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.

Page 40 of 189 · 20 per page

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

  In regard to the first he does two things. First, he shows how powerful custom is in the study of truth. Second (172:C 333), he makes this clear by an example ( “ The great force ” ). He says, first, that the way in which people are affected by what they hear depends upon the things to which they are accustomed, because such things are more willingly heard and more easily understood. For things spoken of in a manner to which we are accustomed seem to us to be acceptable; and if any things are said to us over and above what we have been accustomed to hear, these do not seem to have the same degree of truth. As a matter of fact they seem less intelligible to us and further removed from reason just because we are not accustomed to them; for it is the things which we are accustomed to hear that we know best of all. 332. Now the reason for this is that things which are customary become natural. Hence a habit, which disposes us in a way similar to nature, is also acquired by customary activity. And from the fact that someone has some special sort of nature or special kind of habit, he has a definite relationship to one thing or another. But in every kind of cognition there must be a definite relationship between the knower and the object of cognition. Therefore, to the extent that natures and habits differ, there are diverse kinds of cognition. For we see that there are innate first principles in men because of their human nature, and that what is proper to some special virtue appears good to one who has this habit of virtue; and, again, that something appears palatable to the sense of taste because of its disposition. Therefore, since custom produces a habit which is similar to nature, it follows that what is customary is better known. 333. The great force (172)> Here he makes his previous statement clear by giving a concrete case. He says that the laws which men pass are positive evidence of the force of custom; for the legendary and childish elements in these laws are more effective in winning assent than is knowledge of the truth. Now the Philosopher is speaking here of the laws devised by men, which have as their ultimate end the preservation of the political community. Therefore the men who have established these laws have handed down in them, in keeping with the diversity of peoples and nations involved, certain directives by which human souls might be drawn away from evil and persuaded to do good, although many of them, which men had heard from childhood and of which they approved more readily than of what they knew to be true, were empty and foolish. But the law given by God directs men to that true happiness to which everything false is opposed. Therefore there is nothing false in the divine law.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  We’re going for a midnight boat ride. It’s a cold, clear summer night and four of us—the two boys, my dad and I—are descending the stairs that zigzag down the hill from the house to the dock. Old Boy, my dad’s dog, knows where we’re headed; he rushes down the slope beside us, looks back, snorts and tears up a bit of grass as he twirls in a circle. “What is it, Old Boy, what is it?” my father says, smiling faintly, delighted to be providing excitement for the dog, whom he always called his best friend. I was bundled up, a sweater and a Windbreaker over today’s sunburn. My father stopped to examine the bottom two steps just above the footpath that traveled from cottage to cottage on our side of the lake. This afternoon he had put in the new steps: fresh boards placed vertically to retain the sand and dirt, each braced by four wooden stakes pounded into the ground. Soon the steps would sag and sprawl and need to be redone. Whenever I came back from a swim or a trip in the outboard down to the village grocery store, I passed him crouched over his eternal steps or saw him up on a ladder painting the house, or heard his power saw arguing with itself in the garage, still higher up the hill on the road. My father regarded guests as nuisances who had to be entertained over and over again. Tonight’s expedition was just such a duty. But the boys, our guests’ sons, didn’t register the cheerlessness of the occasion and thought it was exciting still to be up at such an hour. They had run on down to the water as I lingered obediently beside my father, who caressed the steps with the flashlight. The boys were racing to the end of the dock, feet pounding the boards. Old Boy started out after them, but then came back to round us up. Now Kevin was threatening to push his little brother in. Squeals, breathing, a tussle, then release, followed by the sound of two boys just being. As Dad and I went on down, his flashlight veered off into the water, scaring a school of minnows and illuminating bands of sand. The Chris-Craft, moored to the short end of the L formed by the dock, was big, heavy, imposing. Two tarpaulins covered it: one was a square, corners rounded, that fitted over the two seats in front; the other was a smaller, perfect rectangle that protected the bucket seat aft of the engine, which itself lay concealed, redolent of gasoline, under the double wood doors trimmed in chrome. The canvas, as I undid the grommets and gathered in its folds, had the familiar smell of a sour washcloth. Neither my father nor I moved very gracefully over that boat. We were both afraid of the water, he because he couldn’t swim, I because I was afraid of everything.