Desire

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 104 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  She would be, figuratively speaking, wagging her tiny tail, her whole behind in fact as little bitches do—while some grinning stranger accosted us and began a bright conversation with a comparative study of license plates. “Long way from home!” Inquisitive parents, in order to pump Lo about me, would suggest her going to a movie with their children. We had some close shaves. The waterfall nuisance pursued me of course in all our caravansaries. But I never realized how wafery their wall substance was until one evening, after I had loved too loudly, a neighbor’s masculine cough filled the pause as clearly as mine would have done; and next morning as I was having breakfast at the milk bar (Lo was a late sleeper, and I liked to bring her a pot of hot coffee in bed), my neighbor of the eve, an elderly fool wearing plain glasses on his long virtuous nose and a convention badge on his lapel, somehow managed to rig up a conversation with me, in the course of which he inquired, if my missus was like his missus a rather reluctant get-upper when not on the farm; and had not the hideous danger I was skirting almost suffocated me, I might have enjoyed the odd look of surprise on his thin-lipped weather-beaten face when I drily answered, as I slithered off my stool, that I was thank God a widower. How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until she had done her morning duty. And I was such a thoughtful friend, such a passionate father, such a good pediatrician, attending to all the wants of my little auburn brunette’s body! My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys. On especially tropical afternoons, in the sticky closeness of the siesta, I liked the cool feel of armchair leather against my massive nakedness as I held her in my lap. There she would be, a typical kid picking her nose while engrossed in the lighter sections of a newspaper, as indifferent to my ecstasy as if it were something she had sat upon, a shoe, a doll, the handle of a tennis racket, and was too indolent to remove. Her eyes would follow the adventures of her favorite strip characters: there was one well-drawn sloppy bobby-soxer, with high cheekbones and angular gestures, that I was not above enjoying myself; she studied the photographic results of head-on collisions; she never doubted the reality of place, time and circumstance alleged to match the publicity pictures of nakedthighed beauties; and she was curiously fascinated by the photographs of local brides, some in full wedding apparel, holding bouquets and wearing glasses.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Warren’s interested in him. And actually so am I. I think public intellectuals are incredibly weird and interesting . . . It’s got to be a kind of pathological tension, and then he has the race thing to contend with . . . But I just adore his dapperness . He’s terribly dapper .’ ‘Terribly dapper fascist.’ Claire frowned. ‘He’s so compelling , though. Like what they say about Clinton – charisma overdose. It’s probably entirely phero-monal, you know, like nasal , in some way Warren could explain – ’ ‘Nasal, anal – it’s definitely coming out one orifice or another.’ Howard now brought his glass to his mouth so that the next thing he said might be slightly muffled. ‘Congratulations, by the way. I hear they’re in order.’ ‘We’re very happy,’ she said placidly. ‘God, I am so fascinated by him – ’ Howard thought for a moment that she meant Warren. ‘See how he works the room? He’s everywhere, somehow.’ ‘Yeah, like the plague.’ Claire turned to Howard with an impish face. He saw that she had thought it would be all right now to look at him, now the ironic pace of their conversation had been set. The affair, after all, was so long in the past, had remained undiscovered for so long. In the interim Claire had got married! And that imaginary night at a Michigan conference was now the accepted reality; the three-week affair between Howard and Claire Malcolm in Wellington had never happened. Why shouldn’t they talk to each other again, look at each other? But in fact to look was lethal, and the moment she turned they both knew it. Claire did her best to continue, everything grotesquely exaggerated now by fear. ‘ I think,’ she began in a ludicrous teasing voice, ‘I think you’d quite like to be like him.’ ‘How much have you drunk?’ He had a cruel wish at that moment that Claire Malcolm might  On Beauty be gone from the planet. Without his doing anything at all – just gone. ‘All your silly ideological battles . . .’ she said, and then grinned at him foolishly, her lips pulling away from her rosy gums to reveal her expensive American teeth. ‘You both know they don’t really matter. The country’s got bigger fish to fry now. Bigger ideas,’ she whispered, ‘are afoot . Aren’t they? Sometimes I don’t even know why I stay here.’ ‘What are we talking about exactly – state of the nation or the state of you?’ ‘Don’t be a wise-ass,’ she said sourly. ‘I mean all of us, not just me. There’s just no point.’ ‘You sound like you’re fifteen. You sound like my kids.’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Bad, bad girl,” said Lo comfortably. “Juvenile delickwent, but frank and fetching. That light was red. I’ve never seen such driving.” We rolled silently through a silent townlet. “Say, wouldn’t Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers?” “Good Lord, Lo, let us not talk that way.” “But we are lovers, aren’t we?” “Not that I know of. I think we are going to have some more rain. Don’t you want to tell me of those little pranks of yours in camp?” “You talk like a book, Dad.” “What have you been up to? I insist you tell me.” “Are you easily shocked?” “No. Go on.” “Let us turn into a secluded lane and I’ll tell you.” “Lo, I must seriously ask you not to play the fool. Well?” “Well—I joined in all the activities that were offered.” “Ensuite?” “Ansooit, I was taught to live happily and richly with others and to develop a wholesome personality. Be a cake, in fact.” “Yes. I saw something of the sort in the booklet.” “We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.” “Your memory is excellent, Lo, but I must trouble you to leave out the swear words. Anything else?” “The Girl Scout’s motto,” said Lo rhapsodically, “is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as—well, never mind what. My duty is—to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful. That was another police car. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word and deed.” “Now I do hope that’s all, you witty child.” “Yep. That’s all. No—wait a sec. We baked in a reflector oven. Isn’t that terrific?” “Well, that’s better.” “We washed zillions of dishes. “Zillions’ you know is school-marm’s slang for many-many-many-many. Oh yes, last but not least, as Mother says—Now let me see—what was it? I know: We made shadowgraphs. Gee, what fun.” “C’est bien tout?” “C’est. Except for one little thing, something I simply can’t tell you without blushing all over.” “Will you tell it me later?” “If we sit in the dark and you let me whisper, I will. Do you sleep in your old room or in a heap with Mother?” “Old room. Your mother may have to undergo a very serious operation, Lo.” “Stop at that candy bar, will you,” said Lo. Sitting on a high stool, a band of sunlight crossing her bare brown forearm, Lolita was served an elaborate ice-cream concoction topped with synthetic syrup. It was erected and brought her by a pimply brute of a boy in a greasy bow-tie who eyed my fragile child in her thin cotton frock with carnal deliberation. My impatience to reach Briceland and The Enchanted Hunters was becoming more than I could endure. Fortunately she dispatched the stuff with her usual alacrity.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The urge should be something more than the kind of thing that happened to me with Valeria. Carefully mark that then I was rather inept. If and when you wish to sizzle me to death, remember that only a spell of insanity could ever give me the simple energy to be a brute (all this amended, perhaps). Sometimes I attempt to kill in my dreams. But do you know what happens? For instance I hold a gun. For instance I aim at a bland, quietly interested enemy. Oh, I press the trigger all right, but one bullet after another feebly drops on the floor from the sheepish muzzle. In those dreams, my only thought is to conceal the fiasco from my foe, who is slowly growing annoyed. At dinner tonight the old cat said to me with a sidelong gleam of motherly mockery directed at Lo (I had just been describing, in a flippant vein, the delightful little toothbrush mustache I had not quite decided to grow): “Better don’t, if somebody is not to go absolutely dotty.” Instantly Lo pushed her plate of boiled fish away, all but knocking her milk over, and bounced out of the dining room. “Would it bore you very much,” quoth Haze, “to come with us tomorrow for a swim in Our Glass Lake if Lo apologizes for her manners?” Later, I heard a great banging of doors and other sounds coming from quaking caverns where the two rivals were having a ripping row. She has not apologized. The lake is out. It might have been fun. Saturday. For some days already I had been leaving the door ajar, while I wrote in my room; but only today did the trap work. With a good deal of additional fidgeting, shuffling, scraping—to disguise her embarrassment at visiting me without having been called—Lo came in and after pottering around, became interested in the nightmare curlicues I had penned on a sheet of paper. Oh no: they were not the outcome of a bellelettrist’s inspired pause between two paragraphs; they were the hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust. As she bent her brown curls over the desk at which I was sitting, Humbert the Hoarse put his arm around her in a miserable imitation of blood-relationship; and still studying, somewhat shortsightedly, the piece of paper she held, my innocent little visitor slowly sank to a half-sitting position upon my knee. Her adorable profile, parted lips, warm hair were some three inches from my bared eyetooth; and I felt the heat of her limbs through her rough tomboy clothes. All at once I knew I could kiss her throat or the wick of her mouth with perfect impunity. I knew she would let me do so, and even close her eyes as Hollywood teaches. A double vanilla with hot fudge—hardly more unusual than that.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  That young man pacing the beach—with knees that seemed too small for such strong thighs, with long, elegant feet, with a blur of light for a smile, a streak of light for hair, white pools of light for eyes, as though he were being lit suddenly from within that delicately modeled head poised on a slender neck above shoulders so broad he’d have to grow into them—that young man came toward me with a beauty so unsettling I had to call it love, as though he loved me or I him. The drooling adult delectation over particular body parts (the large penis, the hairy chest, the rounded buttocks) is unknown to children; they resolve the parts into the whole and the physical into the emotional, so that desire quickly becomes love. In the same way love becomes desire—hadn’t I desired Fred, Marilyn, my German professor? I went running through the woods. The day was misty; someone had seen a bear eating blueberries and I turned every time I heard a branch snap. A thread of smoke emerged from a dense stand of pine trees across the lake. After I passed the rotting stump and the white flowers beside it I felt as though I’d pressed through a valve into my own preserve and I slowed down to a walk. I stopped to breathe and I heard a woodpecker far away, knocking softly, professionally, auscultating a hollow limb. The