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 The Folding Star (1994)

  This was something so unusual that it seemed to bring my whole life before my mind's eye. What I dreaded was Cherif’s return, some maudlin rapprochement or pretence that nothing serious had gone wrong. Or it could be poor troubled Paul, I supposed, in search of the solace I alone seemed able to offer him. But what if Luc was standing there, fluffily unshaven, greasy-haired, hungry . . . ? I crossed the room assuring myself it was only Marcel, who had got the time of a lesson wrong, or forgotten it was the holidays. Outside, in a vision of unbruised youth and beauty, were Alejo and Agustín. So I had been forgiven? The former, in one of his bright silk waistcoats, like a wicked prefect, kissed me on both cheeks, while his cousin extended a hand stiffly, but with a slight smile: he gave the impression of having been coaxed round and of relying entirely on Alejo as a chaperon. Still, I felt in some way blessed by them, ridiculously moved to find myself in their thoughts. "Agustin wants to ask you something," said Alejo. I shrugged and spread my hands to say "Anything, anything." "Both my sisters say, would you like to come to their party." "And . . . " prompted Alejo. "And I invite you too." "And so do I." "Oh . . . it's terribly sweet of you." "It is for Christmas, and also for my sister's, um, onomastic . . . holiday," said Agustin, glad of this further rationale for their gesture. "I'm very touched, please thank your sisters, it would have been wonderful to meet them at last, but the truth is I'm tied up with something here." I was aware of their both looking curiously past me into the grim fug of the room. "And then any moment I have to go out to meet a friend on the other side of town. But thank you, thank you, my friends." For a minute I was Scrooge playing Mr Brownlow. "I hope you'll have a very happy time." I caught on Agustin's incomparable face the glow of a double satisfaction. I couldn't have borne the party, simple social sweetness was beyond me these days; yet by the time I skulked out through the yard, aware I was noticed from my neighbours' window, a hunched figure in the dusk, I had begun to feel humiliated by their offer, like some difficult old widower invited to share the family turkey. I saw I was shy, too, of dancing with unknown girls. After the tinny carols in the streets, the automated mania of the shoppers, the limbo of Christmas, garish but dank, it was like reaching home to push open the heavy door of the bar, to hear the spring sweep it shut behind me, to move again in the slowed rotations of this other limbo, in its deep-sea gloom of copper and green.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  was busy putting his money where his mouth was, and now he never had to work again. I was a regular guest, and while you never knew everyone, I had enough buddies, male and female, to feel relaxed and comfortable. The atmosphere was a sort of postcollege hip thing—people two or five or even ten years out of school try ing to recapture the feeling of freedom and belonging of those undergraduate days. Dressing down was the absolute rule. The guy in the mus cle shirt and hightops might be a corporate lawyer on the fast track to partner, and the woman in the tie-dyed shirt and clogs could easily be a buttoned-down drone with Anderson Con sulting. I was in grad school at the time, so as I saw it I had a right to wear loose jeans and sandals and a legalize pot T-shirt. There was plenty of sex at these parties. Not as much as you might hear about the next day, of course, but I know how to separate fact from bragging, and there was plenty of fact. All those people trooping up and down the stairs to the second floor weren’t inspecting Kindle’s famous record collection or checking out the new wallpaper in his study. I guess I got about my fair share. I didn’t try as hard as some guys, and sometimes that works out better anyway. My God, with guys like Jerry Shaughnessy or Guido the Italian Stallion, if they didn’t have a real solid line on some trim by ten or eleven you could see the panic in their eyes, like a hunter on the last day of deer season. My normal pattern was to wait un til things thinned out a bit, maybe one A.M. or so, and then take a casual look around to see who might be available. Lately it had been Amy Hauder more often than not, and I sensed I might be drifting into a relationship in my usual aimless way. We were down in the basement, where the laid-back cool

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  FIVEWhen There’s No One to Set an ExampleAs I reached more of the adult children in the study and had a chance to talk to them, my thoughts kept drifting back to Karen. After all, she had prompted the whole project with her visit to my home on the eve of her wedding. And so when I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of a nationally known child treatment center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the fall of 1998, I jumped at the chance. This would give me a golden opportunity to look up Karen, who had settled there with her new husband. Her Christmas cards had kept me up to date. The wedding and honeymoon had gone perfectly. Six months after the wedding she sent me a somewhat cryptic note—“Dear Judy, So far so good! Warm regards, Karen.” As I puzzled over it, I figured that it reflected her characteristic caution about expecting good things to last. Her job was going well, her husband, Gavin, had been promoted, and they’d bought a house. The next year she wrote to say that she was pregnant. And her last card contained a picture of her baby, Maya, who would now be two years old. Karen also included a couple of lines about her decision to quit work full-time and how she had struggled with the change. I drove to Karen’s house with questions racing through my head, the kind that can only be asked by having seen her life unfold for a quarter of a century. What happens to a caregiver