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I sat down next to the suitcase and ordered a cup of cappuccino and a brioche. It was almost one o’clock and I felt calm, almost euphoric. How little our happiness depends on: an open drugstore, an unstolen suitcase, a cup of cappuccino! Suddenly I was acutely aware of all the small pleasures of being alive. The superb taste of the coffee, the sunlight streaming down, the people posing on street corners for you to admire them. It looked as if the whole Latin Quarter had been taken over by Americans. To the right of me and to the left of me, I heard conversations about course requirements at the University of Michigan and the perils of sleeping on the beaches of Spain. There was a tour group of middle-aged black women in flowered hats heading across the Place St. Michel toward the Seine and Notre Dame. There were young American couples with babies and backpacks. “Picasso certainly had a breast fetish…” one lean, body-shirted Oscar Wilde type said to his companion (who was all decked out in the latest everything by Cardin). Little C’s on his bikini-jock too, I imagined. What a scene! Like Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. The Wife of Bath as a black American lady making a pilgrimage to Notre Dame; the Squire as a gentle-faced blond-bearded college kid carrying The Prophet; the Prioress as a lovely student of art history fresh from Miss Hewitt’s, a cotillion or two, and Sarah Lawrence (and dressing in dirty jeans to live down her aristocratic past and profile); the lascivious monk as a street-corner preacher for macrobiotics and natural lifestyles; the Friar as a top-knotted convert to Krishna-consciousness; and the Miller as a former political activist from the University of Chicago who now distributes literature for French women’s lib…. (“Why are you a feminist?” I recently asked a guy I know who is very hot for the movement. “Because it’s the best damned way of getting laid nowadays,” he said.) Chaucer would be right at home here. Nothing he couldn’t cope with. I felt so cool and levelheaded for the moment that I was determined to enjoy myself before my panic returned. So I wasn’t pregnant after all. In a sense that was sad—menstruation was always a little sad—but it was also a new beginning. I was being given another chance.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Within a moment Kevin had made things right by asking Daddy how he thought the hometown baseball team would do next season. My father was soon expatiating on names and averages and strategies that meant nothing to me, the good spring training and the bad trade-off. When Kevin challenged him on one point, Dad laughed good-naturedly at the boy’s spunk (and error) and set him straight. I rested my arm on the rubber tread of the gunwale beside me and my chin on my arm and stared into the shiny water, which was busy analyzing a distant yellow porch light, shattering the simple glow into a hundred shifting possibilities. The baseball talk went on for some time as we rocked in our own wake, which had overtaken us. We were drifting toward an island and its abandoned summer hotel, moth-white behind slender, silver-white birches. The motor wallowed, the sound of an old car with a bad muffler. My father usually felt uncomfortable with other men, but he and Kevin had now found a way to talk to each other and I half listened to the low murmurs of their voices—or rather of Daddy’s monologue and Kevin’s sounds of assent or disagreement. This was Dad’s late-night voice: ruminative, confiding, unending. Old Boy recognized it from their dawn walks together and circumspectly placed his nose between his paws on the cushion beside Dad. Little Peter crawled up over the hatch and listened to the sports talk; even he knew names and averages and had an opinion or two. After he’d been silent for a while I looked around and saw he’d fallen asleep, his head thrown back over the edge of the cushion and his mouth open, his right hand twitching. By now we’d entered the narrows that led into a smaller, colder branch of the lake. The lights of a car, after excavating a tunnel out of the pines halfway up the shore, dipped from view and then suddenly shot out across the water, which looked all the blacker and choppier in the brief glare. I had rowed laboriously over every mile of the lake; it was a mild sort of pleasure to see those backbreaking distances beautifully elided by the Chris-Craft. For Dad had gunned the motors again and we were sitting once more on our high, thundering throne. We passed a point where the clipped lawns of an estate flowed down from a white mansion and its lit, curtained windows. Late last Sunday afternoon, as I was pulling hard through the turbulent water at the point, I’d seen a young man in a seersucker suit and a girl in a party dress. They had sauntered up the hill away from me, he slightly in the lead, she swinging her arms high in an exaggerated way, as though she were a marionette. The sun found a feeble rainbow in the mist above a sprinkler and made the grass as green and uniform as baize.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  cenatorium rata refectui suo commodum, libens ac- cumbit. Et illico vini nectarei eduliumque variorum fercula copiosa, nullo serviente sed tantum spiritu quodam impulsa, subministrantur: nec quemquam tamen illa videre poterat, sed verba tantum audiebat excidentia et solas voces famulas habebat, Post opimas dapes quidam introcessit et cantavit invisus et alius citharam pulsavit, quae videbatur nec ipsa : tunc modulatae multitudinis conferta vox aures eius affertur, ut, quamvis hominum nemo pareret, chorus tamen esse pateret. 4 'Finitis voluptatibus, vespera suadente, concedit Psyche cubitum, iamque provecta nocte clemens quidam sonus aures eius accedit, Tunc virginitati suae pro tanta solitudine metuens et pavet et horrescit, et quovis malo plus timet quod ignorat: iamque aderat ignobilis maritus et torum inscenderat et uxorem sibi Psychen fecerat et ante lucis exortum propere discesserat: statim voces cubiculo praesto- latae novam nuptam interfectae virginitatis curant, Haec diutino tempore sie agebantur, atque, ut est natura redditum, novitas per assiduam consuetudinem delectationem ei commendarat, et sonus vocis in- certae solitudinis erat solacium. Interea parentes eius indefesso luctu atque maerore consenescebant, latiusque porrecta fama sorores illae maiores cuncta 204 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK V This done, she saw the table garnished with meats, and a round chair to sit down, and gladly reposed herself beside the array for dining, which she thought was set very conveniently for her refreshment. Then straightway all sorts of wines like nectar were brought in, and plentiful dishes of divers meats, not by any- body but as it were by some divine spirit or breath, for she could see no person before her, but only hear words falling on every side, and she had only voices to serve her. After that all the rich services were brought to the table, one came in and sang invisibly, another played on the harp, and that, too, could not be seen; the harmony of a large concourse did se greatly thrill in her ears, that though there were no manner of person, yet seemed she in the midst of a great quire.