unsettled and turbulent. The convent offered an asylum of rest and of meditation. Bernard calls his monks "the order of the Peaceful." Feud and war ruled without. Every baronial residence was a fortress. The convent was the scene of brotherhood and co-operation. It furnished to the age the ideal of a religious household on earth. The epitaphs of monks betray the feeling of the time, pacificus, "the peaceful"; tranquilla pace serenus, "in quiet and undisturbed repose"; fraternae pacis amicus, "friend of brotherly peace." The circumstances are presented by Caesar of Heisterbach under which a number of monks abandoned the world, and were "converted"—that is, determined to enter a convent. Now the decision was made at a burial.538 Now it was due to the impression made by the relation of the wonderful things which occurred in convents. This was the case with a young knight, Gerlach,539 who listened to an abbot who was then visiting a castle, as he told his experiences within cloistral walls. Gerlach went to Paris to study, but could not get rid of the seed which had been sown in his heart, and entered upon the monastic novitiate. Sometimes the decision was made in consequence of a sermon.540 Caesar of Heisterbach himself was "converted" by a description given by Gerard of Walberberg, abbot of Heisterbach, while they were on the way to Cologne during the troublous times of Philip of Swabia and Otto IV. Gerard described the appearance of the Virgin, her mother Anna, and St. Mary Magdalene, who descended from the mountain and revealed themselves to the monks of Clairvaux while they were engaged in the harvest, dried the perspiration from their foreheads, and cooled them by fanning. Within three months Caesar entered the convent of Heisterbach.541 There were in reality only two careers in the Middle Ages, the career of the knight and the career of the monk. It would be difficult to say which held out the most attractions and rewards, even for the present life. The monk himself was a soldier. The well-ordered convent offered a daily drill, exercise following exercise with the regularity of clockwork; and though the enemy was not drawn up in visible array on open field, he was a constant reality.542 Barons, counts, princes joined the colonies of the spiritual militia, hoping thereby to work out more efficiently the problem of their salvation and fight their conflict with the devil. The Third Lateran, 1179, bears witness to the popularity of the conventual life among the higher classes, and the tendency to restrict

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  BabsMy fantasies are so personal, and the pleasure I get from them derives so much, I think, from the fact that they are private and locked away in my imagination, that I wouldn’t dream of trying to make them come true. I’ve thought a lot about this, especially after writing this letter. I almost didn’t write it for fear of diminishing this pleasure; I was afraid that putting them on paper would lessen their effectiveness. Luckily it hasn’t, perhaps because I don’t know you. I mean, if someone, even a close friend, asked me to speak them aloud so that the words actually made sound for someone to hear, I don’t think I could do it. And if I could, it certainly would spoil them for me, especially the ones involving love. But act my fantasies out? Make them come true? No, absolutely not. My real life’s not what they’re about; I don’t want those things to really happen to me, I simply want to imagine what it would be like. So that’s where they’ll stay. [Letter] ElizabethI am twenty-five years of age and have spent most of my life in Kansas City. My husband and I have been married nearly five years and we have a son four years old. I am a college graduate, interested in painting and music, and after graduation I spent a short time working as an actress in summer stock. My present job is that of a telephone solicitor. Good luck in your research. Here goes. Usually during sex I concentrate on what I’m doing and who I’m with. However, I sometimes fantasize that I am with an old boyfriend or a complete stranger, that another man in addition to my husband is making love to me. There is a friend of my husband’s with whom I once had a sexual encounter (at my husband’s urging) and I often imagine him as the extra man. This fantasy happens when my husband and I are having anal intercourse. While I am stimulating my clitoris or my husband stimulates it for me, I pretend that the other man and I are enjoying vaginal intercourse while I’m having anal intercourse with my husband at the same time. I sometimes think about the other women I know my husband has been with and wonder if he did the same things to them and how they reacted. I imagine that I am he, making love to one of these women. Also, when I am blowing my husband I try to imagine how it feels to have a penis with someone sucking it or tickling it with her tongue. I can almost feel the semen being sucked out when I would (when he does) obtain orgasm. I thoroughly enjoy my fantasies and find talking about them increases the excitement.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  On the other hand, deepest contentment occurs at those moments when we are fully accepting of ourselves. At such times we respect our actions, feelings, bodies, thoughts. Failure to accept any of these aspects of ourselves is synonymous with self-alienation. One of the highest states of consciousness attainable is that of the nonjudgmental observer. In such a state, freed from the distortions of needs and value judgments (“If a pickpocket sees a Holy Man he will see only his pockets”),1 he will begin to see WHAT IS, both in the world about him and within himself. Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher-mystic, tried to teach people to develop “the Witness” within themselves. “The Witness” could detach itself and nonjudgmentally witness and thereby accept both inner and outer events. Zen Masters and Yogis try to teach a similar acceptance to their students. All of these thinkers appreciate the fact that you don’t think your thoughts, but rather that your thoughts think through you. They recognize that you are no more responsible for thinking than you are for digestion, breathing, for life itself. You may bear a certain degree of responsibility for what you do with your thoughts, but you certainly bear none for having them. My Secret Garden is a compilation of uncensored data on women’s most secret sexual thoughts. This is something that has not been done in our time. As a psychiatrist who has listened to such fantasies before, I consider it an honest accounting. It is also a useful book, for it can help other women witness and accept their fantasies and themselves. And yet I am certain that many people in our society will attack this work. They will do so by attempting to ignore it, condemn it, ban it, laugh at it, intellectually dismiss it, or psychoanalyze it. In doing so such critics will only reinforce their own and others’ self-alienation. The attacks on My Secret Garden will come from three directions. The most primitive charge will be that the women Ms. Friday interviewed are tortured or abnormal in some way and don’t represent the average woman. The second and more sophisticated attack will be the intellectual/psychoanalytic approach, which will attempt to demonstrate why certain fantasies are not “healthy.” Lastly there is the attack to be waged by the anti-Eros forces—those who regard such a frank sexual discussion as this work as either pornography or perversity. Both the nature of these lines of attack and the bankruptcy of such charges are themes I would like to explore more fully. 1. The Women Interviewed Are Not Representative2It might be argued that Ms. Friday’s respondees were not representative of the average woman; that those who would talk about their fantasies are by nature exhibitionists or sexually preoccupied; that only the most “sensationalistic” fantasies found their way into print; that the sampling leaves out women who don’t fantasize and therefore gives a misleading picture of female reveries.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  These have the merit of returns derived from a general census, which my other data lack, because I cannot for a moment suppose that the writers of the latter are a haphazard proportion of those to whom they were sent. Indeed I know of some who, disavowing all possession of the power, and of many others who, possessing it in too faint a degree to enable them to express what their experiences really were, in a manner satisfactory to themselves, sent no returns at all. Considerable statistical similarity was, however, observed between the sets of returns furnished by the schoolboys and those sent by my separate correspondents, and I may add that they accord in this respect with the oral information I have elsewhere obtained. The conformity of replies from so many different sources which was clear from the first, the fact of their apparent trustworthiness being on the whole much increased by cross-examination (though I could give one or two amusing instances of break-down), and the evident effort made to give accurate answers, have convinced me that it is a much easier matter than I had anticipated to obtain trustworthy replies to psychological questions. Many persons, especially women and intelligent children, take pleasure in introspection, and strive their very best to explain their mental processes. I think that a delight in self-dissection must be a strong ingredient in the pleasure that many are said to take in confessing themselves to priests. "Here, then, are two rather notable results: the one is the proved facility of obtaining statistical insight into the processes of other persons' minds, whatever a priori objection may have been made as to its possibility; and the other is that scientific men, as a class, have feeble powers of visual representation. There is no doubt whatever on the latter point, however it may be accounted for. My own conclusion is that an over-ready perception of sharp mental pictures is antagonistic to the acquirement of habits of highly-generalized and abstract thought, especially when the steps of reasoning are carried on by words as symbols, and that if the faculty of seeing the pictures was ever possessed by men who think hard, it is very apt to be lost by disuse. The highest minds are probably those in which it is not lost, but subordinated, and is ready for use on suitable occasions. I am, however, bound to say that the missing faculty seems to be replaced so serviceably by other modes of conception, chiefly, I believe, connected with the incipient motor sense, not of the eyeballs only but of the muscles generally, that men who declare themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures can nevertheless give lifelike descriptions of what they have seen, and can otherwise express themselves as if they were gifted with a vivid visual imagination. They can also become painters of rank of Royal Academicians. [59] . . .