child when she finds a healthy relationship in adulthood? Are there residues from her early experiences? Can she ever break free of that role? Have Karen’s early fears of betrayal affected her marriage? Has she learned to be less serious and more light-hearted or is her grave demeanor a permanent aspect of her personality? I was especially interested to see Karen as a mom. To be honest, I was surprised by her decision to have a child so soon after her marriage. After all, she had spent so many years of her life bringing up her mother’s children. She could have said, “Been there, done that.” AS SOON AS I pulled my rental car into the driveway, Karen came out the front door and ran over to greet me. She looked different—more settled, a tiny bit heavier, still stunning. She was wearing jeans and a loose green pullover and straddled a little girl with ash-blond hair on her right hip. We embraced and then Karen threw her free arm out in a huge arc. “Look at all this. Can you believe it?” “This” was a sprawling ranch-style house with three bedrooms, large front yard, shade trees, a swing set, and a two-car garage filled with bicycles, camping gear, and other paraphernalia of a family that enjoys the outdoors, plus a spectacular garden.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  That she would ask me to move with her to Dayton, that she seemed genuinely surprised by my resistance, and that she would subject me to such a one-sided introduction to a therapist meant that Mom didn’t understand something about the way that Lindsay and I ticked. Lindsay once told me, “Mom just doesn’t get it.” I initially disagreed with her: “Of course she gets it; it’s just the way she is, something she can’t change.” After the incident with the therapist, I knew that Lindsay was right. Mamaw was unhappy when I told her that I planned to live with Dad, and so was everyone else. No one really understood it, and I felt unable to say much about it. I knew that if I told the truth, I’d have a few people offering their spare bedrooms, and all of them would submit to Mamaw’s demand that I live permanently with her. I also knew that living with Mamaw came with a lot of guilt, and a lot of questions about why I didn’t live with my mom or dad, and a lot of whispers from a lot of people to Mamaw that she just needed to take a break and enjoy her golden years. That feeling of being a burden to Mamaw wasn’t something I imagined; it came from a number of small cues, from the things she muttered under her breath, and from the weariness she wore like a dark piece of clothing. I didn’t want that, so I chose what seemed like the least bad option. In some ways, I loved living with Dad. His life was normal in precisely the way I’d always wanted mine to be. My stepmom worked part-time but was usually home. Dad came home from work around the same time each day. One of them (usually my stepmom but sometimes Dad) made dinner every night, which we ate as a family. Before each meal, we’d say grace (something I’d always liked but had never done outside of Kentucky). On weeknights, we’d watch some family sitcom together. And Dad and Cheryl never screamed at each other. Once, I heard them raise their voices during an argument about money, but slightly elevated volumes were far different from screaming. On my first weekend at Dad’s house—the first weekend I had ever spent with him when I knew that, come Monday, I wouldn’t be going somewhere else—my younger brother invited a friend to sleep over. We fished in Dad’s pond, fed horses, and grilled steaks for dinner. That night, we watched Indiana Jones movies until the early-morning hours. There was no fighting, no adults hurling insults at one another, no glass china shattering angrily against the wall or floor. It was a boring evening. And it epitomized what attracted me to Dad’s home. What I never lost, though, was the sense of being on guard. When I moved in with my father, I’d known him for two years.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Armco’s people sat on the boards of many of the important local organizations, and it helped to fund the schools. And it employed thousands of Middletonians who, like my grandfather, earned a good wage despite a lack of formal education. Armco earned its reputation through careful design. “Until the 1950s,” writes Chad Berry in his book Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles , “the ‘big four’ employers of the Miami Valley region—Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Champion Paper and Fiber in Hamilton, Armco Steel in Middletown, and National Cash Register in Dayton—had had serene labor relations, partly because they . . . [hired] family and friends of employees who were once migrants themselves. For example, Inland Container, in Middletown, had 220 Kentuckyians on its payroll, 117 of whom were from Wolfe County alone.” While labor relations no doubt had declined by the 1980s, much of the goodwill built by Armco (and similar companies) remained. The other reason most still call it Armco is that Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced. The opposition was mostly a bunch of noise. Even Papaw—who once promised he’d disown his children if they bought a Japanese car—stopped complaining a few days after they announced the merger. “The truth is,” he told me, “that the Japanese are our friends now. If we end up fighting any of those countries, it’ll be the goddamned Chinese.” The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization world. If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown’s flagship company probably would not have survived without it. Growing up, my friends and I had no clue that the world had changed. Papaw had retired only a few years earlier, owned stock in Armco, and had a lucrative pension. Armco Park remained the nicest, most exclusive recreation spot in town, and access to the private park was a status symbol: It meant that your dad (or grandpa) was a man with a respected job. It never occurred to me that Armco wouldn’t be around forever, funding scholarships, building parks, and throwing free concerts. Still, few of my friends had ambitions to work there. As small children, we had the same dreams that other kids did; we wanted to be astronauts or football players or action heroes. I wanted to be a professional puppy-player-wither, which at the time seemed eminently reasonable. By the sixth grade, we wanted to be veterinarians or doctors or preachers or businessmen. But not steelworkers. Even at Roosevelt Elementary—where, thanks to Middletown geography, most people’s parents lacked a college education—no one wanted to have a blue-collar career and its promise of a respectable middle-class life.