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  without even really being conscious of it – came more regularly to the Bus Stop now than they had before the war started. It was their way of showing solidarity with foreign suffering. Of all the Bus Stop’s regular events, the bi-monthly Spoken Word nights were the greatest sensation. As an art form it practised the same inclusiveness as the venue itself: it made everybody feel at home. Neither rap nor poetry, not formal but also not too wild, it wasn’t black, it wasn’t white. It was whatever anybody had to say and whoever had the guts to get up on the small boxy stage at the back of the basement and say it. For Claire Malcolm, it was an opportunity each year to show her new students that poetry was a broad church, one that she was not afraid to explore. Because of these visits, and as a regular of the restaurant, Claire  the anatomy lesson was well known and loved by the Essakalis. Spotting her now, Yousef pushed through the line of people waiting to be seated and helped Claire hold open the double doors so that her kids might come in from the cold. With his arm high on the doorframe, Yousef smiled at each student in turn, and each got the opportunity to admire his emerald eyes, set improbably in a dark, unmistakably Arab face, and large silky curls, untended, like an infant’s. Once they had all passed through he carefully bent down to Claire’s height and allowed himself to be kissed on both cheeks. During this courtly display, he held on to a little embroidered skullcap that sat on the back of his head. Claire’s class loved all this. Many of them were freshmen for whom a visit to the Bus Stop, indeed to Kennedy Square, was as exotic as a trip to Morocco itself. ‘ Yousef, c¸a fait bien trop longtemps! ’ cried Claire, stepping back but with both her little hands still gripping his own. She tipped her head girlishly to the side. ‘ Moi, je deviens toute vieille, et toi, tu rajeunis .’ Yousef laughed, shook his head and looked appreciatively at the tiny figure before him, swathed in many layers of black shawl. ‘ Non, c’est pas vrai, c’est pas vrai . . . Vous eˆtes magnifique, comme toujours .’ ‘ Tu me flattes comme un diable. Et comment va la famille? ’ asked Claire, and looked over the restaurant to the bar at the far end, where Katrin, waiting to be acknowledged, raised her skinny arm and waved. A naturally angular woman, she was dressed today in a sensual brown wrap dress to accentuate the fact that she was heavily pregnant, with the high-sitting, pointed bump that suggests a boy. She was tearing off raffle tickets and giving them to a line of teenagers who each paid their three dollars and descended into the basement.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia: none of the townspeople had ever seen such weather. Other presents came tumbling in. For her birthday I bought her a bicycle, the doe-like and altogether charming machine already mentioned—and added to this a History of Modern American Fainting: her bicycle manner, I mean her approach to it, the hip movement in mounting, the grace and so on, afforded me supreme pleasure; but my attempt to refine her pictorial taste was a failure; she wanted to know if the guy noon-napping on Doris Lee’s hay was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden in the foreground, and could not understand why I said Grant Wood or Peter Hurd was good, and Reginald Marsh or Frederick Waugh awful.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Jerome made the typical maternal promise casually, imagining that it might be casually attended to, but, as they stepped back into the house, his mother revealed her true face. ‘Yes, he’s down there right now, in the square,’ she said, as if Jerome had asked her. ‘And poor Murdoch needs a walk . . .’ Jerome left his packed bags in the hallway and obliged his mother. He clipped a lead to Murdoch, and together they enjoyed the pretty walk through the old neighbourhood. It was a surprise to Jerome how happy he was to be back. Three years ago he had thought he hated Wellington: an unreal protectorate; high income, morally complacent; full of spiritually inert hypocrites. But now his adolescent zeal faded. Wellington became a comforting dream-scape he felt grateful and fortunate to call home. It was certainly true that this was an unreal place where nothing ever changed. But Jerome – on the brink of his final college year and he knew not what – had begun to appreciate exactly this quality. As long as Wellington stayed Wellington, he could risk all manner of change himself. He walked into a lively late-afternoon square. A saxophonist playing over a tinny backing track alarmed Murdoch. Jerome picked the dog up. A small food market had been set up on the east side, and this competed with the usual chaos of the taxi rank, students at a table protesting the war, others campaigning against animal testing and some guys selling handbags. Near the T-stop, Jerome saw the table his mother had described. It was covered with a yellow cloth embroidered with the words   . But no Levi. Jerome stopped at the newspaper concession outside  On Beauty

• From On Beauty (2005)

