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 Middlesex (2002)

  First of all, Lefty. Still dapper despite stroke damage, wearing a starched white shirt and glen-plaid trousers, he writes on his chalk- board and holds it up: "Christos AnestiV Desdemona sits across from him, her dentures making her look like a snapping turtle. My mother, in this home movie marked "Easter '62," is two years from turning forty. The crow's-feet around her eyes are another reason (aside from the floodlights) why she holds a hand over her face. In this gesture I see the emotional sympathy I've always felt with Tessie, the two of us never happier than when unobserved, people-watching. Behind her hand I can see the traces of the novel she stayed up reading the previ- ous night. All the big words she had to look up in the dictionary crowd her tired head, waiting to show up in the letters she writes me today. Her hand is also a refusal, her only way of getting back at a husband who has begun to disappear on her. (Milton came home every night; he didn't drink or womanize but, preoccupied with busi- ness worries, he began to leave a little more of himself at the diner each day, so that the man who returned to us seemed less and less present, a kind of robot who carved turkeys and filmed holidays but who wasn't really there at all.) Finally, of course, my mother's up- raised hand is a kind of warning, too, a predecessor of the black box. Chapter Eleven sprawls on the carpet, wolfing candy. Grandson 225 of the two former silk farmers (with chalkboard and worry beads), he has never had to help in the cocoonery. He has never been to the Koza Han. Environment has already made its imprint on him. He has the tyrannical, self-absorbed look of American children . . . And now two dogs come bounding into the frame. Rufus and Willis, our two boxers. Rufus sniffs my diaper and, with perfect comic timing, sits on me. He will later bite someone, and both dogs will be given away. My mother appears, shooing Rufus . . and there I am again. I stand up and toddle toward the camera, smiling, trying out my wave . . . . I know this film well. "Easter '62" was the home movie Dr. Luce talked my parents into giving him. This was the film he screened each year for his students at Cornell University Medical School. This was the thirty-five-second segment that, Luce insisted, proved out his theory that gender identity is established early on in life. This was the film Dr. Luce showed to me, to tell me who I was. And who was that? Look at the screen. My mother is handing me a baby doll. I take the baby and hug it to my chest. Putting a toy bottle to the baby's lips, I offer it milk.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  . five. They suffered through their first Michigan winter. A January night, just past 1 a.m. Desdemona Stephanides asleep, wearing her hated YWCA hat against the wind blowing through the thin walls. A radiator sighing, clanking. By candlelight, Lefty finishes his homework, notebook propped on knees, pencil in hand. And from the wall: rustiing. He looks up to see a pair of red eyes shining out from a hole in the base- board. He writes R-A-T before throwing his pencil at the vermin. Desdemona sleeps on. He brushes her hair. He says, in English, "Hello, sweetheart." The new country and its language have helped to push the past a little further behind. The sleeping form next to him is less and less his sister every night and more and more his wife. The statute of limitations ticks itself out, day by day, all memory of the crime being washed away. (But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant . .) . Spring arrived, 1923. My grandfather, accustomed to the multi- farious conjugations of ancient Greek verbs, had found English, for all its incoherence, a relatively simple tongue to master. Once he had swallowed a good portion of the English vocabulary, he began to taste the familiar ingredients, the Greek seasoning in the roots, pre- fixes, and suffixes. A pageant was planned to celebrate the Ford En- glish School graduation. As a top student, Lefty was asked to take part. "What kind of pageant?" Desdemona asked. "I can't tell you. It's a surprise. But you have to sew me some clothes." "What kind?" "Like from the patridha!' It was a Wednesday evening. Lefty and Zizmo were in the sala when suddenly Lina came in to listen to "The Ronnie Ronnette Hour." Zizmo gave her a disapproving look, but she escaped behind her headphones. "She thinks she's one of these Atnerikanidbes" Zizmo said to Lefty. "Look. See? She even crosses her legs." "This is America," Lefty said. "We're 2l\Amerikanidhes now." "This is not America," Zizmo countered. "This is my house. We 99 don't live like the Amerikanidhes in here. Your wife understands. Do you see her in the sala showing her legs and listening to the radio?" Someone knocked at the door. Zizmo, who had an inexplicable aversion to unannounced guests, jumped up and reached under his coat. He motioned for Lefty not to move. Lina, noticing something, took off her earphones. The knock came again. "Kyrie" Lina said, "if they were going to kill you, would they knock?" "Who's going to kill!" Desdemona said, rushing in from the kitchen. "Just a way of speaking," said Lina, who knew more about her husband's importing concern that she'd been letting on. She glided to the door and opened it.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Stir basic emotions. Never promote your message through a rational, direct argument. That will take effort on your audience's part and will not gain its attention. Aim for the heart, not the head. Design your words and images to stir basic emotions—lust, patriotism, family values. It is easier to gain and hold people's attention once you have made them think of their family, their children, their future. They feel stirred, uplifted. Now you have their attention and the space to insinuate your true message. Days later the audience will remember your name, and remembering your name is half the game. Similarly, find ways to surround yourself with emotional magnets—war heroes, children, saints, small animals, whatever it takes. Make your appearance bring these emotionally positive associations to mind, giving you extra presence. Never let these associations be defined or created for you, and never leave them to chance. Make the medium the message. Pay more attention to the form of your message than to the content. Images are more seductive than words, and visuals—soothing colors, appropriate backdrop, the suggestion of speed Appendix B: Soft Seduction: How to Sell Anything to the Masses • 445 or movement—should actually be your real message. The audience may focus superficially on the content or moral you are preaching, but they are really absorbing the visuals, which get under their skin and stay there longer than any words or preachy pronouncements. Your visuals should have a hypnotic effect. They should make people feel happy or sad, depending on what you want to accomplish. And the more they are distracted by visual cues, the harder it will be for them to think straight or see through your manipulations. Speak the target's language— be chummy. At all costs, avoid appearing superior to your audience. Any hint of smugness, the use of complicated words or ideas, quoting too many statistics—all that is fatal. Instead, make yourself seem equal to your targets and on intimate terms with them. You understand them, you share their spirit, their language. If people are cynical about the manipulations of advertisers and politicians, exploit their cynicism for your own purposes. Portray yourself as one of the folk, warts and all. Show that you share your audience's skepticism by revealing the tricks of the trade. Make your publicity as down-home and minimal as possible, so that your competitors look sophisticated and snobby in comparison. Your selective honesty and strategic weakness will get people to trust you. You are the audience's friend, an intimate. Enter their spirit and they will relax and listen to you.