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  oteinemauga, taking Pali’s moist brown hand and touching it to his dry cheek. Mr. and Mrs. Saolefaleotcinemauga beamed smiles like tropic birds floating slowly across their high faces: Mr. Saolefa- leoteinemauga staunch as the sides of Savaii and Mrs. Saolefa- leoteinemauga a single column of devotion and prayer. “Take care of our boy.” Pali, six foot five, looked down at the five- foot-five Reverend. “I will,” said the Reverend, and lowered his head in a few words of thanksgiving while his eyes traced the ascending lines of Pali’s thighs. Summer in Minnesota was hot and green. Then, as happens annually in Minnesota during the third week of October, win ter descended swiftly with snow and ice. Christmas came and went. Pali was invited to spend part of winter break with the Reverend Knarffssen and his son Gregg, the assistant pastor. Pali wondered about the rumor that Gregg and the Reverend were not actually related by blood but by common interest, as he noted the difference in physical appearance during the first sauna the three of them took together. In fact, the three of them were sitting naked in the Pastor’s basement within fifteen minutes of Pali’s arrival, coming into the house after the drive from the seminary in town with Gregg. The Pastor, bounding down the stairs in his bathrobe, invited Pali to join them for their afternoon invigorating Swedish sauna. Before you could say, Uff dal, Pali was on a high pine bench pouring spring water from a wooden dipper, watching eucalyptus-scented steam rise between him and his nude hosts. Pali wore a towel, having been brought up a mod est Christian Samoan. “I would have thought that being Polynesian,” said the Pas

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In the worst hours of apathy and dejection I would go for solace to Hartford's fine museum, seeking out a Canaletto painting of Rome, the Pantheon standing brown and gold against the blue sky of a late afternoon in summer; and each time I would come away from it comforted, and once again at peace. About the year 1941 I had discovered by chance, in an artists' supply shop in New York, four Piranesi engravings which G . . . and I bought. One of them, a View of Hadrian's Villa which I had not known before, is an interior of the chapel of Canopus, from which were taken in the Seventeenth Century the Antinous in Egyptian style and the accompanying basalt statues of priestesses, all to be seen today in the Vatican. The foreground shows a round structure, burst open like a skull, from which fallen trees and brush hang vaguely down, like strands of hair. The genius of Piranesi, almost mediumistic, has truly caught the element of hallucination here: he has sensed the long-continued rituals of mourning, the tragic architecture of an inner world. For several years I looked at this drawing almost daily, without a thought for my former enterprise, which I supposed that I had given up. Such are the curious detours of what is called oblivion. In the spring of 1947, while sorting over some papers I burned the notes taken at Yale; they seemed to have become by that time completely useless. Still, Hadrian's name appears in an essay on Greek myth which I wrote in 1943 and which Roger Caillois published during those war years in Les Lettres Franfaises, in Buenos Aires. Then in 1945 the figure of the drowned Antinous, borne along somehow on that Lethean current, came again to the surface in an unfinished essay, Canticle of the Soul and its True Freedom, written just before the advent of a serious illness. Keep in mind that everything recounted here is thrown out of perspective by what is left unsaid: these notes serve [Hadrian 324a.jpg] Interior of the Pantheon, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi [Hadrian 324bc.jpg] Temple of Canope Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi [Hadrian 324d.jpg] Foundation Wall of Hadrian�s Tomb, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi only to mark the lacunae. There is nothing, for example, of what I was doing during those difficult years, nor of the thinking, the work, the worries and anxieties, or the joys; nor of the tremendous repercussion of external events and the perpetual testing of oneself upon the touchstone of fact.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Those who know his ways greet each announcement with a delight unshared by the novice; in my first week at the club the disdainful announcement that ‘Mr Beckwith has a man in reception’ had brought a round of silly laughter as I walked, blushing, from the gym. And the pool is a busy place. Except for certain mournful periods—early afternoons, Sunday evenings—there is a crowd: friends are racing, practised divers arch into the water making barely a splash, the agile avoid the slow, groups sit in a dripping line on the edge, feet flicking the water, cocks shrunken by the cold sticking up comically in their trunks. Miles of serious swimming are wound up in those twenty-five yards each day, and though some dally between lengths, of most you see only the heave of breaststrokers’ backs, the misted goggles and gasping, half-averted mouths of crawlers, the incessant cleaving movements of their arms, and the bubbling wakes of their feet. I went to swim most