trees, interpreting the wind, swayed above me. Where the path crossed the logger’s road, Ralph was sitting in a sort of natural hummock created by the exposed roots of an old elm. He had his pants down around his knees and was examining his erect penis with a disbelieving curiosity, a slightly stunned look emptying his face. He called me over and I joined him, as though to examine a curiosity of nature. He persuaded me to touch it and I did. He asked me to lick the red, sticky, unsheathed head and I hesitated. Was it dirty? I wondered. Would someone see us? Would I become ill? Would I become a queer and never, never be like other people? To overcome my scruples, Ralph hypnotized me. He didn’t have to intone the words long to send me into a deep trance. Once I was under his spell he told me I’d obey him, and I did. He also said that when I awakened I’d remember nothing, but he was wrong there. I have remembered everything.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  6 At ego curiosus alioquin, ut primum artis magicae semper optatum nomen audivi, tantum a cautela Pamphiles afui ut etiam ultro gestirem tali magis- terio me vel ampla cum mercede tradere et prorsus in ipsum barathrum saltu concito praecipitare. Fes- tinus denique et vecors animi, manu eius velut catena quadam memet expedio et, “ Salve” propere addito, ad Milonis hospitium perniciter evolo ; ac dum amenti 56 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK II long before, as if you were mine own natural child ; beware I say, beware of the evil arts and wicked allurements of that Pamphile that is the wife of Milo, whom you call your host, for she is accounted the most chief and principal magician and enchantress of every necromantic spell: who, by breathing out certain words and charms over boughs and stones and other frivolous things, can throw down all the light of the starry heavens into the deep bottom of hell, and reduce them again to the old chaos. For as soon as she espieth any comely young man, she is forthwith stricken with his love, and presently setteth her eye and whole affection on him: she soweth her seed of flattery, she invadeth his spirit, and entangleth him with continual snares of immeasurable love. And then if any accord not to her filthy desire, so that they seem loathsome in her eye, by and by in a moment she either turneth them into stones, sheep, or some other beast as herself pleaseth, and some she presently slays and murders; of whom I would you should earnestly beware. For she burneth con- tinually, and you, by reason of your tender age and comely beauty, are capable of her fire and love." Thus with great care Byrrhaena charged me, but I nevertheless, that was curious and coveted after such sorcery and witcheraft, as soon as I heard its name, little esteemed to beware of Pamphile, but willingly determined to bestow abundance of money in learning of that teacher, and even to leap of my own accord into that very pit whereof Byrrhaena had warned me, and so I waxed mad and hasty, and wresting myself out of her company, as out of links or chains, I bade her farewell, and departed with all speed towards the house of mine host Milo. Then as I hastened by the way like one bereft of wit, I reasoned thus with 57 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From On Beauty (2005)

  packed in with the rest and listened to the gossip, much of which was of Zora, and her successful address. His daughter had managed to postpone the decision on discretionary students until the next meeting, a month from now. Within the Wellington system, achieving a postponement of this kind was akin to adding a new amend-ment to the constitution. Howard was proud of her and her speechifying, but he would congratulate her later. He had to get out of this room. He left her chatting to well-wishers and launched a determined assault on the exit. In the hall, he turned left, avoided the crowd heading for the lunch room. He escaped into one of the corridors that came off the main lobby. The wall along here was lined with glass cases, each with its booty of rusty trophies and curling certificates, photos of students in outmoded sportswear. He walked to the end and leaned against the fire door. You weren’t allowed to smoke anywhere in this building. He wasn’t going to smoke; he was just going to roll one and then take it outside. Patting the pockets of his suit jacket, he found the comforting green and gold pouch in the breast. You can only buy this brand in England, and at Christmas he had stocked up, buying twenty pouches in the airport. What’s the New Year’s resolution , Kiki had asked, suicide ? ‘ There you are!’ The worm of tobacco nestling in Howard’s palm jumped on to his shoe. ‘Oops,’ said Victoria and knelt down to rescue it. She stood up again with grace, her spine seeming to uncurl notch by notch until she was straight as a post and right next to him. ‘Hello, stranger.’ She placed the tobacco back in his hand. There was a visceral shock in this closeness. He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either. He had watched old films with his daughter and taken peaceful, meditative walks with his wife; he had worked a little on his Rembrandt lectures. He had recalled, with the mawkish tenderness of the disloyal, how very lucky and blessed he was to have his family. In fact, taken as a concept, as a premise , ‘Victoria Kipps’ had done a world of good for Howard’s  On Beauty marriage and for Howard’s general mental state. The concept of Victoria Kipps had put the blessings of his own life in perspective. But Victoria Kipps was not a concept. She was real. She patted his arm. ‘Been looking for you,’ she said. ‘Vee.’ ‘What’s the occasion?’ she asked and touched the lapels of his suit. ‘Oh, ’course – faculty meeting . . . Very nice. You can’t out-dress Dad, though. It’ll only end in tears.’ ‘Vee.’ She looked at him with the same amused face he had just seen on her father. ‘ Yes . What?’