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The embodiment of the Ideal Lover for the 1920s was Rudolph Valen- tino, or at least the image created of him in film. Everything he did—the gifts, the flowers, the dancing, the way he took a woman's hand—showed a scrupulous attention to the details that would signify how much he was thinking of her. The image was of a man who made courtship take time, transforming it into an aesthetic experience. Men hated Valentino, because women now expected them to match the ideal of patience and attentive- ness that he represented. Yet nothing is more seductive than patient atten- tiveness. It makes the affair seem lofty, aesthetic, not really about sex. The power of a Valentino, particularly nowadays, is that people like this are so rare. The art of playing to a woman's ideal has almost disappeared—which only makes it that much more alluring. If the chivalrous lover remains the ideal for women, men often idealize the Madonna/whore, a woman who combines sensuality with an air of spirituality or innocence. Think of the great courtesans of the Italian Re- naissance, such as Tullia d'Aragona—essentially a prostitute, like all courte- sans, but able to disguise her social role by establishing a reputation as a poet and philosopher. Tullia was what was then known as an "honest courtesan." Honest courtesans would go to church, but they had an ulterior motive: for men, their presence at Mass was exciting. Their houses were pleasure palaces, but what made these homes so visually delightful was their art- works and shelves full of books, volumes of Petrarch and Dante. For the man, the thrill, the fantasy, was to sleep with a woman who was sexual yet had the ideal qualities of a mother and the spirit and intellect of an artist. Where the pure prostitute excited desire but also disgust, the honest cour- tesan made sex seem elevated and innocent, as if it were happening in the Garden of Eden. Such women held immense power over men. To this day they remain an ideal, if for no other reason than that they offer such a range of pleasures. The key is ambiguity—to combine the appearance of sensi- tivity to the pleasures of the flesh with an air of innocence, spirituality, a poetic sensibility. This mix of the high and the low is immensely seductive. The dynamics of the Ideal Lover have limitless possibilities, not all of them erotic.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  line. But for yiayia Presidential is okay." "When the time comes, you can have whatever you want. But—" "And satin inside. Please. And a pillow. Like here. Page eight. Number five. Pay attention! And tell Georgie leave my glasses." As far as Desdemona was concerned, death was only another kind of emigration. Instead of sailing from Turkey to America, this time she would be traveling from earth to heaven, where Lefty had already gotten his citizenship and had a place waiting. Gradually we became accustomed to Desdemona's retreat from the family sphere. By this time, the spring of 1971, Milton was busy with a new "business venture." After the disaster on Pingree Street, Milton vowed never to make the same mistake again. How do you escape the real estate rule of location, location, location? Simple: be everywhere at once. "Hot dog stands," Milton announced at dinner one night. "Start with three or four and add on as you go." With the remaining insurance money Milton rented space in three malls in the Detroit metropolitan area. On a pad of yellow paper, he came up with the design for the stands. "McDonald's has Golden Arches?" he said. "We've got the Pillars of Hercules." If you ever drove along the blue highways anywhere from Michi- gan to Florida, anytime from 1971 to 1978, you may have seen the bright white neon pillars that flanked my father's chain of hot dog restaurants. The pillars combined his Greek heritage with the colonial architecture of his beloved native land. Milton's pillars were the Parthenon and the Supreme Court Building; they were the Herakles of myth as well as the Hercules of Hollywood movies. They also got people's attention. 275 Milton started out with three Hercules Hot Dogs™ but quickly added franchises as profits allowed. He began in Michigan but soon spilled over into Ohio, and from there went on down the Interstate to die deep South. The format was more like Dairy Queen than Mc- Donald's. Seating was minimal or nonexistent (at most a couple of picnic tables). There were no play areas, no sweepstakes or "Happy Meals" no giveaways or promotions. What there was was hot dogs, Coney Island style, as that term was used in Detroit, meaning they were served with chili sauce and onions. Hercules Hot Dogs were side-of-the-road places, and usually not the nicest roads. By bowling alleys, by train stations, in small towns on the way to bigger ones, anywhere where real estate was cheap and a lot of cars or people passed through.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  72 Lecture 13: Plato, Phaedo idea of freedom of conscience. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates presents his conviction that the soul is immortal and that belief in the immortal soul can give an individual guidance for life. Socrates, like Jesus, never wrote a book. His student, Plato, left a series of dialogues in which Plato pays the highest tribute to his teacher by putting his ideas into the mouth of Socrates, thereby implying that without Socrates, Plato the intellectual would not have existed. It has been said that all of philosophy has been a series of footnotes to Plato and that Socrates was his intellectual father. Socrates was a true philosopher, a seeker after truth and a lover of wisdom. He asked such questions as: What is justice? What is piety? What is God? What is good government? This questioning brought Socrates into confl ict with the citizens of Athens. The Athenians wanted to eliminate Socrates because he forced them to think about these issues. The Phaedo is a dialogue that takes place on the day that Socrates will carry out his own execution by drinking a glass of hemlock. Phaedo is a non-Athenian who is one of the students of Socrates. At the beginning of the dialogue, the jailer gives Socrates instructions, and Socrates asks for someone to take his wife, Xanthippe, home. The students of Socrates ask him why he has recently been writing a hymn to Apollo and verse versions of Aesop’s fables. He indicates that in his dreams, the muses had told him to make music and poetry. When he attempted to write poetry, he realized that his search for truth was his way of making poetry. In obtaining this wisdom, he learned that his search for truth was what he should have been doing all along and that he had done what he was meant to do. Crito, a student of Socrates, then asks why Socrates appears happy in his present situation. After all, Socrates has been condemned to death. Socrates states that he is happy because he has lived his whole life wanting to die and preparing to die. He believes that a person who spends his life searching for truth and wisdom is doing nothing but preparing to die. Death is the moment when the soul is liberated from the trials of the body, and the soul of a person In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates presents his conviction that the soul is immortal and that belief in the immortal soul can give an individual guidance for life.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  faces. Years and years of baby hair, stimulated by the life-giving water, had taken root and grown.) But now Father Mike was ready for the dunking. "The servant of God, Calliope Helen is baptized in the Name of the Father, Amen ..." and he pushed me under for the first time. In the Orthodox Church, we don't go in for partial immersion; no sprinkling, no forehead dabbing for us. In order to be reborn, you have to be buried first, so under the water I went. My family looked on, my mother seized with anxiety (what if I inhaled?), my brother dropping a penny into the water when no one was looking, my grandmother stilling her fan for the first time in weeks. Father Mike pulled me up into the air again—"and of the Son, Amen"— and dunked me under once more. This time I opened my eyes. Chapter Eleven's penny, in freefall, glinted through the murk. Down it sank to the bottom where, I now noticed, lots of things were collected: other coins, for instance, hairpins, somebody's old Band-Aid. In the green, scummy, holy water, I felt at peace. Everything was silent. The sides of my neck tingled in the place where humans once had gills. I was dimly aware that this beginning was somehow indicative of the rest of my life. My family were around me; I was in the hands of God. But I was in my own, separate element, too, submerged in rare sensations, pushing evolution's envelope. This knowledge whizzed through my mind, and then Father Mike pulled me up again—"and ." One more dunking to go. Down I of the Holy Spirit, Amen . went and back up again, into light and air. The three submersions had taken a while. In addition to being murky, the water was warm. By the third time up, therefore, I had indeed been reborn: as a foun- tain. From between my cherubic legs a stream of crystalline liquid . 221 shot into the air. Lit from the dome above, its yellow scintillance ar- rested everyone's attention. The stream rose in an arc. Propelled by a full bladder, it cleared the lip of the font. And before my nouno had time to react, it struck Father Mike right in the middle of the face. Suppressed laughter from the pews, a few old ladies gasping in horror, then silence. Disgraced by his own partial immersion— and dabbing himself like a Protestant— Father Mike completed the cere- mony. Taking the chrism on his fingertips, he anointed me, marking the sign of the Cross on the required places, first my forehead, then eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears, breast, hands, and feet. As he touched each place, he said, "The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit." Finally he gave me my First Communion (with one exception: Father Mike didn't forgive me for my sin). "That's my girl," Milton crowed on the way home. "Pissed on a priest."