days, sometimes after exercises on the mats in the gym or a shortish turn in the weights room. It was a bizarre occupation, numbing and yet satisfying. I swam fast, alternating crawl and breaststroke, with a length of butterfly every ten. My mind would count its daily fifty lengths as automatically as a photocopier; and at the same time it would wander. Absorbed in thought I barely noticed the half-hour—one unfaltering span of pure physical exercise—elapse. This evening I thought of Arthur a lot, running real and projected conversations through my mind as I tumble-turned from length into length through the cool, gloomy water. A week had gone by since we’d met, a week spent in bed, or trailing naked from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen; sleeping at irregular times, getting drunk, watching movies on the video. I was engrossed in him. He was still strange to me, though, and much less predictable than I was. Perhaps he felt stifled in the flat. After hours of languid vacancy he would spring up and run from room to room, tapping door-frames and chair-backs as he went. Sometimes he ploughed through the stations on the hi-fi till he found some music to dance to, and would swarm around wearing nothing but my school straw hat, or a towel which he flirted about or shook like a fetish.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  me ask you, have you had any ... relief tonight?” “Nope. With me it’s all give and no take. I just give and give and then give some more.” She giggled. “Would you like some take, for a change?” she asked shyly. “God yes.” “Okay, you just lie still and let me take care of you.” I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling in happy exhaus tion as Amira unzipped my jeans and delicately extracted my cock. She crouched over me, her dark hair shielding her face as if by modesty. Her tongue was warm and soft, her motions tentative and unpracticed. She held my cock gently inside her mouth, like she was afraid of damaging it, and moved her head up and down in a slow and steady rhythm. In the state I was in, it was enough. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift along patiently with the sensation. “Here it comes,” I said. Amira lifted her head and took over with her hand, stroking my slippery cock with a firm grip. I groaned and spilled out my load in a prolonged spasm of pleasure. When it was over, the room seemed to be spinning in lazy circles, and I felt drugged. I lay there limply while Amira cleaned me with a towel and zipped me up. “You’re an angel,” I said. She smiled. “If my mother could see me right now, she wouldn’t think so.” The next morning I was hung over, sore, and vaguely de pressed. Instead of leaving me fulfilled, the escapade sent me into a funk that lasted for weeks. I remember thinking that Amira had it right—it was much better to let a fantasy remain a fantasy, and to remain true to your morals. I called up Amira a few days later and asked her out. She turned me down, politely but firmly, which only reinforced my feelings for her. I obsessed over her for a while, and then I eventually came to my senses. Still, I was shocked when, a year later, I heard that she was dropping out of law school because she was pregnant. Today I look back at the incident with a strange mixture of distaste and pride. Should you act out an extreme fantasy when you have the chance? You’re asking the wrong guy—I still haven’t decided yet.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Other considerations came slowly to mind during the night which followed Iollas' death; life has given me much, or at least I have known how to obtain a great deal from it; in this moment as in the time of my felicity, but for wholly opposite reasons, it seems to me that existence has nothing more to offer: I am not sure, however, that I have not something more to learn from it. I shall listen for its secret instructions to the end. All my life long I have trusted in the wisdom of my body; I have tried to distinguish between and enjoy the varied sensations which this friend has provided me: I no longer refuse the death agony prepared for me, this ending slowly elaborated within my arteries and inherited perhaps from some ancestor, or born of my temperament, formed little by little from each of my actions throughout my life. The time of impatience has passed; at the point where I now am, despair would be in as bad taste as hope itself. I have ceased to hurry my death. There is still much to be done. My estates in Africa, inherited from my mother-in-law, Matidia, must be turned into models of agricultural development; the peasants of Borysthenes, the village established in Thrace in memory of a good horse, are entitled to aid after a severe winter; on the contrary, subsidies should not be granted to the rich cultivators of the Nile Valley, who are ever ready to take advantage of the emperor's solicitude. Julius Vestinus, prefect of Education, sends me his report on the opening of public grammar schools. I have just completed the revision of Palmyra's commercial code: it takes everything into account, from the entrance fees for caravans to the tax set for prostitutes. At the moment, we are assembling a congress of physicians and magistrates to determine the utmost duration of a pregnancy, thus putting an end to interminable legal squabbles. Cases of bigamy are increasing in number in the veterans' settlements; I am doing my best to persuade these men not to make wrong use of the new laws which permit them to marry, and I counsel them to abstain prudently from taking more than one wife at a time! In Athens a Pantheon is in process of construction on the model of the Pantheon in Rome; I am composing the inscription to be placed on its walls, and shall enumerate therein (as examples and commitments for the future) my services to the Greek cities and to barbarian peoples; the services rendered to Rome are matters of course.