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  musing with myself, and my courage came then upon me which before was scant. And I spoke unto Fotis at last, and said : “O Fotis, how trimly, how merrily, with shaking your hips you can stir the pot, and how sweet do you make the pottage. O happy and thrice happy is he to whom you give leave and license to dip his finger therein.” Then she, being likewise witty and merrily disposed, gave answer: “ Depart, I say, wretch, from me; depart from my fire, for if the flame thereof do never so little blaze forth it will burn thee inwardly, and none can extinguish the heat thereof but I alone, who know well how with daintiest seasoning to stir both board and bed.” When she had said these words she cast her eyes upon me and laughed, but I did not depart from thence until such time as I had viewed her in every point: but why should I speak of other things? When as it hath always been my chief care both abroad to mark and view the head and hair of every dame and afterwards delight myself therewith privately at home, and this is my firm and fixed judgement, for that is the principal part of all the body, and is first open to our eyes; and whatsoever flourishing and gorgeous apparel doth for the other parts of the body, this doth the natural and comely beauty set forth on the head. Moreover there be divers, that (to the intent to shew their grace and loveliness) will cast off their partlets and habiliments, and do more delight to shew the fairness and ruddiness of their skin in beauty unadorned than to deck themselves up in raiment of gold. But, though it be a crime unto me to say it, and I pray there may be no example of so foul a thing, know ye that if you spoil and cut off the hair of any woman and deprive her of this natural adornment of her face, though she were never 61 LUCIUS APULEIUS mari edita, fluctibus educata—licet, inquam, Venus ipsa fuerit, licet omni Gratiarum choro stipata et toto Cupidinum populo comitata et balteo suo cincta, cinnama fragrans et balsama rorans, calva processerit, placere non poterit nec Vulcano suo. 9 Quid cum capillis color gratus et nitor splendidus illucet et contra solis aciem vegetus fulgurat vel placidus renitet, aut in contrariam gratiam variat aspectum, et nunc aurum coruscans in lenem mellis deprimitur umbram, nunc corvina nigredine caeruleos columbarum collis flosculos aemulatur, vel cum guttis Arabicis obunctus et pectinis arguti dente tenui dis- criminatus et pone versum coactus amatoris oculis oc- currens ad instar speculi reddit imaginem gratiorem ? Quid cum frequenti subole spissus cumulat verticem vel prolixa serie porrectus dorsa permanat? Tanta denique est capillamenti dignitas, ut quamvis auro, veste, gemmis, omnique cetero mundo exornata mulier incedat, tamen, nisi capillum distinxerit, ornata non possit audire.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  7I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals. If her share in the ardors she kindled had never amounted to much, neither had pure lucre ever come to the fore. But I was weak, I was not wise, my schoolgirl nymphet had me in thrall. With the human element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture only increased; and of this she took advantage. Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start of the Beardsley era—and went up to one dollar five before its end. This was a more than generous arrangement seeing she constantly received from me all kinds of small presents and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under the moon—although, of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or even a whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted very badly some item of juvenile amusement. She was, however, not easy to deal with. Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies—or three nickels—per day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force. Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed—during one schoolyear!—to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks. O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches; and in the margin of that leaping epilepsy she would firmly clutch a handful of coins in her little fist, which, anyway, I used to pry open afterwards unless she gave me the slip, scrambling away to hide her loot. And just as every other day I would cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visit drugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughter in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves, so every now and then I would burgle her room and scrutinize torn papers in the wastebasket with the painted roses, and look under the pillow of the virginal bed I had just made myself. Once I found eight one-dollar notes in one of her books (fittingly—Treasure Island), and once a hole in the wall behind Whistler’s Mother yielded as much as twenty-four dollars and some change—say twenty-four sixty—which I quietly removed, upon which, next day, she accused, to my face, honest Mrs. Holigan of being a filthy thief. Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hoarding place which I never discovered; but by that time I had brought prices down drastically by having her earn the hard and nauseous way permission to participate in the school’s theatrical program; because what I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood—or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But I was having those thoughts myself and if Bennett knew, he didn’t let on. Something seemed very wrong in our marriage. Our lives ran parallel like railroad tracks. Bennett spent the day at his office, his hospital, his analyst, and then evenings at his office again, usually until nine or ten. I taught a couple of days a week and wrote the rest of the time. My teaching schedule was light, the writing was exhausting, and by the time Bennett came home, I was ready to go out and break loose. I had had plenty of solitude, plenty of long hours alone with my typewriter and my fantasies. And I seemed to meet men everywhere. The world seemed crammed with available, interesting men in a way it never had been before I was married. What was it about marriage anyway? Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger. And you longed for an overripe Camembert, a rare goat cheese: luscious, creamy, cloven-hoofed. I was not against marriage. I believed in it in fact. It was necessary to have one best friend in a hostile world, one person you’d be loyal to no matter what, one person who’d always be loyal to you. But what about all those other longings which after a while marriage did nothing much to appease? The restlessness, the hunger, the thump in the gut, the thump in the cunt, the longing to be filled up, to be fucked through every hole, the yearning for dry champagne and wet kisses, for the smell of peonies in a penthouse on a June night, for the light at the end of the pier in Gatsby…. Not those things really—because you knew that the very rich were duller than you and me—but what those things evoked. The sardonic, bittersweet vocabulary of Cole Porter love songs, the sad sentimental Rodgers and Hart lyrics, all the romantic nonsense you yearned for with half your heart and mocked bitterly with the other half. Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  * Erat in proxuma civitate iuvenis natalibus praeno- bilis, quo clarus eo pecuniae fuit satis locuples sed luxuriae popinalis, scortisque et diurnis potationibus exercitatus, atque ob id factionibus latronum male sociatus, necnon etiam manus infectus humano cruore, Thrasyllus nomine: idque sic erat et fama dicebat. 2 Hic cum primum Charite nubendo maturuisset, inter praecipuos procos summo studio petitionis eius munus 344 BOOK VIII ABovuT the cockcrow of night came a young man from the next city, which seemed to be one of the family of the good woman Charite which sometime endured so much misery and calamity with me amongst the thieves; who, after that he had taken a stool and sat down by the fireside in the company of the servants, began to declare many terrible things that had happened unto Charite and unto her house, saying : * O ye horsekeepers, shepherds, and cow- herds, you shall understand that we have lost our good mistress Charite miserably and by evil adven- ture, but not alone did she go down to the ghosts. But to the end you may learn and know the whole matter, I purpose to tell you the circumstance of every point, whereby such as are more learned than I, to whom fortune has ministered. more copious style, may paint it out in paper in form of an history. « There was a young gentleman dwelling in the next city, born of good parentage, valiant in prowess, and rich in substance, but very much given and addict to whore-hunting and continual revelling by broad day: whereby "he fell in company with thieves, and had his hand ready to the effusion of human blood; and his name was Thrasyllus. The matter was this accordiny to the report of every man: when Charite had come to an age ripe for marriage, he was among the chiefest of her suitors $45 LUCIUS APULEIUS obierat, et quanquam ceteris omnibus id genus viris antistaret eximiisque muneribus parentum invitaret iudicium, morum tamen improbatus repulsae contu- melia fuerat aspersus, Àc dum herilis puella in boni Tlepolemi manum venerat, firmiter deorsus delapsum nutriens amorem et denegati thalami permiscens in- dignationem, cruento facinori quaerebat accessum. Nanctus denique praesentiae suae tempestillam occa- sionem, sceleri quod diu cogitarat accingitur, ac die, quo praedonum infestis mucronibus puella fuerat astu virtutibusque sponsi sui liberata, turbae gratulantium exultans insigniter permiscuit sese salutique praesenti ae futurae suboli novorum maritorum gaudibundus, ad honorem splendidae prosapiae inter praecipuos hospites domum nostram receptus, occultato consilio sceleris, amici fidelissimi personam mentiebatur. lamque sermonibus assiduis et conversatione fre- quenti, nonnunquam etiam cena poculoque communi carior cariorque factus, in profundam ruinam cupidinis sese paulatim nescius praecipitaverat. Quidni, cum flamma saevi amoris parva quidem primo vapore de- lectet, sed fomentis consuetudinis exaestuans immo- dieis ardoribus totos amburat homines ? 346 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VIII

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Was I doomed to be hungry for life? At the end of the paper about artists, we all applauded from our rickety gold-backed chairs and politely stood and yawned. “I must have a copy of that paper,” I said to Bennett. “You don’t need it,” he said. “It’s the story of your life.” I may have neglected to report another aspect of the paper on artists (whose author, as I recall, was a certain Dr. Koenigsberger). This concerned the love life of the artist, particularly the tendency of artists to latch on (with considerable ferocity) to quite unsuitable “love objects” and idealize them wildly like the idealized parents they thought they never had. This unsuitable “love object” was mostly a projection on the part of the artist-lover. In fact, the object of passion was often quite ordinary in the eyes of others. But to the artist-lover, the beloved became mother, father, muse, the epitome of perfection. Sometimes the epitome of bitchy perfection or evil perfection, but always a deity of sorts, always omnipotent. What was the creative purpose of these infatuations, Dr. Koenigsberger wanted to know. We bent our heads forward in eager anticipation. By recreating the quality of the Oedipal infatuation, the artist could recreate his “family romance” and thus recreate his idealized childhood world. The numerous and often rapidly changing infatuations of artists were designed to keep the illusion alive. A new, strong sexual infatuation was the closest approximation one had in adult life to the passion of the small child for the parent of the opposite sex. Bennett grinned throughout this part of the paper. I sulked. Dante and Beatrice. Scott and Zelda. Humbert and Lolita. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. King Kong and Faye Wray. Yeats and Maud Gonne. Shakespeare and the Dark Lady. Shakespeare and Mr. W.H. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Sylvia Plath and the Grim Reaper. Keats and Fanny Brawne. Byron and Augusta. Dodgson and Alice. D. H. Lawrence and Frieda. Aschenbach and Tadzio. Robert Graves and the White Goddess. Schumann and Clara. Chopin and George Sand. Auden and Kallmann. Hopkins and the Holy Ghost. Borges and his mother. Me and Adrian? At four o’clock that afternoon, my idealized object reappeared to chair a meeting in another one of the baroque meeting rooms. This was to be the final event before the end. The next morning Anna Freud and her Band of Renown would have another go at the lecture podium to sum it all up for the press, the participants, the weak, the halt, and the blind. Then the Congress would be over and we’d leave. But who would leave with whom? Bennett with me? Adrian with me? Or all three together? Rub-a-dub-dub—Three analysands in a tub? Adrian’s meeting concerned proposals for the next Congress and it was mainly a bore.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  After Munich and its environs, we drove north as far as Heidelberg (stopping, looping and zigzagging along the way), took the Autobahn to Basle (Swiss chocolate, Schwitzer-deutsch and a dour sandstone cathedral overlooking the Rhine), then on to Strasbourg (home of stuffed goose livers and great beer), a wild zigzagging tour of back roads leading more or less toward Paris, then down through the South of France, into Italy (via the Riviera), south as far as Florence, then north again to Verona and Venice, across the Alps, through the Ticino and into Austria again, then north up through Germany once more, then into France, and finally to Paris, for the last time, where the truth (or one of them) was revealed to me but did not (not yet) make me free. Incredible as this inefficient itinerary may sound, it is still more incredible when you realize that the whole thing took only two and a half weeks. We saw almost nothing. We were driving most of the time and talking. And fucking. Adrian was impotent when I wanted him in private, but he became voraciously virile in the most public places: in beach cabanas, in parking lots, in airports, in ruins, monasteries and churches. Unless he could break at least two taboos with one act, he wasn’t interested at all. What really would have turned him on would have been the opportunity to bugger his mother in church. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, et cetera. — We talked. We talked. We talked. Psychoanalysis on wheels. Remembrance of things past. We made lists to pass the time: my former boyfriends, his former girlfriends, the various kinds of fucks (group-fucks, love-fucks, guilt-fucks, etc.), the various places where we had fucked (in the bathroom of a 707, in the deserted Jewish chapel of the old Queen Elizabeth, in a ruined abbey in Yorkshire, in rowboats, in graveyards)…. I must admit that I made some of these up, but the main thing was entertainment, not literal truth. Surely you don’t suppose that I’m telling the literal truth here either? Adrian, like every other shrink I’ve ever known or fucked, wanted to find patterns in my past. Repetitive, self-destructive patterns preferably—but any sort of pattern would do. And, of course, I tried to oblige. It wasn’t hard either. Where men are concerned I have always lacked a simple quality known as caution, or perhaps you might call it common sense. I meet a guy any other self-respecting women would automatically run miles from, and I manage to find something endearing about all his questionable characteristics, something rivetingly attractive about his manias. Adrian loved to hear this. Of course he excluded himself from the company of the other neurotics I had known. It never occurred to him that he was part of any pattern.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I nearly convinced myself all over again. That’s one of my biggest problems. When I start out to convince other people, I don’t always convince them but I invariably convince myself. I’m a complete bust as a con woman. “You really have an American accent,” he said, smiling his just-got-laid smile. “I haven’t got an accent—you have—” “Ac-sent,” he said mocking me. “Fuck you.” “That’s not at all a bad idea.” “What did you say your name was?” (Which, as you may recall, is the climactic line from Strindberg’s Miss Julie.) “Adrian Goodlove,” he said. And with that he turned suddenly and upset his beer all over me. “Terribly sorry,” he kept saying, wiping at the table with his dirty handkerchief, his hand, and eventually his Indian shirt—which he took off, rolled up and gave me to wipe my dress with. Such chivalry! But I was just sitting there looking at the curly blond hair on his chest and feeling the beer trickle between my legs. “I really don’t mind at all,” I said. It wasn’t true that I didn’t mind. I loved it. Goodlove, Goodall, Goodbar, Goodbody, Goodchild, Goodeve, Goodfellow, Goodford, Goodfleisch, Goodfriend, Goodgame, Goodhart, Goodhue, Gooding, Goodlet, Goodson, Goodridge, Goodspeed, Goodtree, Goodwine. You can’t be named Isadora White Wing (née Weiss—my father had bleached it to “White” shortly after my birth) without spending a rather large portion of your life thinking about names. Adrian Goodlove. His mother had named him Hadrian and then his father had forced her to change it to Adrian because that sounded “more English.” His father was big on sounding English. “Typical tight-ass English middle class,” Adrian said of his Mum and Dad. “You’d hate them. They spend their whole lives trying to keep their bowels open in the name of the Queen. A losing battle too. Their assholes are permanently plugged.” And he farted loudly to punctuate. He grinned. I looked at him in utter amazement. “You’re a real primitive,” I sneered, “a natural man.” But Adrian kept on grinning. Both of us knew I had finally met the real zipless fuck. — OK. So I admit my taste in men is questionable. Plenty more evidence of that will follow. But who can debate taste anyway? And who can convey an infatuation? It’s like trying to describe the taste of chocolate mousse, or the look of a sunset, or why you can sit for hours and make faces at your own baby.... Who is there who adds up to all that much on paper? We take Romeo on faith, and Julian Sorel and Count Vronsky, and even Mellors the gamekeeper. The smile, the shaggy hair, the smell of pipe tobacco and sweat, the cynical tongue, the beer spilling, the exuberant public farting.... My husband has a beautiful head of black hair and long thin fingers.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (At the time, Pia herself was overweight but flat-chested.) “I see the whole thing as taking place in the Cloisters,” she went on. “I’m sure you could rent the Cloisters if you knew the right people.” “Where would you live?” “Well, I see this really weird old house in Vermont—an abandoned monastery or abbey or something....” (Neither of us questioned the fact that there were abandoned monasteries and abbeys in Vermont.) “...With these extremely rustic floorboards and a skylight built into the roof. It would be sort of one big room which would be a studio and a bedroom with a big round bed under the skylight—and black satin sheets. And we’d have lots of Siamese cats— named things like John Donne and Maud Gonne and Dylan—you know.” I did, or at least I thought I did. “Anyway...” she continued, “...I see myself sort of as a cross between Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren....” (Pia had dark hair.) “...What do you think?” She swept her greasy brown hair up on her head and held it there as she sucked in her cheeks and widened her large blue eyes at me. “I sort of think you’re more the Anna Magnani type,” I said, “earthy and basic, but terribly sensual.” “Maybe...” she said thoughtfully. She was posing in front of the mirror. “Oh, it’s disgusting,” she said after a while. “We never meet anyone the least bit worthy of us.” And she made a hideous face. — During our senior year at Music and Art, Pia and I opened our hostile minority of two to include a few other selected misfits. That was the closest we ever came to having a crowd. The group included a bosomy girl named Nina Nonoff whose claims to distinction were her necrophiliac passion for the ghost of Dylan Thomas, her supposed knowledge of Chinese and Japanese profanities, and her “contact” with a real Yalie (visions of football weekends for us all—but unfortunately the “contact” turned out to be a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of her brother’s). Nina’s mother also had a huge collection of “sex books” among which we included Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament; any book with the word puberty in it was OK. And finally there was the sheer class of Nina’s father having created the Blue Wasp Series for radio in the 1940s. Jill Siegel, on the other hand, was a member of the group not so much for class as out of charity. She had little to contribute in the way of sophistication, but made up for this by means of her blind loyalty to us and the flattering way in which she aped our most florid affectations. An on-and-off member was Grace Baratto—a music major whose intellect we did not respect but who told fantastic stories about her sexual exploits.