• From My People (2022)

  People like Skip and Karen Finley’s daughter Kristin, who married Timothy Brown at that beach a couple of years ago and now lives in Oak Bluffs full-time. It would be great to have a bookstore on Circuit Avenue featuring the history of black Oak Bluffs, but there is Zita Allen’s Cousen Rose Gallery, which showcases current and past black history makers, and C’est la Vie, one of the few stores owned by a black man, Roger Schilling. Thankfully it features artifacts that draw in black people looking for things that look like or feature them. So Roger and Zita are there and they represent! As do artists and writers like Jill Nelson and her brother, the award-winning documentarian Stanley Nelson, and Abigail McGrath, niece of Dorothy West, who holds writer’s workshops that put an Oak Bluffs imprimatur on those who dream of following in her aunt’s footsteps—and may in time. Many Vineyarders whose history in Oak Bluffs long predates ours continue to nourish the roots they planted here generations ago and tend them as they spread. I have watched Colin Redd, son of Sharon and Frankie, grow into a handsome young man who no longer has time to play as he once did (at least in the daytime), busily dividing his time between work at Biscuits and the new Johnny Cupcakes on Circuit Avenue. Gretchen Tucker Underwood plays host and takes occasional stabs (or whacks) at being a disciplinarian to her growing grandchildren, seventeen-year-old Jason and thirteen-year-old Brandon, who come every summer. The other day I ran into Shayna, the daughter of Harry and Charlena Seymour of Oak Bluffs, down with her husband, Steve Carr, and their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Blake, who now have their own house in town. A television reporter in Boston, she had come to do a piece on historic Oak Bluffs. I suspect I will see Blake in a few years out on the tennis court, now abandoned by his grandmother, keeping the tradition alive and preparing for the historic Tucker Invitational. Or maybe they will be joined by those yet to come in the Finley household. Judy and Ron Davenport will make sure their huge stable of grandchildren, including the most recent entry of twins, will inherit their love of Oak Bluffs. I even know some folks who spent years going to the Hamptons who have now discovered Oak Bluffs and are here to stay, soon with a brand-new grandchild in tow. So I have no doubt that while some of the so-called historic memories of Oak Bluffs will fade, in their place others will be created by a multicolored, economically diverse crowd, and it will be up to all of us to ensure that Oak Bluffs continues to be a place we and our children, grandchildren, and generations to come will happily call home.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Farewell, Monsieur; the last mark of your friendship I ask is that you institute no perquisitions to discover what shall have become of me. Oh, Corville! I await you in a better world, your virtues should lead you unto it; may the atonements I make, to expiate my crimes, in this place where I go to spend the unhappy years that remain to me, permit me to encounter you again someday." Madame de Lorsange leaves the house immediately; she takes some money with her, leaps into a carriage, to Monsieur de Corville abandons the rest of her ownings after having recommended that they be turned into a pious legacy, and flies to Paris, where she takes a Carmelite's veil; not many years go by before she becomes the example of her order and the edification, as much by her great piety as by the wisdom of her mind and the regularity of her manners. Monsieur de Corville, worthy of his country's highest posts, attained to them, and, whatever were his honors, he employed them for no end but to bring happiness to the people, glory to his master, whom, "although a minister," he served well, and fortune to his friends. O you who have wept tears upon hearing of Virtue's miseries; you who have been moved to sympathy for the woe-ridden Justine; the while forgiving the perhaps too heavy brushstrokes we have found ourselves compelled to employ, may you at least extract from this story the same moral which determined Madame de Lorsange! May you be convinced, with her, that true happiness is to be found nowhere but in Virtue's womb, and that if, in keeping with designs it is not for us to fathom, God permits that it be persecuted on Earth, it is so that Virtue may be compensated by Heaven's most dazzling rewards.