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Rome would be perpetuating herself in the least of the towns where magistrates strive to demand just weight from the merchants, to clean and light the streets, to combat disorder, slackness, superstition and injustice, and to give broader and fairer interpretation to the laws. She would endure to the end of the last city built by man. Humanitas, Libertas, Felicitas: those noble words which grace the coins of my reign were not of my invention. Any Greek philosopher, almost every cultured Roman, conceives of the world as I do. I have heard Trajan exclaim, when confronted by a law which was unjust because too rigorous, that to continue its enforcement was to run counter to the spirit of the times. I shall have been the first, perhaps, to subordinate all my actions to this "spirit of the times", to make of it something other than the inflated dream of a philosopher, or the slightly vague aspirings of some good prince. And I was thankful to the gods, for they had allowed me to live in a period when my allotted task consisted of prudent reorganization of a world, and not of extracting matter, still unformed, from chaos, or of lying upon a corpse in the effort to revive it. I enjoyed the thought that our past was long enough to provide us with great examples, but not so heavy as to crush us under their weight; that our technical developments had advanced to the point of facilitating hygiene in the cities and prosperity for the population, though not to the degree of encumbering man with useless acquisition; that our arts, like trees grown weary with the abundance of their bearing, were still able to produce a few choice fruits. I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct. It was, in sum, pleasing to me that even these words Humanity, Liberty, Happiness, had not yet lost their value by too much misuse. I see an objection to every effort toward ameliorating man's condition on earth, namely that mankind is perhaps not worthy of such exertion. But I meet the objection easily enough: so long as Caligula's dream remains impossible of fulfillment, and the entire human race is not reduced to a single head destined for the axe, we shall have to bear with humanity, keeping it within bounds but utilizing it to the utmost; our interest, in the best sense of the term, will be to serve it.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Glad to hear it, Will,’ he replied, following me round the little maze of banked lockers. I found one that was free, slung my bag into it, and began to undress. Bill stood by me, amicable, massive, flushed, his head and shoulders still rinsed with sweat. There was a kind of handsomeness lost in his heavy, square face. He sat down on the bench, where he could politely talk while also watching me take my clothes off. It was typical of his behaviour, discreet, but not prurient: his was the old-fashioned ethos of a male community, delighting in men, but always respectful and fraternal. I knew he would never ask a personal question. ‘That boy Phil’s coming on well,’ he said. ‘Very nice definition. Said he was a bit loose after being off for a spell, but I should say he’d put on a centimetre or two this week alone.’ Phil, I knew, was a lad he had a bit of a soft spot for; I’d seen him hanging around to count for him when he was on the machines, and because Phil was genuinely interested in his own body Bill was always able to engage him in earnest analyses of methods and results. I could see, too, that Phil, who was shy and stocky, might be a tricky proposition, and sensed some resistance in him to Bill’s cheery and paternal chatter across the crowded shower room. ‘Phil’s all very well,’ I suggested, ‘but he’s the plump type: he’ll always have to work hard.’ I pulled off my T-shirt and Bill shook his head. ‘I’d like to see you do some more work,’ he said with a sucking in of his breath. ‘You’ve got the makings of something really choice.’ I looked down, as it were modestly, at my lean torso, the smooth, tight tits, the little fuse of hair running down to my belt. The swimming-pool at the Corry is reached down a spiral staircase from the changing-rooms. It is the most subterraneous zone of the Club, its high coffered ceiling supporting the floor of the gym above. Corinthian pillars at each corner are an allusion to ancient Rome, and you half expect to see the towel-girt figures of Charlton Heston and Tony Curtis deep in senatorial conspiracy. Instead, a bored attendant paces around the narrow mosaic border of the pool in flip-flops. The water comes to within an inch or so of the margin, and any waves run over the floor, which glistens and, being uneven, holds little cold puddles. Some regulation, I suspect, stipulates how many turns around the pool the attendant must take each hour, for he combines his vigilance with relaxing in the spectators’ seats and reading a book; after a longish spell of this he will then trot around the pool for a minute or two as if to make up his ration. I have never known, or known of, any occasion on which his services were needed.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  MARGE PIERCY From Three Women The New Kid I he first time they had sex, they were stoned and kept gig- gling. It didn’t hurt but it didn’t feel like much. They didn’t date like the straight kids. Both his parents worked and her mother was always at the law office or in court, so they just fucked whenever they felt like it. When her sister Rachel was home from grade school, Elena took Evan into her room and shut the door. They played music loud. She had Rachel cowed. She knew that even if Rachel suspected anything, she wouldn’t tell their mom, Suzanne: she’d be scared to. Evan put on his father’s overcoat and went into an adult bookstore. He bought books about sex and several women’s videos. After that, he spent an hour looking for Elena’s clit, till he found it. If other girls asked her about him, she said he was like her brother. They were both intense and dark and aloof: even