  His wife looked at him. He felt known. Murdoch, in disgust, left the room. Kiki reached up to kiss her husband. Howard pulled off his wife’s long skirt and her substantial, realistic underwear. He put his hands under her lovely fat ass and squeezed. She let out a soft hum of contentment. She sat up and began to unwind that long plait of hers. Howard lifted his hands up to help her. Coils of long afro hair came free and sprang wide and short until the halo from the old days surrounded her face. She undid his zip and took him into her hands. Slowly, steadily, sensuously, expertly, she manipulated him. She began whispering in his ear. Her accent grew thick and Southern and filthy. For reasons private and old she was now in character as a Hawaiian fishwife called Wakiki. The fatal thing about Wakiki was her sense of humour – she’d bring you to the edge of abandon and then say something so funny that everything fell apart. Not funny to anyone else. Funny to Howard. Funny to Kiki. Laughing hard now, Howard lay back and pulled Kiki on top of him. She had a way of hovering closely there without putting all her weight on him. Kiki’s legs had always been strong as hell. She kissed him again, straightened up and crouched over him. He reached out like a child for her breasts and she placed them in his hands. She lifted her belly with her own hand and then pushed her husband inside herself. Home! But this happened sooner than Howard had expected, and he was partly saddened, for he knew  on beauty and being wrong like she knew that he was out of practice and therefore doomed. He could survive on top, or behind, or spooning, or any of the many other marital familiars. He was a stayer in those positions. He was a champion. They used to spend hours spooned next to each other, moving gently back and forth, speaking of the day, of funny things that had happened, of some foible of Murdoch’s, even of the children. But if she crouched above him, the giant breasts bouncing and developing their coating of sweat, her beautiful face working intently on what she wanted, the strange genius of her muscles clasping and unclasping him – well, then he had three and a half minutes, tops. For ten or so years, this was a cause of enormous sexual frustration between them. Here was her favourite position; here was his inability to withstand the pleasure of it. But life is long, and so is marriage. There came a breakthrough one year when Kiki found herself able to work with his excitement so as to somehow stimulate new muscles, and these sped her along in time with him. She once tried to explain to him how she did this, but the anatomical difference between our genders is too great.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘romantic fuck-up’ or – more pleasing to the Belsey mentality – his ‘flirtation with Christianity’. How could he explain how pleasurable it had truly been to give himself up to the Kippses? It was a kind of blissful un-selfing; a summer of un-Belsey; he had allowed the Kippses’ world and their ways to take him over entirely. He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies. He had put up a weak show of fighting these ideas, but only so that he might enjoy all the more the sensation of the family’s ridicule – to hear once again how typically liberal, academic and wishy-washy were his own thoughts. When Monty suggested that minority groups too often demand equal rights they haven’t earned, Jerome had allowed this strange new idea to penetrate him without complaint and sunk further back into the receiving sofa. When Michael argued that being black was not an identity but an accidental matter of pigment, Jerome had not given a traditionally hysterical Belsey answer – ‘Try telling that to the Klansman coming at you with a burning cross’ – but rather vowed to think less of his identity in the future. One by one the gods of the Belseys toppled.  kipps and belsey I’m so full of liberal crap , Jerome had thought happily, bowed his head low and pressed his knees into one of the little red cushions provided for kneeling in the Kippses’ pew of the local church. Long before Victoria arrived in the house, he was already in love. It was only that his general ardour for the family found its correct, specific vessel in Victoria – right age, right gender, and as beautiful as the idea of God. Victoria herself, flush with the social and sexual successes of her first summer abroad without her family, returned home to find a tolerable young man, weighed down by his virginity and satisfyingly unmanned by his desire for her. It seemed petty not to make a gift of her new-found loveliness (she had been what Caribbeans call a margar child) to a boy so obviously starved of the same quality. And he’d be gone by August anyway. They spent a week stealing kisses in shaded corners of the house and made love once, extremely badly, under the tree in the Kippses’ back garden. Victoria never for a moment considered . . . But of course Jerome did. Considering things too much, all the time, was the definition of who he was. ‘It’s not healthy, baby,’ said his mother now, smoothing his hair to his scalp, watching it spring back. ‘You’re brooding the hell out of this summer. Summer’s almost up.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘You like? I would so very much like to tell you I just threw it together,’ said Meredith loudly and quickly in her nervous, Californian scream, ‘but it takes me a long, looong time to look this good. Bridges have been built quicker. Whole hermeneutic systems have coalesced with more speed. Just from here to here,’ said Meredith, signalling the space between her eyebrows and her upper lip, ‘that’s like three hours.’ The bell rang. Howard groaned, as if the present company was more than enough, but went practically skipping off to answer it. Abandoned by their only real connection, the little triangle fell quiet, resorting to smiles. Kiki wondered precisely how far she was from Meredith and Christian’s ideal of a leader’s appropriate consort. ‘We made you a thing,’ said Meredith abruptly. ‘Did he tell you? We made you this thing. Maybe it’s crap , I don’t know.’ ‘No . . . no, I hadn’t yet – ’ said Christian, blushing. ‘Like a thing – a present . Is that corny? Thirty years and all that? Have we just been corny?’ ‘I’ll just . . .’ said Christian, crouching down awkwardly to get to his old-fashioned satchel, which rested against the ottoman. ‘So we did some half-assed research and it turns out that thirty years is pearl , but, as you know, the average grad income doesn’t really stretch that far, so we weren’t really in the pearl way of things . . .’ Meredith laughed maniacally. ‘And then Chris thought of this poem and then I like did my arts and craft thing and anyway here it is: see it’s like a framed, fabricy, type poem thing – I don’t know.’ Kiki felt the warm teak frame delivered into her hands and admired the crushed rose petals and broken shells under the glass. The text was sewn in, like a tapestry. It was the most unusual present she could have expected from these two. It was lovely. ‘ Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes –’ read Kiki circumspectly, aware that she should know it.  On Beauty ‘So, that’s the pearl thing,’ said Meredith. ‘It’s probably stupid.’ ‘Oh – it’s so gorgeous,’ said Kiki, skim-reading the rest to herself in a quick whisper. ‘Is it Plath? That’s wrong, isn’t it.’ ‘It’s Shakespeare,’ said Christian, wincing slightly. ‘ The Tempest. Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change, Into something rich and strange . Plath stripped it for parts.’ ‘ Shit ,’ Kiki laughed. ‘When in doubt, say Shakespeare. And when it’s sport, say Michael Jordan.’ ‘That is totally my policy,’ agreed Meredith. ‘This is really gorgeous. Howard will love it. I don’t think it comes under his representational art ban.’ ‘No, it’s textual,’ said Christian testily. ‘That’s the point. It’s a textual artifact.’ Kiki looked at him inquiringly. She wondered sometimes whether Christian was in love with her husband.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The thread ran over my ribs and along my spine, tingling and singing, into a basin that was poised between my hips, now pressed against the low kitchen counter before which I stood, pounding spice. And within that basin was a tiding ocean of blood beginning to be made real and available to me for strength and information. The jarring shocks of the velvet-lined pestle, striking the bed of spice, traveled up an invisible pathway along the thread into the center of me, and the harshness of the repeated impacts became increasingly more unbearable. The tidal basin suspended between my hips shuddered at each repetition of the strokes which now felt like assaults. Without my volition my downward thrusts of the pestle grew gentler and gentler until its velvety surface seemed almost to caress the liquefying mash at the bottom of the mortar. The whole rhythm of my movements softened and elongated until, dreamlike, I stood, one hand tightly curved around the carved mortar, steadying it against the middle of my body; while my other hand, around the pestle, rubbed and pressed the moistening spice into readiness with a sweeping circular movement. I hummed tunelessly to myself as I worked in the warm kitchen, thinking with relief about how simple my life had become now that I was a woman. The catalog of dire menstruation warnings from my mother passed out of my head. My body felt strong and full and open, yet captivated by the gentle motions of the pestle, and the rich smells filling the kitchen, and the fullness of the young summer heat. I heard my mother’s key in the lock. She swept into the kitchen briskly, like a ship under full sail. There were tiny beads of sweat over her upper lip, and vertical creases between her brows. “You mean to tell me no meat is ready?” My mother dropped her parcel of tea onto the table, and looking over my shoulder, sucked her teeth loudly in weary disgust. “What do you call yourself doing, now? You have all night to stand up there playing with the food? I go all the way to the store and back already and still you can’t mash up a few pieces of garlic to season some meat? But you know how to do the thing better than this! Why you vex me so?” She took the mortar and pestle out of my hands and started to grind vigorously. And there were still bits of garlic left at the bottom of the bowl. “Now you do, so!” She brought the pestle down inside the bowl of the mortar with dispatch, crushing the last of the garlic. I heard the thump of wood brought down heavily upon wood, and I felt the harsh impact throughout my body, as if something had broken inside of me. Thump, thump, went the pestle, purposefully, up and down in the old familiar way.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I opened the fridge, stood in the yellow light, and chewed my piece of pizza. My salivary glands were hesitant at first, but then they acquiesced, and the pizza tasted better than I’d remembered it. I pulled clean pajamas from the dryer and put them on in the hallway. I sniffed the air again and recognized the distinct tang of turpentine. It was coming from the bedroom. The bedroom door was locked. I knocked. “Hello?” I listened with my ear pressed against the door, but all I heard was my own shallow breathing, the blink of my eyes, my mouth filling with spit, the echo in my throat swallowing it down. I took my vitamins, but did not bathe. When I took the Infermiterol that day, I pictured Ping Xi’s paintings. They flashed into my mind like memories. They were all “sleeping nudes,” mussed beds and tangles of pale limbs and blond hair, blue shadows in the folds of the white sheets, sunsets reflected on the white wall backgrounds. In every painting, my face was hidden. I saw them in my mind’s eye—small oils on cheap prestretched canvases or smaller primed panels. They were innocent and not very good. It didn’t matter. He could sell them for hundreds of thousands and say they were self-conscious critiques of the institutionalization of painting, maybe even about the objectification of women’s bodies through art history. “School is not for artists,” I could hear him say. “Art history is fascism. These paintings are about what we sleep through while we’re reading books our teachers give us. We’re all asleep, brainwashed by a system that doesn’t give a shit about who we really are. These paintings are deliberately boring.” Did he think that was an original idea? I would never remember posing for the paintings, but I knew that if I was high on Infermiterol, I must have just been feigning sleep. I took an Infermiterol, lay down on the living room floor, a fresh towel folded under my head as a pillow, and went back to sleep. Over the next month, when I’d wake up, my mind was filled with colors. The apartment began to feel less cavernous to me. One time I awoke to find my hair had been cut off, like a boy’s, and there were long blond hairs stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl. I imagined sitting on the toilet with a towel over my shoulders, Ping Xi standing above me, snipping away. In the mirror, I looked bold and sprightly. I thought I looked good. I wrote Post-it notes requesting fresh fruits, mineral water, grilled salmon from “a good Japanese restaurant.” I asked for a candle to burn while I bathed. During this period, my waking hours were spent gently, lovingly, growing