• From My People (2022)

  Henderson went on, adding: “But now there is a much broader range of white-collar blacks—the young professionals, primarily, who follow the normal pattern of white-collar workers.” Today’s black vacationers at Oak Bluffs—the closest stop by ferry from the mainland at Woods Hole—are sometimes the great-grandchildren of the first blacks to buy property there. Mrs. Sadie Ashburn, who at eighty-five still does most of the cook ing at her cottage resort—one of the few black businesses in the area—can remember coming to Martha’s Vineyard when she was five years old. And while many city residents prefer the quiet solitude of the small “up island” settlements—the most remote of which is Gay Head, about forty-five minutes away—the blacks for the most part seem to stay in this bustling little town with its quaint and sometimes elegant gingerbread houses. When asked to describe Oak Bluffs, the usual reply from those who live farther out is: “It’s urban.” And yet, paradoxically, it is a desire to get away from urban living that seems to have attracted most of the blacks here. Mostly they are the families of businessmen, lawyers, judges, politicians, doctors, and artists from Boston to Atlanta. “We live in the heart of Trenton,” said Mrs. Audrian Hayling, wife of Dr. Leslie Hayling, a dentist, and mother of fourteen-year-old Leslie Jr. “Les can’t ride a bike or do any of the things that he has the freedom to do here,” she said. “It’s such a change here. I call it coming to renew my soul.” The Haylings own one of the most beautiful homes on one of the most spacious lots in the section of the Bluffs called East Chop. It overlooks the boat basin and borders on the West Chop area, a section a few blocks away in which only a handful of blacks live. While the Haylings at one time considered buying a home at Sag Harbor, they decided that the disadvantage of distance—five hours by car, compared with two to Sag Harbor—was outweighed by the variety: more beaches, more golf courses, more of their friends. Of course, Dr. Hayling, a World War II pilot, said he would probably not have bought a house on the Vineyard “if I didn’t have an airplane”—a Beechcraft Bonanza that seats five. Mrs. Hayling and their son drive up and stay for the entire summer, while Dr. Hayling flies up on Thursdays—about a forty-five-minute trip—and returns to Trenton on Monday afternoons. The house has been “winterized,” and the family spends long winter holidays there as well. “From Tuesday to Friday, it’s a real matriarchy,” said Teixeira Nash, a personable artist—known as “Tex” to her friends—who is chairman of the Council of the Arts in Washington. Mrs. Nash’s father was a Portuguese who came to Boston from the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of West Africa, in the early 1900s, and she and her friends spent their summers here as children.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Her spark then endeavoured, as she stood, by disclosing her thighs, to gain us a completer sight of that central charm of attraction, but not obtaining it so conveniently in that attitude, he led her to the foot of the couch, and bringing it to one of the pillows gently inclined her head down, so that as she leaned with it over her crossed hands, straddling with her thighs wide spread, and jutting her body out, she presented a full back view of her person, naked to her waist. Her posteriors, plump, smooth, and prominent, formed luxuriant tracts of animated snow, that splendidly filled the eye, till it was commanded down the parting or separation of those exquisitely white cliffs, by their narrow vale, and was there stopt, and attracted by the embowered bottom-savity, that terminated this delightful vista and stood moderately gaping from the influence of her bended posture, so that the agreeable interior red of the sides of the orifice came into view, and with respect to the white that dazzled round it, gave somewhat the idea of a pink slash in the glossiest white satin. Her gallant, who was a gentleman about thirty, somewhat inclined to a fatness that was in no sort displeasing, improving the hint thus tendered him of this mode of enjoyment, after setting her well in this posture, and encouraging her with kisses and caresses to stand him thro’, drew out his affair ready erected, and whose extreme length, rather disproportioned to its breadth, was the more surprising, as that excess is not often the case with those of his corpulent habit; making then the right and direct application, he drove it up to the guard, whilst the round bulge of those Turkish beauties of her’s, tallying with the hollow made with the bent of his belly and thighs, as he curved inwards, brought all those parts, surely not un-delightfully, into warm touch, and close conjunction; his hands he kept passing round her body, and employed in toying with her enchanting breasts. As soon too as she felt him at home as he could reach, she lifted her head a little from the pillow, and turning her neck, without much straining, but her cheeks glowing with the deepest scarlet, and a smile of the tenderest satisfaction, met the kiss he pressed forward to give her as they were thus close joined together: when leaving him to pursue his delights, she hid again her face and blushes with her hands and pillow, and thus stood passively and as favourably too as she could, whilst he kept laying at her with repeated thrusts and making the meeting flesh on both sides resound again with the violence of them; then ever as he backened from her, we could see between them part of his long white staff foamingly in motion, till, as he went on again and closed with her, the interposing hillocks took it out of sight.