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But what did all this have to do with me—who went to school and got better marks than the boys and painted and wrote and spent Saturdays doing still lifes at the Art Students League and my weekday afternoons editing the high-school paper (Features Editor; the Editor-in-Chief had never been a girl— though it also never occurred to us then to question it)? What did the moon and tides and earth-mothering and the worship of the Lawrentian “phallos” have to do with me or with my life? I met my first “phallos” at thirteen years and ten months on my parents’ avocado-green silk living-room couch, in the shade of an avocado-green avocado tree, grown by my avocado green-thumbed mother from an avocado pit. The “phallos” belonged to Steve Applebaum, a junior and art major when I was a freshman and art major, and it had a most memorable abstract design of blue veins on its Kandinsky-purple underside. In retrospect, it was a remarkable specimen: circumcised, of course, and huge (what is huge when you have no frame of reference?), and with an impressive life of its own. As soon as it began to make its drumlinlike presence known under the tight zipper of Steve’s chinos (we were necking and “petting-below-the-waist” as one said then), he would slowly unzip (so as not to snag it?) and with one hand (the other was under my skirt and up my cunt) extract the huge purple thing from between the layers of his shorts, his blue Brooks-Brothers shirttails, and his cold, glittering, metal-zippered fly. Then I would dip one hand into the vase of roses my flower-loving mother always kept on the coffee table, and with a right hand moistened with water and the slime from their stems, I would proceed with my rhythmic jerking off of Steve. How exactly did I do it? Three fingers? Or the whole palm? I suppose I must have been rough at first (though later I became an expert). He would throw his head back in ecstasy (but controlled ecstasy: my father was watching TV in the dining room) and would come into his Brooks-Brothers shirttails or into a handkerchief quickly produced for this purpose. The technique I have forgotten, but the feeling remains. Partly, it was reciprocity (tit for tat, or clit for tat), but it was also power. I knew that what I was doing gave me a special kind of power over him —one that painting or writing couldn’t approach. And then I was coming too—maybe not like Lady Chatterley, but it was something. Toward the end of our idyll, Steve (who was then seventeen and I fourteen) wanted me to take “it” in my mouth. “Do people really do that?” “Sure,” he said with as much nonchalance as he could muster. He went to my parents’ bookshelf in search of Van de Velde (carefully hidden behind Art Treasures of the Renaissance). But it was too much for me. I couldn’t even pronounce it.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Somebody else had. I turned around and saw this blond, shaggy-haired Englishman with a pipe hanging out of his face. “If you’d stop being paranoid for a minute and use charm instead of main force, I’m sure nobody could resist you,” he said. He was smiling at me the way a man smiles when he’s lying on top of you after a particularly good lay. “You’ve got to be an analyst,” I said, “nobody else would throw the word paranoid around so freely.” He grinned. He was wearing a very thin white cotton Indian kurtah and I could see his reddish-blond chest hair curling underneath it. “Cheeky cunt,” he said. Then he grabbed a fistful of my ass and gave it a long playful squeeze. “You’ve a lovely ass,” he said. “Come, I’ll see to it that you get into the conference.” Of course he turned out to have no authority whatsoever in the matter, but I didn’t know that till later. He was bustling around so officiously that you’d have thought he was the head of the whole Congress. He was chairman of one of the preconferences—but he had absolutely nothing to say about Press. Who cared about Press, anyway? All I wanted was for him to press my ass again. I would have followed him anywhere. Dachau, Auschwitz, anywhere. I looked across the registration desk and saw Bennett talking seriously with another analyst from New York. The Englishman had made his way into the crowd and was grilling the registration girl in my behalf. Then he walked back to me. “Look—she says you have to wait and talk to Rodney Lehmann. He’s a friend of mine from London and he ought to be here any minute so why don’t we walk across to the café, have a beer, and look for him?” “Let me just tell my husband,” I said. It was going to become something of a refrain in the next few days. He seemed glad to hear that I had a husband. At least he didn’t seem sorry. I asked Bennett if he’d come across the street to the café and meet us (hoping, of course, that he wouldn’t come too soon) and he waved me off. He was busy talking about countertransference. I followed the smoke from the Englishman’s pipe down the steps and across the street. He puffed along like a train, the pipe seeming to propel him. I was happy to be his caboose. We set ourselves up in the café, with a quarter liter of white wine for me and a beer for him. He was wearing Indian sandals and dirty toenails. He didn’t look like a shrink at all. “Where are you from?” “New York.” “I mean your ancestors.” “Why do you want to know?” “Why are you dodging my question?” “I don’t have to answer your question.” “I know.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Candy cracked her knuckles. ‘Bailey really doesn’t give a fuck.’ ‘That’s why I’m not gonna complain to Bailey, I’m gonna do something, man – I’m gonna take some . . . like some direct action .’ Candy blinked slowly at him. ‘Oh, right. Good luck with that.’  the anatomy lesson ‘Look: just meet me out back in two minutes, a’ight? Get the others – Tom and Gina and Gloria – everybody on our floor. I’ll find LaShonda – she’s on the counter.’ ‘O kay ,’ said Candy, managing to make this sound like an overused quotation. ‘ God . . . calm down with the Stalinism.’ ‘Two minutes.’ ‘ Okay .’ At the counter Levi found LaShonda at the far end of the long bank of cash registers, much taller and wider than the six male clerks working beside her. An amazon of retail. ‘LaShonda, hey, girl.’ LaShonda waved her talons in a swift, economical move, like the spreading of a fan, each nail clicking off the next. She grinned at him. ‘Hey, Levi, baby. How you doing?’ ‘Oh, I’m cool . . . you know, hustling, doing my thang.’ ‘You do it well, baby, you do it well .’ Levi tried hard to hold the gaze of this incredible woman but failed, as ever. LaShonda hadn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that Levi was still only sixteen, living with his parents in the middle-class suburb of Wellington, and therefore not really a viable stand-in father for her three small children. ‘Hey, LaShonda, can I speak to you for a minute?’ ‘Sure, baby – I always got time for you, you know that.’ LaShonda came out from behind the counter, and Levi followed her as she made her way to a quiet corner near the Classical Music chart. For a three-time mom, her body was miraculous. The black long-sleeved shirt clung to the muscles in her stocky forearms; the front buttons strained to contain her bust. LaShonda’s big old butt, as it stretched and fought against the nylon of the regulation pants, was, as far as Levi was concerned, the great unspoken perk of this job. ‘LaShonda, can you meet us all out back in five minutes? We having a meeting,’ said Levi, allowing his accent to slip a few rungs down into closer relation with LaShonda’s own. ‘Get Tom and anyone else who can get away for a minute. It’s about this Christmas Day thing.’  On Beauty ‘What’s that, baby? What Christmas Day thing?’ ‘You didn’t hear? They making us work Christmas Day.’ ‘For real? Time and a half ?’ ‘Well . . . I don’t know . . .’ ‘Man, I could do with the extra dollars, I know you know what I’m saying.’ Levi nodded. This was the other thing.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  We are not rich, and while we travel, we shall be obliged—we shall be thrown a good deal together. Two people sharing one room, inevitably enter into a kind—how shall I say—a kind—” “The word is incest,” said Lo—and walked into the closet, walked out again with a young golden giggle, opened the adjoining door, and after carefully peering inside with her strange smoky eyes lest she make another mistake, retired to the bathroom. I opened the window, tore off my sweat-drenched shirt, changed, checked the pill vial in my coat pocket, unlocked the— She drifted out. I tried to embrace her: casually, a bit of controlled tenderness before dinner. She said: “Look, let’s cut out the kissing game and get something to eat.” It was then that I sprang my surprise. Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was there something wrong, I wondered, with those great gray eyes of hers, or were we both plunged in the same enchanted mist?) She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy- knees while she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a copper-colored, charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands as if she were a bemused bird-hunter holding his breath over the incredible bird he spreads out by the tips of its flaming wings. Then (while I stood waiting for her) she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on. Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes—for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate—while we moan and die. “What’s the katter with misses?” I muttered (word-control gone) into her hair. “If you must know,” she said, “you do it the wrong way.” “Show, wight ray.” “All in good time,” responded the spoonerette. Seva ascendes, pulsata, brulans, kitzelans, dementissima. Elevator clatterans, pausa, clatterans, populus in corridoro. Hancnisi mors mihi adimet nemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondis-sime, nobserva nihil quidquam; but, of course, in another moment I might have committed some dreadful blunder; fortunately, she returned to the treasure box. From the bathroom, where it took me quite a time to shift back into normal gear for a humdrum purpose, I heard, standing, drumming, retaining my breath, my Lolita’s “oo’s” and “gee’s” of girlish delight. She had used the soap only because it was sample soap. “Well, come on, my dear, if you are as hungry as I am.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We could be like Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre: together yet apart. We’d learn to do away with silly things like jealousy. We’d fuck each other and all our friends. We’d live without worrying about possessions or possessiveness. Eventually someday, we’d establish a commune for schizophrenics, poets, and radical shrinks. We’d live like real existentialists instead of just talking about it. We’d all live together in a geodesic dome. “Sort of like a Yellow Submarine,” I said. “Well, why not?” “You’re an incurable romantic, Adrian.... Walden Pond and all that.” “Look—I don’t see what’s so super about the sort of hypocrisy you live with. Pretending to all that crap about fidelity and monogamy, living in a million contradictions, being kept by your husband as a sort of spoilt talented baby and never standing on your own two feet. At least we’d be honest. We’d live together and fuck everyone openly. Nobody would exploit anyone and nobody would have to feel guilty for being dependent....” “Poets and schizophrenics and shrinks?” “Well there’s not much difference is there?” “None whatsoever.” Adrian had been taught existentialism in the course of one week in Paris by Martine, the French actress who’d been in a bin. “That’s fast,” I said. “Existentialism made simple. Sort of like the souped-up Berlitz course. How’d she manage it?” He described how he’d gone to Paris to see her and Martine had surprised him by meeting him at Orly with two friends: Louise and Pierre. They were to spend the whole week together, never be apart, tell each other everything, fuck each other in all possible combinations, and never make any “silly moral excuses.” “Whenever I spoke of my patients or my children or my girlfriend at home, she said: ‘of no interest.’ “Whenever I protested about needing to work, needing to earn a living, needing to sleep, needing to escape from the intensity of the experience, she said: ‘of no interest.’ None of the usual excuses held. Actually, it was terrifying at first.” “Sounds fascistic. And all in the name of freedom.” “Well, I see your point, but it wasn’t fascistic because actually her idea was that you had to stretch the boundaries of what you could endure. You had to go to the bottom of your experience even if the bottom turned out to be terror. Martine had been mad. She had been hospitalized and she came through it herself with all sorts of new illuminations. She put herself back together again and was much stronger than before. And that’s what that week did for me. I had to cope with the terrifying feeling of having no plans, not knowing where we were going next, having no privacy at all, being dependent on three other people for everything all the time. It revived all sorts of childhood problems for me. And the sex—the sex was terrifying at first.