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  And if the conversation waned, she would move to the piano, play a tune, and sing wonderfully. If ever the king seemed bored or sad, Madame de Pompadour would propose some project—perhaps the building of a new country house. He would have to advise in the design, the layout of the gardens, the decor. Back at Versailles, Madame de Pompadour put hersell in charge of the palace amusements, building a private theater for weekly performances un- der her direction. Actors were chosen from among the courtiers, but the female lead was always played by Madame de Pompadour, who was one of the finest amateur actresses in France. The king became obsessed with this sure indication that the sitter intended to secure a posthumous fame as well. Warhol's portraits were not so much realistic documents of contemporary faces as they were designer icons awaiting future devotions. —DAVID BOURDON, WARHOL Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size. —VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN The Ideal Lover • 35 theater; he could barely wait for its performances. Along with this interest came an increasing expenditure of money on the arts, and an involvement in philosophy and literature. A man who had cared only for hunting and gambling was spending less and less time with his male companions and be- coming a great patron of the arts. Indeed he stamped a whole era with an aesthetic style, which became known as "Louis Quinze," rivaling the style associated with his illustrious predecessor, Louis XIV. Lo and behold, year after year went by without Louis tiring of his mis- tress. In fact he made her a duchess, and her power and influence extended well beyond culture into politics. For twenty years, Madame de Pompadour ruled both the court and the king's heart, until her untimely death, in 1764, at the age of forty-three. Louis XV had a powerful inferiority complex. The successor to Louis XIV, the most powerful king in French history, he had been educated and trained for the throne—yet who could follow his predecessor's act? Eventu- ally he gave up trying, devoting himself instead to physical pleasures, which came to define how he was seen; the people around him knew they could sway him by appealing to the basest parts of his character. Madame de Pompadour, genius of seduction, understood that inside Louis XV was a great man yearning to come out, and that his obsession with pretty young women indicated a hunger for a more lasting kind of beauty. Her first step was to cure his incessant bouts of boredom. It is easy for kings to be bored—everything they want is given to them, and they sel- dom learn to be satisfied with what they have. The Marquise de Pom- padour dealt with this by bringing all sorts of fantasies to life, and creating constant suspense.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  me first mention that it is October here in Germany. Though the weather was cool, the beach at Herringsdorf was dotted with quite a few diehard nudists. Primarily men, they lay walrus-like on towels or boisterously congregated in the striped Strandkbrbe, the little beach huts. From the elegant boardwalk surrounded by pine and birch trees, I looked out at these naturists and wondered what I always wonder: What is it like to feel free like that? I mean, my body is so much bet- ter than theirs. I'm the one with the well-defined biceps, the bulging pectorals, the burnished glutes. But I could never saunter around in public like that. "Not exacdy the cover of Sunshine and Health" said Julie. "After a certain age, people should keep their clothes on," I said, or something like that. When in doubt I resort to mildly conservative or British-sounding pronouncements. I wasn't thinking about what I was saying. I had suddenly forgotten all about the nudists. Because I was looking at Julie now. She had pushed her silver DDR-era eye- glasses onto the top of her head so that she could take pictures of the distant sunbathers. The wind off the Baltic was making her hair fly around. "Your eyebrows are like little black caterpillars," I said. "Flat- terer," said Julie, still shooting. I said nothing else. As one does the return of sun after winter, I stood still and accepted the warm glow of possibility, of feeling right in the company of this small, oddly fierce person with the inky hair and the lovely, unemphasized body. Still, that night, and the night after, we slept in separate rooms. My father forbade me to talk to Marius Grimes in April, a damp, cool-headed month in Michigan. By May the weather grew warm; June was hot and July hotter still. In the backyard of our house on Seminole, I jumped through the sprinkler in my bathing suit, a two- piece number, while Chapter Eleven picked dandelions to make dan- delion wine. During that summer, as the temperature climbed, Milton tried to come to grips with the predicament he found himself in. His vision had been to open not one restaurant but a chain. Now he realized that the first link in that chain, the Zebra Room, was a weak one, and 233 he was thrown into doubt and confusion. For the first time in his life Milton Stephanides came up against a possibility he'd never enter- tained: failure. What was he going to do with the restaurant? Should he sell it for peanuts? What then? (For the time being, he decided to close the diner on Mondays and Tuesdays to cut payroll expenses.)