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She couldn’t remember. “You forget to use a fork again?” Beth drawled. Fran, scraping the onions from the pan with a spatula, glared at her in silence, fingers in her mouth, and tipped more or less equal portions into all three bowls. She killed the range and swept dinner across the room, the odd bowl balanced on her forearm like she’d done while waitressing at the Boulevard in college. For a while after that they ate in companionable silence, forks scraping against ceramic. Fran missed the smell of lilacs blowing in through Indi’s windows, but the bunker’s vast and solid presence made her feel secure, and the cool light of its electric bulbs was soothing. It was after nine by the kitchen clock, one of those rimless steel circles with lines instead of numbers, when Robbie leaned over Fran’s shoulder and prodded her half-eaten testicle with his fork. “Is that what they look like?” Fran flushed. It felt embarrassing for him to see her artificiality outside her body, the way she’d felt when hookups saw her hormones in the drawer of her bedside table. “Yes.” “Why?” Beth asked thickly around her own mouthful of fried balls. “Did you want some?” Weed smoke swirled pale and gray in the recirculated air, migrating slowly toward the vents up near the ceiling. Fran didn’t know if they were technically allowed to smoke inside, but it wasn’t like they could unpop that cherry. She smiled at that image. A fruit crushed in a pretty fist. Fingers unfolding. The cherry whole again. Tattoo of a peach with a bite out of it. “Never have I ever…” Beth, sprawled on the couch beside Fran with her head pillowed on the armrest, hesitated, tongue curled up over her upper lip. She tapped the neck of her beer bottle against her teeth in contemplation. “Started a fire on purpose.” Fran laughed in horrified delight as Robbie, sitting on the floor in front of her with his head resting on her knee, tipped his drink back. Finished, he set the bottle on the floor and reached for another. He popped the cap off neatly with his teeth and grinned at her in an easy, guileless way that made her stomach flutter. She could almost see it, cinders flying through his thick, dark hair in a summer breeze. A gutted house’s skeleton collapsing in on itself, red and black and flaming orange, and the wind of it flattening his clothes against his slender frame. “Bullshit you did,” snapped Indi. It was joking, said with a smile, but even Robbie seemed to feel the edge on it. She’d come out of her bedroom halfway through their dozenth round of Gin, smelling like a distillery and with a six-pack of Jae and Dana’s homebrew in each hand. Since then she’d been drinking steadily. Her face was flushed. Sweat stood out on her forehead. “I did!” protested Robbie, looking faintly hurt and extremely drunk.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Mrs. Cole still continued her friendship, and offered me her assistance and advice towards another choice; but I was now in ease and affluence enough to look about me at leisure; and as to any constitutional calls of pleasure, their pressure, or sensibility, was greatly lessened by a consciousness of the ease with which they were to be satisfied at Mrs. Cole’s house, where Louisa and Emily still continued in the old way; and my great favourite Harriet used often to come and see me, and entertain me, with her head and heart full of the happiness she enjoyed with her dear baronet, whom she loved with a tenderness and constancy, even though he was her keeper, and what is yet more, had made her independent, by a handsome provision for her and hers. I was then in this vacancy from any regular employ of my person in my way of business, when one day, Mrs. Cole, in the course of the constant confidence we lived in, acquainted me that there was one Mr. Barville, who used her house, just come to town, whom she was not a little perplexed about providing a suitable companion for; which was indeed a point of difficulty, as he was under the tyranny of a cruel taste: that of an ardent desire, not only of being unmercifully whipped himself, but of whipping others, in such sort, that though he paid extravagantly those who had the courage and complaisance to submit to his humour, there were few, delicate as he was in the choice of his subjects, who would exchange turns with him so terribly at the expense of their skin. But, what yet increased the oddity of this strange fancy was the gentleman being young; whereas it generally attacks, it seems, such as are, through age, obliged to have recourse to this experiment, for quickening the circulation of their sluggish juices, and determining a conflux of the spirits of pleasure towards those flagging shrivelly parts, that rise to life only by virtue of those titillating ardours created by the discipline of their opposites, with which they have so surprising a consent. This Mrs.