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Thank you so much for lunch, Charles; I have enjoyed it.’ He turned a surprised gaze on me. ‘You like the old Club?’ he asked. ‘Not too bad, is it?’ Fine hair-veins branched merrily over his pinkish cheeks, but his dark eyes were sunken and his big head looked heavy with impending sleep. I thought how I had seen him dead on the lavatory floor. I felt quite fond of him, and was glad that I had belonged to him and not to the talkative, rather sinister Staines. ‘I do hope we’ll have another little chin-wag soon,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you at the baths, of course.’ Again it seemed inconceivable to me that this man could be capable of physical exercise. As if reading my thoughts he explained: ‘I find the water most … therapeutic. Swimming, if you can call it swimming, is the only thing that makes me feel young. Floating around, splish-splosh, flip-flop …’ Downstairs again on my way out, I stopped off for a pee. The lavatory was off the hall, down a corridor where lesser but brighter portraits were hung, late Victorian and Edwardian mostly, the flashy brushwork making the sitters seem all the more roguish and parvenus. Staines was coming out as I entered, and uttered a ‘Whoops,’ though he did not otherwise indicate that he knew me. As I stood at the urinal, along the front of which ran a tilted glass plate to prevent the old buffers from piddling on their shoes, a voice said, ‘Enjoy your meal, sir?’ It was Raymond, our waiter, who I had not realised was there. He caught my eye in the mirror as I glanced across. 3I did so regret it was the Central Line I used most. I couldn’t get any kind of purchase on it. It had neither the old-fashioned openair quality of the District Line, where rain misted the tracks as one waited, nor the grimy profundity of the Northern Line, nor the Piccadilly’s ingenious, civilised connexiveness. For much of its length it was a great bleak drain, and though some of its stops—Holland Park, St Paul’s, Bethnal Green—were historic enough, they were offset on my daily journeys by the ringing emptiness of Lancaster Gate and Marble Arch, and the trash and racket of Tottenham Court Road, where I got out. Somewhere, I knew, the line had its ghost stations, but I had given up looking out for their unlit platforms and perhaps, in a flash from the rails, the signboards and good-humoured advertisements of an abandoned decade.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  more than her brother or her lover, Evan was like her twin. They liked the same thrash bands; they liked dark violent movies that felt real; they liked taking their clothes off and try ing different things. They always did their homework to gether and they always had sex using condoms. Neither could drive a car, for they were both fourteen. They had to use their bikes or public transportation to go anywhere. They bought their dope in the neighborhood, at a spot outside a drugstore where guys she knew from grade school were selling. Both of them loved their neighborhood, with its blocks that matched, each block a particular type of red brick rowhouse, some with funky little strip gardens in the middle of the street. Evan and she didn’t talk about garbage like love and fami lies. They talked about peace and death and hypocrisy and lies. They did his next science project together and then they let the mice go in the basement of the school. She hoped they could make it on their own. In school, she was too weird for the other girls. If she stood with a group of girls, conversation slowed down or stopped. She got her breasts and she was tall, so guys were always trying to feel her up, poking at her, making noises, but they were scared of her too and never bugged her about dating. She lis tened to the other girls talking about their boyfriends, and it wasn’t like that with her. She didn’t dote on Evan. It was as if they were each other’s shadow. He called them E squared or E to the second power. There was no hand holding, no smooching, no rings or pins or flowers. They fought some times and called each other names, but it never lasted. They would start laughing as if for them to be anything but one be ing, one conspiracy, one gang of two, was a joke. She could not even have said if she loved Evan. It was like loving her arm. They were a unit. His parents and hers asked questions, but

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Mamaw had a much bigger bark than bite, at least with me. She once ordered me to watch a TV show with her on a Friday night, a creepy murder mystery, the type of show Mamaw loved to watch. At the climax of the show, during a moment designed to make the viewer jump, Mamaw flipped off the lights and screamed in my ear. She’d seen the episode before and knew what was coming. She made me sit there for forty-five minutes just so she could scare me at the appointed time. The best part about living with Mamaw was that I began to understand what made her tick. Until then, I had resented how rarely we traveled to Kentucky after Mamaw Blanton’s death. The decline in visits wasn’t noticeable at first, but by the time I started middle school, we visited Kentucky only a few times a year for a few days at a time. Living with Mamaw, I learned that she and her sister, Rose—a woman of uncommon kindness—had a falling-out after their mother died. Mamaw had hoped that the old house would become a sort of family time share, while Rose had hoped that the house would go to her son and his family. Rose had a point: None of the siblings who lived in Ohio or Indiana visited often enough, so it made sense to give the house to someone who would use it. But Mamaw feared that without a home base, her children and grandchildren would have no place to stay during their visits to Jackson. She, too, had a point. I started to understand that Mamaw saw returning to Jackson as a duty to endure rather than a source of enjoyment. To me, Jackson was about my uncles, and chasing turtles, and finding peace from the instability