• From Middlesex (2002)

  He passed the stairway to the pilothouse and squeezed past the extra cargo, crates of Kalamata olives and olive oil, sea sponges from Kos. He proceeded forward, running his hand along the green tarps of the lifeboats, until he met the chain separating steerage from third class. In its heyday, the Giulia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Line. Boasting modern conveniences ("lurnina eleetrica, ventilatie et comfortu eel mat rnare"), it had traveled once a month between Trieste and New York. Now the electric lights worked only in first class, and even then sporadically. The iron rails were rusted. Smoke from the stack had soiled the Greek flag. The boat smelled of old mop buckets and a history of nausea. Lefty didn't have his sea legs yet. He kept falling against the railing. He stood at the chain for an appropriate amount of time, then crossed to port and returned aft. Desdemona, as arranged, was standing alone at the rail. As Lefty passed, he smiled and nodded. She nodded coldly and looked back out to sea. On the third day, Lefty took another after-dinner stroll. He walked forward, crossed to port, and headed aft. He smiled at Desde- mona and nodded again. This time, Desdemona smiled back. Rejoin- ing his fellow smokers, Lefty inquired if any of them might happen to know the name of that young woman traveling alone. On the fourth day out, Lefty stopped and introduced himself. "So far the weather's been good." "I hope it stays that way." "You're traveling alone?" "Yes." "I am, too. Where are you going to in America?" "Detroit." "What a coincidence! I'm going to Detroit, too." They stood chatting for another few minutes. Then Desdemona excused herself and went down below. Rumors of the budding romance spread quickly through the ship. To pass the time, everybody was soon discussing how the tall young Greek with the elegant bearing had become enamored of the dark beauty who was never seen anywhere without her carved olivewood box. "They're both traveling alone," people said. "And they both have relatives in Detroit." "I don't think they're right for each other." "Why not?" 66 "He's a higher class than she is. It'll never work." "He seems to like her, though." "He's on a boat in the middle of the ocean! What else does he have to do?" On the fifth day, Lefty and Desdemona took a stroll on deck to- gether. On the sixth day, he presented his arm and she took it. "I introduced them!" one man boasted. City girls sniffed. "She wears her hair in braids. She looks like a peasant." My grandfather, on the whole, came in for better treatment. He was said to have been a silk merchant from Smyrna who'd lost his fortune in the fire; a son of King Constantine I by a French mistress;

• From Middlesex (2002)