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "At the theatre we occupied the same box, alone, or with my mother. Neither of us accepted, as was soon known, any invitation to whatsoever entertainment where the other was not also a guest. At the public promenades we either walked, rode or drove together. In fact, had our union been blessed by the Church, it could not have been a closer one. Let the moralist after that explain to me the harm we did, or the law-giver that would apply to us the penalty inflicted to the worst of criminals, the wrong we did to society. "Although we did not dress alike, still—being almost of the same build, of about the same age, as well as of identical tastes—the people, who saw us always arm-in-arm, ended by not being able to think of the one apart from the other. "Our friendship had almost become proverbial, and 'No Réné without Camille' had become a kind of by-word." "But you, that had been so terrorized by the anonymous note, did you not fear that people might begin to suspect the real nature of your attachment?" "That fear had quite passed away. Does the shame of a divorce-court keep the adultress from meeting her lover? Do the impending terrors of the law keep the thief from stealing? My conscience had been lulled by happiness into a calm repose; moreover, the knowledge I had acquired at Briancourt's gatherings, that I was not the only member of our cankered society who loved in the Socratic fashion, and that men of the highest intelligence, of the kindest heart, and of the purest aesthetic feelings, were—like myself—sodomists, quieted me. It is not the pains of hell we dread, but rather the low society we might meet there below. "The ladies now had, I believe, begun to suspect that our excessive friendship was of too loving a nature; and as I have heard since, we had been nicknamed the angels of Sodom—hinting, thereby, that these heavenly messengers had not escaped their doom. But what did I care if some tribades suspected us of sharing their own frailties." "And your mother?" "She was actually suspected of being Réné's mistress. I was amused by it; the idea was so very absurd." "But had she not any inkling of your love for your friend?" "You know the husband is always the last to suspect his wife's infidelity. She was surprised to see the change wrought in me. She even asked me how it was that I had learnt to like the man I had snubbed and treated with such disdain; and then she added,— "'You see you must never be prejudiced, and judge people without knowing them.' "A circumstance, however, which happened at that time forcibly diverted my mother's attention away from Teleny.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I had now achieved this rare adventure ultimately much more to my satisfaction than I had bespoken the nature of it to turn out; nor was it much lessened, you may think, by spark’s lavish praises of my constancy and complaisance, which he gave weight to by a present that greatly surpassed my utmost expectation, besides his gratification to Mrs. Cole. I was not, however, at any time re-enticed to renew with him, or resort again to the violent expedient of lashing nature into more haste than good speed: which, by the way, I conceive acts somewhat in the manner of a dose of Spanish flies; with more pain perhaps, but less danger; and might be necessary to him, but was nothing less so than to me, whose appetite wanted the bridle more than the spur. Mrs. Cole, to whom this adventurous exploit had more and more endeared me, looked on me now as a girl after her own heart, afraid of nothing, and, on a good account, hardly enough to fight all the weapons of pleasure through. Attentive then, in consequence of these favourable conceptions, to promote either my profit or pleasure, she had special regard for the first, in a new gallant of a very singular turn, that she procured for and introduced to me. This was a grave staid, solemn, elderly gentleman, whose peculiar humour was a delight in combing fine tresses of hair; and as I was perfectly headed to his taste, he used to come constantly at my toilet hours, when I let down my hair as loose as nature, and abandoned it to him to do what he pleased with it; and accordingly he would keep me an hour or more in play with it, drawing the comb through it, winding the curls round his fingers, even kissing it as he smoothed it; and all this led to no other use of my person, or any other liberties whatever, any more than if a distinction of sexes had not existed. Another peculiarity of taste he had, which was to present me with a dozen pairs of the whitest kid gloves at a time: these he would divert himself with drawing on me, and then biting off their finger ends; all which fooleries of a silly appetite, the old gentleman paid more liberally for, than most others did for more essential favours. This lasted till a violent cough, seizing and laying him up, delivered me from this most innocent and insipid trifler, for I never heard more of him after his first retreat.