that plagued my Ohio existence. Jackson gave me a shared home with Mamaw, a three-hour road trip to tell and listen to stories, and a place where everyone knew me as the grandson of the famous Jim and Bonnie Vance. Jackson was something much different to her. It was the place where she sometimes went hungry as a child, from which she ran in the wake of a teenage pregnancy scandal, and where so many of her friends had given their lives in the mines. I wanted to escape to Jackson; she had escaped from it. In her old age, with limited mobility, Mamaw loved to watch TV. She preferred raunchy humor and epic dramas, so she had a lot of options. But her favorite show by far was the HBO mob story The Sopranos . Looking back, it’s hardly surprising that a show about fiercely loyal, sometimes violent outsiders resonated with Mamaw. Change the names and dates, and the Italian Mafia starts to look a lot like the Hatfield-McCoy dispute back in Appalachia. The show’s main character, Tony Soprano, was a violent killer, an objectively terrible person by almost any standard.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Greece knew better about such things: her resin-steeped wine, her bread sprinkled with sesame seed, fish grilled at the very edge of the sea and unevenly blackened by the fire, or seasoned here and there by the grit of sand, all satisfied the appetite alone without surrounding by too many complications this simplest of our joys. In the merest hole of a place in Aegina or Phaleron I have tasted food so fresh that it remained divinely clean despite the dirty fingers of the tavern waiter; its quantity, though modest, was nevertheless so satisfying that it seemed to contain in the most reduced form possible some essence of immortality. Likewise meat cooked at night after a hunt had that same almost sacramental quality, taking us far back to the primitive origins of the races of men. Wine initiates us into the volcanic mysteries of the soil, and its hidden mineral riches; a cup of Samos drunk at noon in the heat of the sun or, on the contrary, absorbed of a winter evening when fatigue makes the warm current be felt at once in the hollow of the diaphragm and the sure and burning dispersion spreads along our arteries, such a drink provides a sensation which is almost sacred, and is sometimes too strong for the human head. No feeling so pure comes from the vintage-numbered cellars of Rome; the pedantry of great connoisseurs of wine wearies me. Water drunk more reverently still, from the hands or from the spring itself, diffuses within us the most secret salt of earth and the rain of heaven. But even water is a delight which, sick man that I am, I may now consume only with strict restraint. No matter: in death's agony itself, and mingled with the bitterness of the last potions, I shall try still to taste on my lips its fresh simplicity. In the schools of philosophy, where it is well to try once for all each mode of life, I have experimented briefly with abstention from meat; later, in Asia, I have seen the Indian Gymnosophists avert their eyes from smoking lamb quarters and gazelle meat served in the tent of Osroës. But this practice, in which your youthful love of austerity finds charm, calls for attentions more complicated than those of culinary refinement itself; and it separates us too much from the common run of men in a function which is nearly always public, and in which either friendship or formality presides. I should prefer to live all my life upon woodcock and fattened goose rather than be accused by my guests, at each meal, of a display of asceticism. As it is, I have had some trouble to conceal from my friends, by the help of dried fruits or the contents of a glass sipped slowly, that the masterpieces of my chefs were made more for them than for me, and that my interest in these courses ended before theirs.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I felt the same way. There were two kinds of people: those whom I’d behave around because I wanted to impress them and those whom I’d behave around to avoid embarrassing myself. The latter people were outsiders, and Kentucky had none of them. In many ways, Dad’s life project was rebuilding for himself what he once had in Kentucky. When I first visited him, Dad had a modest house on a beautiful plot of land, fourteen acres in total. There was a medium-sized pond stocked with fish, a couple of fields for cows and horses, a barn, and a chicken coop. Every morning the kids would run to the chicken coop and grab the morning’s haul of eggs—usually seven or eight, a perfect number for a family of five. During the day, we capered around the property with a dog in tow, caught frogs, and chased rabbits. It was exactly what Dad had done as a child, and exactly what I did with Mamaw in Kentucky. I remember running through a field with Dad’s collie, Dannie, a beautiful, bedraggled creature so gentle that he once caught a baby rabbit and carried it in his mouth, unharmed, to a human for inspection. I have no idea why I was running, but we both collapsed from exhaustion and lay in the grass, Dannie’s head on my chest and my eyes staring at the blue sky. I don’t know that I had ever felt so content, so completely unworried about life and its stresses. Dad had built a home with an almost jarring serenity. He and his wife argued, but they rarely raised their voices at each other and never resorted to the brutal insults that were commonplace in Mom’s house. None of their friends drank, not even socially. Even though they believed in corporal punishment, it was never doled out excessively or combined with verbal abuse—spanking was methodical and anger-free. My younger brother and sister clearly enjoyed their lives, even though they lacked pop music or R-rated movies. What little I knew of Dad’s character during his marriage to Mom came mostly secondhand. Mamaw, Aunt Wee, Lindsay, and Mom all told varying degrees of the same story: that Dad was mean. He yelled a lot and sometimes hit Mom. Lindsay told me that, as a child, I had a peculiarly large and misshapen head, and she attributed that to a time when she saw Dad push Mom aggressively. Dad denies ever physically abusing anyone, including Mom. I suspect that they were physically abusive to each other in the way that Mom and most of her men were: a bit of pushing, some plate throwing, but nothing more. What I do know is that between the end of his marriage with Mom and the beginning of his marriage with Cheryl—which occurred when I was four—Dad had changed for the better. He credits a more serious involvement with his faith.