  As for Desdemona, during the mid-to-late fifties she was experi- encing a brief and completely uncharacteristic spell of contentment. Her son had returned unhurt from another war. (St. Christopher had kept his word during the "police action" in Korea and Milton hadn't been so much as fired on.) Her daughter-in-law's pregnancy had caused the usual anxiety, of course, but Chapter Eleven had been born healthy. The restaurant was doing well. Every week family and friends gathered at Milton's new house in Indian Village for Sunday dinner. One day Desdemona received a brochure from the New Smyrna Beach Chamber of Commerce, which she had sent away for. It didn't look like Smyrna at all, but at least it was sunny, and there were fruit stands. Meanwhile, my grandfather was feeling lucky. Having played at least one number every day for a little over two years, he had now bet on every number from 1 to 740. Only 259 numbers to go to reach 999! Then what? What else?— start over. Bank tellers handed rolls of money to Lefty, which he in turn handed to the pharmacist behind the window. He played 741, 742, and 743. He played 744, 745, and 746. And then one morning the bank teller informed Lefty that there weren't sufficient funds in his account to make a withdrawal. The teller showed him his balance: $13.26. My grandfather thanked the teller. He crossed the bank lobby, adjusting his tie. He felt suddenly dizzy. The gambling fever he'd had for twenty-six months broke, sending a last wave of heat over his skin, and suddenly his entire body was dripping wet. Mopping his brow, Lefty walked out of the bank into his penniless old age. The earsplitting cry my grandmother let out when she learned of 207

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Is there anyplace as comforting as an old, institutional, prewar bathroom? The kind of bathroom they used to build in America when the country was on the rise. The basement bathroom at Baker & Inglis was done up like a box at the opera. Edwardian lighting fix- tures gleamed overhead. The sinks were deep white bowls set in blue slate. When you bent to wash your face you saw tiny cracks in the porcelain, as in a Ming vase. Gold chains held the drain-stoppers in place. Beneath the taps, dripping had worn the porcelain thin in green stripes. Above each sink hung an oval mirror. I wanted nothing to do with any of them. ("The hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age" started early for me.) Avoiding my reflection, I headed straight for the toilet stalls. There were three, and I chose the middle. Like the others, it was marble. Gray New England marble, two inches thick, quarried in the nineteenth century and studded with fossils millions of years old. I closed the door and latched it. I took a Safe-T-Guard from the dispenser and laid it over the toilet seat. Germ-protected, I lowered my underpants, lifted my kilt, and sat. Right away I could feel my body relaxing, my stoop unkinking itself. I brushed my hair out of my face so that I could see. There were little fern-shaped fos- sils, and fossils that looked like scorpions stinging themselves to death. Down beneath my legs the toilet bowl had a rust stain, an- cient, too. The basement bathroom was the opposite of our locker room. The stalls were seven feet high and extended all the way to the floor. Fossilized marble concealed me even better than my hair. In the base- ment bathroom was a time frame I felt much more comfortable with, not the rat race of the school upstairs but the slow, evolutionary progress of the earth, of its plant and animal life forming out of the generative, primeval mud. The faucets dripped with die slow, inex- orable movement of time and I was alone down there, and safe. Safe from my confused feelings about the Obscure Object; and safe, too, from the bits of conversation I'd been overhearing from my parents' 328 bedroom. Just the night before, Milton's exasperated voice had reached my ears: "You still got a headache? Christ, take some aspirin." "I took some already," my mother replied. "Nothing helps." Then my brother's name, and my father grumbling something I couldn't make out. Then Tessie: "I'm worried about Callie, too. She still hasn't got- ten her period." "Hell, she's only thirteen." "She's fourteen. And look how tall she is. I think something's wrong." Silence a moment, after which my father asked, "What does Dr. Phil say?" "Dr. Phil! He doesn't say anything. I want to take her to someone else."

• From Middlesex (2002)