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Mother was working as a stringer for the town paper when the story came out, and the mayor, whose only real job was to turn on the traffic light every morning, called a press conference. Mother brought Lecia and me along, and another reporter was there from The Port Arthur News. He was chewing Red Man tobacco, I remember, and spitting into a Folger’s can he’d brought with him for that purpose. In the back of the firehouse, somebody had strung up one of those big flags made out of the royal-blue felt that you see only at Scout jamborees. It had the town motto on it in gold letters: Leechfield Will Grease The Planet! Mother took a Polaroid of the mayor standing in front of it holding up the copy of Business Week like he’d won it in a raffle. The big-jawed reporter from Port Arthur told Lecia and me that he felt like he was supposed to write up the winner of a shit-eating contest. After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor’s wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that’d break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love. The last stars were clicking out just as we pulled up in our yard. The old Impala’s tires had left deep muddy grooves in the yard in front of our house when we’d backed out for Grandma’s days earlier. Those were what we plunged back into coming home. Daddy had come in from the graveyard shift and was shaving at the kitchen sink, his hard hat sitting in the drainboard. He always shaved without a mirror, using soap and cold water, something he’d learned in the war. It was a kind of modesty for him, not watching himself too much. He was standing shirtless at the kitchen sink with little speckles of blood all over his chin. Lecia and I came tearing in and threw ourselves around his skinny legs, but he made out like we hadn’t been anywhere. Like his own daddy, he might well have asked us if we’d got the coffee. Mother threatened divorce a lot of times, and Daddy’s response to it was usually a kind of patient eye-rolling. He never spoke of divorce as an option. If I asked him worried questions about a particularly nasty fight, he’d just say I shouldn’t talk bad about my mother, as if even suggesting they might split up insulted her somehow. In his world, only full-blown lunatics got divorced. Regular citizens in a bad marriage just hunkered down and stood it. His uncle Lee Gleason, for instance, didn’t speak to his wife for forty years before he died, but they didn’t bother with divorce.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "'In love and in war, every stratagem is good; and perhaps with him, as with the Jesuits, "the end justifies the means." Anyhow, forget this note completely, let it be like a mid-winter night's dream.' "Then, taking the obnoxious bit of paper, he placed it on the glowing embers; first it writhed and crackled, then a sudden flame burst forth and consumed it. An instant afterwards, it was nothing but a little, black, crumpled thing, on which tiny, fiery snakes were hastily chasing and then swallowing each other as they met. "Then came a puff from the crackling logs, and it mounted and disappeared up the chimney like a little black devil. "Naked as we were on the low couch in front of the fireplace, we clasped and hugged each other fondly. "'It seemed to threaten us before it disappeared, did it not? I hope Briancourt will never come between us.' "'We'll defy him,' said my friend, smiling; and taking hold of my phallus and of his own, he brandled them both. 'This,' said he, 'is the most efficient exorcism in Italy against the evil eye. Moreover he has doubtless forgotten both you and me by this time—nay, even the very idea of having written this note.' "'Why?' "'Because he has found out a new lover.' "'Who, the Spahi officer?' "'No, a young Arab. Anyhow we'll know who it is by the subject of the picture he is going to paint. Some time ago he was only dreaming of a pendant to the three Graces, which to him represented the mystic trinity of tribadism.' "A few days afterwards we met Briancourt in the green room of the Opera. When he saw us, he looked away and tried to shun us. I would have done the same. "'No,' said Teleny, 'let us go and speak to him and have matters out. In such things never shew the slightest fear. If you face the enemy boldly, you have already half vanquished him.' Then, going up to him and dragging me with him,—'Well,' said he, stretching out his hand, 'what has become of you? It is some days since we have seen each other.' "'Of course,' replied he, 'new friends make us forget old ones.' "'Like new pictures old ones. By the bye, what sketch have you begun?' "'Oh, something glorious!—a picture that will make a mark, if any does.' "'But what is it?' "'Jesus Christ.' "'Jesus Christ?' "'Yes, since I knew Achmet, I have been able to understand the Saviour. You would love Him, too,' added he, 'if you could see those dark, mesmeric eyes, with their long and jetty fringe.' "'Love whom," said Teleny, 'Achmet or Christ?'