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘No, I’m cool, I’m fine – there ,’ said Kiki good-humouredly, upright now, and shimmying her hips a little. ‘Actually, I’m pretty flexible. Yoga. And, to be honest, I guess I feel men and women use their minds about equally.’ She brushed the wood dust off her palms. ‘Oh, I don’t. No, I don’t . Everything I do I do with my body. Even my soul is made up of raw meat, flesh. Truth is in a face, as much as it is anywhere. We women know that faces are full of meaning, I think. Men have the gift of pretending that’s not true. And this is where their power comes from. Monty hardly knows he has a body at all!’ She laughed and put a hand to Kiki’s face. ‘You have a marvellous face, for example. And the moment I saw you I knew I would like you.’ The silliness of this made Kiki laugh too. She shook her head at the compliment. ‘Well, it looks like we like each other,’ she said. ‘What will the neighbours say?’ Carlene Kipps raised herself up from her chair. Kiki’s protesting noises couldn’t stop her neighbour walking her to the gate. If Kiki had been in any doubt earlier, she knew now that this woman was unwell. She asked to take Kiki’s arm after only a couple of steps. Kiki felt almost the whole of Carlene’s weight shift on to her, and this weight was nothing at all to bear. Something in Kiki’s heart shifted too, towards this woman. She didn’t seem to say anything that she didn’t mean. ‘Those are my bougainvillea – I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don’t know if they will survive. But right now they have the  kipps and belsey appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing. And they do it with such style. I grow them in Jamaica – we have a little house there. Yes, I think the garden will be my solution to this house. Don’t you think that’s true?’ ‘I don’t know how to answer that. They’re both wonderful.’ Carlene nodded quickly, dismissing the charming nonsense. She patted Kiki’s hand soothingly. ‘You must go and organize your party.’ ‘And you must come.’ With the same incredulous and yet mollifying look, as if Kiki had asked her to the moon, she nodded again, and turned back towards her house.  By the time Kiki returned to  Langham, her first guest had arrived.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  This wasn’t meant to happen to us. We’re not like other people. You’re my best friend – ’ ‘Best friend, yes,’ said Howard wretchedly. ‘That’s always been the case.’ ‘And we’re co-parents.’ ‘And we’re co-parents ,’ repeated Howard, chafing against an Americanism he despised. ‘You don’t have to say that sarcastically, Howard – that’s part of what we are now.’ ‘I wasn’t being . . .’ Howard sighed. ‘And we were in love,’ he said. Kiki let her head flop back on the couch. ‘Well, Howie, that was your past tense, not mine.’ They were silent again. ‘ And ,’ said Howard, ‘of course we were always very good at the Hawaiian.’ It was now Kiki’s turn to sigh. Hawaiian , for reasons private and old, was a euphemism for sex in the Belsey household. ‘Actually, we excelled at the Hawaiian,’ added Howard – he was out on a limb and he knew it. He put a hand to his wife’s coiled hair. ‘You can’t deny it.’ ‘I never did. You did. When you did what you did.’ This sentence – with its overabundance of ‘dids’ – was prob-lematically comic. Howard struggled to rein in a smile. Kiki smiled first. ‘Fuck you,’ she said. Howard took both his hands and put them under his wife’s cataclysmic breasts. ‘Fuck you ,’ she repeated. He brought his hands round to their summits, and massaged the handful he could manage. He touched his lips to her neck and kissed her there. And again on her ears, which were wet from tears. She turned her face to his. They kissed. It was a burly, substantial,  On Beauty tongue-filled kiss. It was a kiss from the past. Howard held his wife’s lovely face in both of his hands. And now the same journey of so many nights over so many years: the kiss trail down her throat’s chubby rings of flesh, down to her chest. He undid the buttons of her shirt, as she attended to the hardy clip of her bra. The silver-dollar-sized nipples, from which occasional hairs sprouted, were the familiar deep brown with only a hint of pink. They protruded like no other nipples he had ever seen. They fitted perfectly and properly into his mouth. They moved on to the floor. Both thought of the children and the possibility that one of them would come home, but neither dared go to the door to lock it. Any movement away from this spot would be the end. Howard lay on top of his wife. He looked at her. His wife looked at him. He felt known. Murdoch, in disgust, left the room. Kiki reached up to kiss her husband. Howard pulled off his wife’s long skirt and her substantial, realistic underwear. He put his hands under her lovely fat ass and squeezed. She let out a soft hum of contentment.