  And now, amid the prairie, appears the recreation vehicle be- longing to Myron and Sylvia Bresnick, of Pelham, New York. Like a modern-day covered wagon, it rolls out of the waving grasslands and stops. A door opens, like the door of a house, and standing inside is a perky woman in her late sixties. "I think we've got room for you," she says. A moment before, I had been on Route 80 in western Iowa. But now as I carry my suitcase onto this ship of the prairie, I am suddenly in the Bresnicks' living room. Framed photographs of their children hang on the walls, along with Chagall prints. The history of Winston Churchill that Myron is working his way through at night at the hookups sits on the coffee table. Myron is a retired parts salesman, Sylvia a former social worker. In profile she resembles a cute Punchinello, her cheeks expressive, painted, and the nose carved for comic effect. Myron works his lips around his cigar, foul and intimate with his own juices. While Myron drives, Sylvia gives me a tour of the beds, the shower, the living area. What school do I go to? What do I want to be? She peppers me with questions. Myron turns from the wheel and booms, "Stanford! Good school!" And it is right then that it happens. At some moment on Route 80 something clicks in my head and suddenly I feel I am getting the hang of it. Myron and Sylvia are treating me like a son. Under this collective delusion I become that, for a little while at least. I become male-identified. But something daughterly must cling to me, too. For soon Sylvia has taken me aside to complain about her husband. "I know it's tacky. This whole RV thing. You should see the people we meet in these camps. They call it the CRV lifestyle.' Oh, they're nice enough— but 450 bor-ing. I miss going to cultural events. Myron says he spent his life traveling around the country too busy to see it. So he's doing it over again— slowly. And guess who gets dragged along?" "My heart?" Myron is calling to her. "Could you bring your hus- band an iced tea, please? He's parched." They let me off in Nebraska. I counted my money and found I had two hundred and thirty dollars left. I found a cheap room in a kind of boardinghouse and stayed the night. I was still too scared to hitchhike in the dark.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  church that one day and never again, and seems to have existed for the sole purpose of changing my mother's mind. In the bathroom the girl held her steaming shirt away from her body while Tessie brought damp towels. "Are you okay, honey? Did you get burned?" "He's very clumsy, that boy," the girl said. "He can be. He gets into everything." "Boys can be very obstreperous." Tessie smiled. "You have quite a vocabulary." At this compliment the girl broke into a big smile. " 'Obstreper- ous' is my favorite word. My brother is very obstreperous. Last month my favorite word was 'turgid.' But you can't use 'turgid' that much. Not that many things are turgid, when you think about it." "You're right about that," said Tessie, laughing. "But obstreperous is all over the place." "I couldn't agree with you more," said the girl. Two weeks later. Easter Sunday, 1959. Our religion's adherence to the Julian calendar has once again left us out of sync with the neigh- borhood. Two Sundays ago, my brother watched as the other kids on the block hunted multicolored eggs in nearby bushes. He saw his friends eating the heads off chocolate bunnies and tossing handfuls of jelly beans into cavity-rich mouths. (Standing at the window, my brother wanted more than anything to believe in an American God who got resurrected on the right day.) Only yesterday was Chapter Eleven finally allowed to dye his own eggs, and then only in one color: red. All over the house red eggs gleam in lengthening, solstice rays. Red eggs fill bowls on the dining room table. They hang from string pouches over doorways. They crowd the mantel and are baked into loaves of cruciform tsoureki. But now it is late afternoon; dinner is over. And my brother is smiling. Because now comes the one part of Greek Easter he prefers to egg hunts and jelly beans: the egg-cracking game. Everyone gath- ers around the dining table. Biting his lip, Chapter Eleven selects an egg from the bowl, studies it, returns it. He selects another. "This looks like a good one," Milton says, choosing his own egg. "Built like a Brinks truck." Milton holds his egg up. Chapter Eleven prepares to attack. When suddenly my mother taps my father on the back. "Just a minute, Tessie. We're cracking eggs here." 15 She taps him harder. "What?" "My temperature." She pauses. "It's up six tenths." She has been using the thermometer. This is the first my father has heard of it. "Now?" my father whispers. "Jesus, Tessie, are you sure?" "No, I'm not sure. You told me to watch for any rise in my tem- perature and I'm telling you I'm up six tenths of a degree." And, low- ering her voice, "Plus it's been thirteen days since my last you know what." "Come on, Dad," Chapter Eleven pleads. "Time out," Milton says. He puts his egg in the ashtray. "That's

• From Middlesex (2002)

  She led Desdemona across the room. A wooden box full of dirt lay open. "So what we did was, we ordered these silkworms from a com- pany. You know, mail order? We got more on the way. Problem is, they don't seem to like it here in De-troit. Don't blame 'em myself. They keep dying on us, and when they do? Ooowhee, what a stink! My sweet Jes— " She caught herself. "Just an expression. I was brought up Sanctified. Listen, what you say your name was?" "Desdemona." "Listen, Des, before I became Supreme Captain, I did hair and nails. Not no farmer's daughter, understand? This thumb look green 147 to you? Help me out. What do these silkworm fellas like? How we get them to, you know, silkify?" "It hard work." "We don't mind." "It take money." "We got plenty." Desdemona picked up a shriveled worm, barely alive. She cooed to it in Greek. "Listen up now, little sisters," Sister Wanda said, and, as one, the girls stopped sewing, crossed hands in laps, and looked up atten- tively. "This the new lady gonna teach us how to make silk. She a mu- latto like Minister Fard and she gonna bring us back the knowledge of the lost art of our people. So we can do for ourself." Twenty-three pairs of eyes fell on Desdemona. She gathered courage. She translated what she wanted to say into English and went over it twice before she spoke. "To make good silk," she then pronounced, beginning her lessons to the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class, "you have to be pure." "We trying, Des. Praise Allah. We trying." 148 TRICKnOLOGV ffjjD hat was how my grandmother came to work for the Nation of Islam. Like a cleaning lady working in Grosse Pointe, she came and went by the back door. Instead of a hat, she wore a head scarf to conceal her irresistible ears. She never spoke above a whisper. She never asked questions or complained. Having grown up in a country ruled by others, she found it all familiar. The fezzes, the prayer rugs, the crescent moons: it was a little like going home. For the residents of Black Bottom it was like traveling to another planet. The temple's front doors, in a sweet reversal of most Ameri- can entrances, let blacks in and kept whites out. The former paintings in the lobby— landscapes aglow witii Manifest Destiny, scenes of In- dians being slaughtered— had been carted down to the basement. In their place were depictions of African history: a prince and princess strolling beside a crystal river; a conclave of black scholars debating in an outdoor forum.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "But how can you marry somebody you don't know anything about?" "To get out of that country, Des, I would have married a cripple." "I have some experience with importing," Lefty managed to get in as Zizmo demonstrated the plumbing. "Back in Bursa. In the silk in- dustry." "Your portion of the rent is twenty dollars." Zizmo didn't take the hint. He pulled the chain, unleashing a flood of water. "As far as I'm concerned," Lina was continuing downstairs, "when it comes to husbands, the older the better." She opened the pantry door. "A young husband would be after me all the time. It would be too much of a strain." "Shame on you, Lina." But Desdemona was laughing now, de- spite herself. It was wonderful to see her old cousin again, a little piece of Bithynios still intact. The dark pantry, full of figs, almonds, walnuts, halvah, and dried apricots, made her feel better, too. "But where can I get the rent?" Lefty finally blurted out as they headed back downstairs. "I don't have any money left. Where can I work?" "Not a problem." Zizmo waved his hand. "I'll speak to a few peo- ple." They came through the sola again. Zizmo stopped and looked significantly down. "You haven't complimented my zebra skin rug." "It's very nice." "I brought it back from Africa. Shot it myself." 90 "You've been to Africa?" "I've been all over." Like everybody else in town, they squeezed in together. Desdemona and Lefty slept in a bedroom direcdy above Zizmo and Lina's, and the first few nights my grandmother climbed out of bed to put her ear to the floor. "Nothing" she said, "I told you." "Come back to bed," Lefty scolded. "That's their business." "What business? That's what I'm telling you. They aren't having any business." While in the bedroom below, Zizmo was discussing the new boarders upstairs. "What a romantic! Meets a girl on the boat and marries her. No dowry." "Some people marry for love." "Marriage is for housekeeping and for children. Which reminds me." "Please, Jimmy, not tonight." "Then when? Five years we've been married and no children. You're always sick, tired, this, that. Have you been taking the castor oil?" "Yes." "And the magnesium?" "Yes." "Good. We have to reduce your bile. If the mother has too much bile, the child will lack vigor and disobey his parents."