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But already that purely military project was proving an aid to peace and to development of prosperity in that part of Britain; villages sprang up, and there was a general movement of settlers toward our frontiers. The trench-diggers of the legion were aided in their task by native crews; the building of the wall was for many of these mountain dwellers, so newly subdued, the first irrefutable proof of the protective power of Rome; their pay was the first Roman money to pass through their hands. This rampart became the emblem of my renunciation of the policy of conquest: below the northernmost bastion I ordered the erection of a temple to the god Terminus. Everything enchanted me in that rainy land: the shreds of mist on the hillsides, the lakes consecrated to nymphs wilder than ours, the melancholy, grey-eyed inhabitants. I took as a guide a young tribune of the British auxiliary corps, a fair-haired god who had learned Latin and who spoke some halting Greek; he even attempted timidly to compose love verses in that tongue. One cold autumn night he served as interpreter between me and a Sibyl. We were sitting in the smoky hut of a Celtic woodcutter, warming our legs clad in clumsy, heavy trousers of rough wool, when we saw creeping toward us an ancient creature drenched and disheveled by rain and wind, wild and furtive as any animal of the wood. She fell upon the small oaten loaves which lay baking upon the hearth. My guide coaxed this prophetess, and she consented to examine for me the smoke rings, the sudden sparks, and those fragile structures of embers and ashes. She saw cities a-building, and joyous throngs, but also cities in flames, with bitter lines of captives, who belied my dreams for peace; there was a young and gentle visage which she took for the face of a woman and in which I refused to believe; then a white spectre, which was perhaps only a statue, since that would be an object far stranger than any phantom for this denizen of forest and heath. And vaguely, at a distance of some years, she saw my death, which I could well have predicted without her. There was less need for my presence in prosperous Gaul and wealthy Spain than in Britain. Narbonensian Gaul reminded me of Greece, whose graces had spread that far, the same fine schools of eloquence, the same porticoes under a cloudless sky. I stopped in N�mes to plan a basilica to be dedicated to Plotina and destined one day to become her temple. Some family ties endeared this city to the empress and so made its clear, sun-warmed landscape the dearer to me. But the revolt in Mauretania was flaming still.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Bob Hamel, my stepdad and eventual adoptive father, was a good guy in that he treated Lindsay and me kindly. Mamaw didn’t care much for him. “He’s a toothless fucking retard,” she’d tell Mom, I suspect for reasons of class and culture: Mamaw had done everything in her power to be better than the circumstances of her birth. Though she was hardly rich, she wanted her kids to get an education, obtain white-collar work, and marry well-groomed middle-class folks—people, in other words, who were nothing like Mamaw and Papaw. Bob, however, was a walking hillbilly stereotype. He had little relationship with his own father and had learned the lessons of his own childhood well: He had two kids whom he barely saw, though they lived in Hamilton, a town ten miles south of Middletown. Half of his teeth had rotted out, and the other half were black, brown, and misshapen, the consequence of a lifetime of Mountain Dew consumption and presumably some missed dental checkups. He was a high school dropout who drove a truck for a living. We’d all eventually learn that there was much to dislike about Bob. But what drove Mamaw’s initial dislike were the parts of him that most resembled her. Mamaw apparently understood what would take me another twenty years to learn: that social class in America isn’t just about money. And her desire that her children do better than she had done extended past their education and employment and into the relationships they formed. When it came to spouses for her kids and parents for her grandkids, Mamaw felt, whether she knew it consciously, that she wasn’t good enough. When Bob became my legal father, Mom changed my name from James Donald Bowman to James David Hamel. Until then, I’d borne my father’s first name as my middle name, and Mom used the adoption to erase any memory of his existence. She kept the D to preserve what had by then become a universal nickname—J.D. Mom told me that I was now named after Uncle David, Mamaw’s older, pot-smoking brother. This seemed a bit of a stretch even when I was six. Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn’t Donald. Our new life with Bob had a superficial, family-sitcom feel to it. Mom and Bob’s marriage seemed happy. They bought a house a few blocks away from Mamaw’s. (We were so close that if the bathrooms were occupied or I felt like a snack, I’d just walk over to Mamaw’s.) Mom had recently acquired her nursing license, and Bob made a great salary, so we had plenty of money. With our gun-toting, cigarette-smoking Mamaw up the street and a new legal father, we were an odd family but a happy one. My life assumed a predictable cadence: I’d go to school and come home and eat dinner. I visited Mamaw and Papaw nearly every day.