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  her earphones on, looking up reverentially at the television. Levi, the youngest boy, stood beside his father in front of the kitchen cabinets. And now the two of them began to choreograph a breakfast in speechless harmony: passing the box of cereal from one to the other, exchanging implements, filling their bowls and sharing milk from a pink china jug with a sun-yellow rim. The house was south facing. Light struck the double glass doors that led to the garden, filtering through the arch that split the kitchen. It rested softly upon the still life of Kiki at the breakfast table, motion-less, reading. A dark red Portuguese earthenware bowl faced her, piled high with apples. At this hour the light extended itself even further, beyond the breakfast table, through the hall, to the lesser of their two living rooms. Here a bookshelf filled with their oldest paperbacks kept company with a suede beanbag and an ottoman upon which Murdoch, their dachshund, lay collapsed in a sunbeam. ‘Is this for real?’ asked Kiki, but got no reply. Levi was slicing strawberries, rinsing them and plopping them into two cereal bowls. It was Howard’s job to catch their frowzy heads for the trash. Just as they were finishing up this operation, Kiki turned the papers face down on the table, removed her hands from her temples and laughed quietly. ‘Is something funny?’ asked Howard, moving to the breakfast bar and resting his elbows on its top. In response, Kiki’s face resolved itself into impassive blackness. It was this sphinx-like expression that sometimes induced their American friends to imagine a more exotic provenance for her than she actually possessed. In fact she was from simple Florida country stock. ‘Baby – try being less facetious,’ she suggested. She reached for an apple and began to cut it up with one of their small knives with the translucent handles, dividing it into irregular chunks. She ate these slowly, one piece after another. Howard pulled his hair back from his face with both hands. ‘Sorry – I just – you laughed, so I thought maybe something was funny.’ ‘How am I meant to react?’ said Kiki, sighing. She laid down her  kipps and belsey knife and reached out for Levi, who was just passing with his bowl. Grabbing her robust fifteen-year-old by his denim waistband, she pulled him to her easily, forcing him down half a foot to her sitting level so that she could tuck the label of his basketball top back inside the collar. She put her thumbs on each side of his boxer shorts for another adjustment, but he tugged away from her. ‘ Mom , man . . .’ ‘Levi, honey, please pull those up just a little . . . they’re so low . . . they’re not even covering your ass.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Howard raised his eyes from his poor machine. He felt obscurely cheered by Smith’s neat tartan bow-tie, his baby face spattered with light freckles, the thin ripple of ash-blond hair. You couldn’t ask for a better helpmeet than Smith J. Miller. But he was an eternal optimist. He didn’t get how this system worked. He didn’t know, as Howard did, that by next Tuesday these kids would have already sifted through the academic wares on display in the form of courses across the Humanities Faculty, and performed a comparative assessment in their own minds, drawing on multiple variables including the relative academic fame of the professor; his previous publications up to that point; his intellectual kudos; the uses of his class; whether his class really meant anything to their permanent records or their personal futures or their grad school potential; the likelihood of the professor in question having any real-world power that might translate into an actual capacity to write that letter which would effectively place them – three years from now – on an internship at the New Yorker or in the Pentagon or in Clinton’s Harlem offices or at French Vogue – and that all this private research, all this Googling , would lead them rightly to conclude that taking a class on ‘Constructions of the Human’, which did not come under their core requirements for the semester, which was taught by a human being himself over the hill, in a bad jacket, with eighties hair, who was under-published, politically marginal and badly situated at the top of a building without proper heating and no elevator, was not in their best interests. There’s a reason it’s called shopping. ‘See, now, with pah -point,’ persisted Smith, ‘the whole class can see what’s going on. It’s pretty damn sharp, the image you git.’ Howard smiled gratefully but shook his head. He was beyond the point of learning new tricks. He got on his knees and plugged the projector’s cord into the wall; a snag of blue light leaped from the socket. He pressed the button on the back of the projector. He twiddled the connected cable. He pressed hard on the light box, hoping to engage some loose connection.  the anatomy lesson ‘Ah’ll do that,’ said Smith. He drew the projector away from Howard, sliding it along the table. Howard stood where he was for a minute, in exactly the same pose as if the projector were still before him. ‘Maybe you should close those blinds,’ suggested Smith gently. Like most people in the Wellington loop, Smith was fully apprised of Howard’s situation. And, personally, he was sorry for Howard’s trouble, and had told him so two days earlier when they met to go over which worksheets needed photocopying. I’m sorry for your trouble . As if someone Howard loved had died. ‘You want some coffee, Howard, some tea? Doughnut?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I can have scrambled once on a Sunday – I feel like I earned it, I swam my butt off this week. We got eggs?’ ‘Cupboard – far right.’ Kiki tucked her feet back under her. She was cold now, after all. Using the thin rubber edges of the sliding doors as support, she hauled her body up off the ground. A squirrel, whose progress she’d been following, finally succeeded in tearing open the netted ball of fat and nuts Kiki had left for the birds, and now stood just where she’d hoped he would half an hour earlier, right on the flagstones before her, with his question-mark of a tail quivering in the northeaster. ‘Zoor, look at this little guy.’ ‘I never understand that – how do eggs not go in the fridge? You’re the only person I have ever met who believes that. Eggs – fridge. It’s so basic .’ Kiki closed the sliding doors and went over to the cork notice board, where bills and birthday cards, photos and newspaper clippings, were pinned. She began lifting the layers of paper, looking under receipts and behind the calendar. Nothing ever got taken down from here. There was still a picture of the first Bush with a dartboard superimposed over his face. Still, in the top left-hand corner, a huge button bought in New York’s Union Square in the mid eighties: I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat . Long ago someone  On Beauty had spilled something on it, and the quote had yellowed and curled like parchment, shrinking between its plastic and metal covers. ‘Zoor, do we still have the pool guy’s number? I should call him. It’s getting out of hand out there.’ Zora shook her head quickly, a vibration of perplexed disinterest. ‘Eyeano. Ask Dad.’ ‘Honey, put the extractor fan on. The smoke alarm’ll go.’ Kiki, fearing her daughter’s infamous clumsiness, raised her hands to her cheeks as Zora unhooked a frying pan from the collection of same hanging from a rack above the oven. Nothing was dropped. Now the fan machine started up, conveniently loud and insensitive to nuance – mechanical background noise to fill up all the gaps in the room, in the conversation. ‘Where is everybody? It’s late.’ ‘I don’t even think Levi came home last night. Your dad’s asleep, I think.’ ‘You think ? You don’t know?’ They looked at each other, the older woman closely examining the younger face.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Yeah . . . Tell him,’ said Levi smiling, turning from Howard and holding on to the banister either side of himself, lifting his feet up and then parallel with his chest like a gymnast, ‘tell him ‘‘ I’m just another black man caught up in the mix, tryna make a dollah outta fifteen cents! ’’ ’ ‘Right. Will do.’ The doorbell rang. Howard took a step down, kissed the back of his son’s head, ducked under one of his arms and went to the door. A familiar, grinning face was there on the other side, turned ashen in the cold. Howard raised a finger in greeting. This was a Haitian fellow called Pierre, one of the many from that difficult island who now found occupation in New England, discreetly compensating for Howard’s unwillingness to drive a car. ‘Oi – where’s Zoor?’ Howard called back to Levi from the threshold. Levi shrugged. ‘Eyeano,’ he said, that strange squelch of vowels his most frequent response to any question. ‘Swimming?’ ‘In this weather? Christ .’ ‘It’s indoors . Obviously.’ ‘Just tell her goodbye, all right? Back on Wednesday. No, Thursday.’  kipps and belsey ‘Sure, Dad. Be safe, yo.’ In the car, on the radio, men were screaming at each other in a French that was not, as far as Howard could tell, actually French. ‘The airport, please,’ said Howard, over this. ‘OK, yes. We have to go slow, though. Streets pretty bad.’ ‘OK, not too slow, though.’ ‘Terminal?’ The accent was so pronounced Howard thought he heard the name of Zola’s novel. ‘What’s that?’ ‘You know the terminal?’ ‘Oh . . . No, I don’t . . . I’ll find out – it’s here somewhere – don’t worry . . . you drive – I’ll find it.’ ‘Always flying,’ said Pierre rather wistfully, and laughed, looking at Howard via the rear view. Howard was struck by the great width of his nose, straddling the two sides of his amiable face. ‘Always off somewhere, yes,’ said Howard genially, but it did not seem to him that he travelled so very much, though when he did it was more and further than he wished. He thought of his own father again – compared to him, Howard was Phileas Fogg. Travel had seemed the key to the kingdom, back then. One dreamed of a life that would enable travel. Howard looked through his window at a lamp-post buried to its waist in snow supporting two chained-up, frozen bikes, identifiable only by the tips of their handlebars. He imagined waking up this morning and digging his bike out of the snow and riding to a proper job, the kind Belseys had had for generations, and found he couldn’t imagine it. This interested Howard, for a moment: the idea that he could no longer gauge the luxuries of his own life.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared. The Bus Stop was a Wellington institution. For twenty years it had been a cheap and popular Moroccan restaurant, attracting students, the aged hippies of Kennedy Square, professors, locals and tourists. A first-generation Moroccan family ran it and the food was very good, unpretentious and flavoursome. Although there was no Moroccan diaspora in Wellington to appreciate the authenticity of the lamb tagine or the saffron couscous, this had never tempted the Essakalli family into Americanization. They served what they themselves enjoyed eating and waited for the Wellingtonians to acclimatize, which they did. Only the decor nodded to the town’s hunger for kitschy ethnic charm: oak tables inlaid with mother of pearl, low banquette seating buried in multicoloured cushions of  On Beauty harsh goat’s wool. Long-necked hookah pipes rested on the high shelves like exotic birds come to roost. Six years ago, when the Essakallis went into retirement, their son Yousef took over with his German-American wife, Katrin. Unlike his parents, who had merely tolerated the students – their pitchers of beer, fake IDs and requests for ketchup – the younger, more American Yousef enjoyed their presence and understood their needs. It was his idea to convert the restaurant’s -foot basement into a club space where many different classes and events and parties could take place. Here the visuals of Star Wars were shown alongside the soundtrack to Dr Zhivago . Here a fleshy, dimpled red-headed lady explained to a gang of willowy freshman girls how to move one’s abdomen in tiny increments of clockwise motion, the art of the belly dance. Local rappers performed impromptu sets. It was a favourite stop-off for British guitar bands hoping to rid themselves of nerves before their American tours. Morocco, as it was reimagined in the Bus Stop, was an inclusive place. The black kids from Boston were down with Morocco, down with its essential Arab nature and African soul, the massive hash pipes, the chilli in the food, the infectious rhythms of the music. The white kids from the college were down with Morocco too: they liked its shabby glamour, its cinematic history of non-politicized Orientalism, the cool pointy slippers. The hippies and activists of Kennedy Square –