• From Middlesex (2002)

  was like a hole in the roof, or the push-pedal faucet in the bathroom, or the box that spoke on the wall. (Every room on Middlesex was equipped with an intercom. Back when they had been installed in the 1940s— over diirty years after the house itself had been built in 1909— the intercoms had probably all worked. But by 1967 you might speak into the kitchen intercom only to have your voice come out in the master bedroom. The speakers distorted our voices, so that we had to listen very closely to understand what was being said, like deciphering a child's first, garbled speech.) Chapter Eleven tapped into the pneumatic system in the base- ment and spent hours sending a Ping-Pong ball around the house through a network of vacuum cleaner hoses. Tessie never stopped complaining about the lack of closet space and the impractical layout, but gradually, thanks to a touch of claustrophobia, she grew to ap- preciate Middlesex's glass walls. Lefty cleaned them. Making himself useful as always, he took upon himself the Sisyphean task of keeping all those Modernist sur- faces sparkling. With the same concentration he trained on the aorist tense of ancient Greek verbs— a tense so full of weariness it specified actions that might never be completed— Lefty now cleaned the huge picture windows, the fogged glass of the greenhouse, the sliding doors that led to the courtyard, and even the skylights. As he was Windexing the new house, however, Chapter Eleven and I were ex- ploring it. Or, I should say, them. The meditative, pastel yellow cube that faced the street contained the main living quarters. Behind that 260 lay a courtyard with a dry pool and a fragile dogwood leaning over in vain to see its reflection. Along the western edge of this courtyard, extending from the back of the kitchen, ran a white, translucent tun- nel, something like the tubes that conduct football teams onto the field. This tunnel led to a small domed outbuilding— a sort of huge igloo— surrounded by a covered porch. Inside was a bathing pool (just warming up now, getting ready to play its part in my life). Be- hind the bathhouse was yet another courtyard, floored with smooth black stones. Along the eastern edge of this, to balance the tunnel, ran a portico lined with thin brown iron beams. The portico led up to the guest house, where no guests ever stayed: only Desdemona, for a short time with her husband and a long time alone.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  utes were elapsed I clambered up onto the carpet and dried off. Over the sound system Bob Presto was saying, "Let's hear it for Hermaph- roditus, ladies and gentlemen! Only here at Octopussy's Garden, where gender is always on a bender! I'm telling you, folks, we put the glam rock in the rock lobsters, we put the AC/DC in the mahi mahi . ." . Beached on her side, Zora with blue eyes and golden hair asked me, "Am I zipped?" I checked. "This tank is making me all congested. I'm always congested." "You want something from the bar?" "Get me a Negroni, Cal. Thanks." "Ladies and Gendemen, it's time for our next attraction here at Octopussy's Garden. Yes, I see now that the boys from Steinhardt Aquarium are just bringing her in. Put those tokens in the boxes, ladies and gendemen, this is something you won't want to miss. May I have a drum roll, please? On second thought, make that a sushi roll." Zora's music started. Her overture. "Ladies and gendemen, since time immemorial mariners have told stories of seeing incredible creatures, half woman, half fish, swimming in the seas. We here at Sixty-Niners did not give credence to such stories. But a tuna fisherman of our acquaintance brought us an amazing catch the other day. And now we know those stories are true. Ladies and gendemen," crooned Bob Presto, "does . . anyone . . . . smell . . .fish!" At that cue, Zora in her rubber suit with the flashing green se- quin scales would tumble into the tank. The suit came up to her waist and left her chest and shoulders bare. Into the aquatic light Zora streamed, opening her eyes underwater as I did not, smiling at the men and women in the booths, her long blond hair flowing behind her like seaweed, tiny air bubbles beading her breasts like pearls, as she kicked her glittering emerald fish tail. She performed no lewd- ness. Zora's beauty was so great that everyone was content merely to look at her, the white skin, the beautiful breasts, the taut belly with its winking navel, the magnificent curve of her swaying backside where flesh merged with scales. She swam with her arms at her sides, voluptuously fluctuating. Her face was serene, her eyes a light Caribbean blue. Downstairs a constant disco beat throbbed, but up 485 here in Octopussy's Garden the music was ethereal, a kind of melodi- ous bubbling itself. Viewed from a certain angle, there was a kind of artistry to it. Sixty-Niners was a smut pavilion, but up in the Garden the atmo- sphere was exotic rather than raunchy. It was the sexual equivalent of Trader Vic's. Viewers got to see strange things, uncommon bodies, but much of the appeal was the transport involved. Looking through their portholes, the customers were watching real bodies do the

• From Middlesex (2002)

  ons; and local, earth-tone Pewabics. For tables, he upended cable reels and spread them with cloths. He tented bedsheets overhead, hiding the pipes. From his old connections in the rum-running busi- ness he rented a slot machine and ordered a week's supply of beer and whiskey. And on a cold Friday night in February of 1924, he opened for business. The Zebra Room was a neighborhood place with irregular hours. Whenever Lefty was open for business he put an icon of St. George in the living room window, facing the street. Patrons came around back, giving a coded knock— a long and two shorts followed by two longs— on die basement door. Then they descended out of the Amer- ica of factory work and tyrannical foremen into an Arcadian grotto of forgetfulness. My grandfather put the Victrola in the corner. He set out braided sesame koulouria on the bar. He greeted people with the exuberance they expected from a foreigner and he flirted with the ladies. Behind the bar a stained glass window of liquor bottles glowed: the blues of English gin, the deep reds of claret and Madeira, the tawny browns of scotch and bourbon. A hanging lamp spun on its chain, speckling the zebra skin with light and making the cus- tomers feel even drunker than they were. Occasionally someone would stand up from his chair and begin to twitch and snap his fin- gers to the strange music, while his companions laughed. Down in that basement speakeasy, my grandfather acquired the attributes of the barkeep he would be for the rest of his life. He chan- neled his intellectual powers into the science of mixology. He learned how to serve the evening rush one-man-band style, pouring whiskeys with his right hand while filling beer steins with his left, as he pushed 132 out coasters with his elbow and pumped the keg with his foot. For fourteen to sixteen hours a day he worked in that sumptuously deco- rated hole in the ground and never stopped moving the entire time. If he wasn't pouring drinks, he was refilling the koulouria trays. If he wasn't roiling out a new beer keg, he was placing hard-boiled eggs in a wire hamper. He kept his body busy so that his mind wouldn't have a chance to think: about the growing coldness of his wife, or the way their crime pursued them. Lefty had dreamed of opening a casino, and the Zebra Room was as close as he ever came to it. There was no gambling, no potted palms, but there was rebetika and, on many nights, hashish. Only in 1958, when he had stepped from behind the bar of another Zebra Room, would my grandfather have the leisure to remember his youthful dreams of roulette wheels. Then, trying to make up for lost time, he would ruin himself, and finally silence his voice in my life forever.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  "Your parents let you smoke?" I said. She looked up, surprised, then returned to the work at hand. She got the cigarette going, inhaled deeply, and let it out, slowly, satisfy- ingly. "They smoke," she said. "They'd be pretty big hypocrites if they didn't let me smoke." "But they're adults." "Mummy and Daddy know I'm going to smoke if I want to. If they don't let me do it, I'll just sneak it." By the looks of it, this dispensation had been in effect for some time. The Object was not new to smoking. She was already a profes- sional. As she sized me up, her eyes narrowing, the cigarette hung 332 aslant from her mouth. Smoke drifted close to her face. It was a strange opposition: the hard-bitten private-eye expression on the face of a girl wearing a uniform for private school. Finally she reached up and took the cigarette out of her mouth. Without looking for the ashtray, she flicked her ash. It fell in. "I doubt a kid like you smokes," she said. "That would be a good guess." "You interested in starting?" She held out her pack of Tareytons. "I don't want to get cancer." She tossed the pack down, shrugging. "I figure they'll be able to cure it by the time I get it." "I hope so. For your sake." She inhaled again, even more deeply. She held the smoke in and then turned in cinematic profile and let it out. "You don't have any bad habits, I bet," she said. "I've got tons of bad habits." "Like what?" "Like I chew my hair." "I bite my nails," she said competitively. She lifted one hand to show me. "Mummy got me this stuff to put on them. It tastes like shit. It's supposed to help you quit." "Does it work?" "At first it did. But now I sort of like the taste." She smiled. I smiled. Then, briefly, trying it out, we laughed together. "That's not as bad as chewing your hair," I resumed. "Why not?" "Because when you chew your hair it starts smelling like what you had for lunch." She made a face and said, "Bogue." At school we would have felt funny talking together, but here no one could see us. In the bigger scheme of things, out in the world, we were more alike than different. We were both teenagers. We were both from the suburbs. I set down my bag and came over to the sofa. The Object put her Tareyton in her mouth. Planting her palms on ei- ther side of her crossed legs, she lifted herself up, like a yogi levitat- ing, and scooted over to make room for me. "I've got a history test tomorrow," she said. "Who do you have for history?" 333 " "Miss Schuyler." "Miss Schuyler has a vibrator in her desk"