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.

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• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  My enamoured mind, which held amorous converse ever with my Lady, burned more than ever to bring back my eyes to her; and whatsoever food nature or art e’er made, to catch the eyes and so possess the mind, be it in human flesh, be it in pictures, if all united, would seem nought towards the divine delight which glowed upon me when that I turned me to her smiling face. And the power of which that look made largess to me, from the fair nest of Leda12 plucked me forth, and into the swiftest heaven thrust me. Its parts most living and exalted are so uniform that I know not to tell which Beatrice chose for my position. But she, who saw my longing, smiling began—so glad that God seemed joying in her counterance— “The nature of the universe which stilleth the centre and moveth all the rest around, hence doth begin as from its starting point.13 And this heaven hath no other where than the divine mind wherein is kindled the love which rolleth it and the power which it sheddeth. Light and love grasp it in one circle, as doth it the others, and this engirdment he only who doth gird it understandeth. Its movement by no other is marked out; but by it all the rest are measured, as ten by half and fifth. And how Time in this same vessel hath its roots, and in the rest its leaves, may now be manifest to thee. O greed, who so dost abase mortals below thee, that not one hath power to draw his eyes forth from thy waves! ’Tis true the will in men hath vigour yet; but the continuous drench turneth true plum fruits into cankered tubers. Faith and innocence are found only in little children; then each of them fleeth away before the cheeks are covered. Many a still lisping child observeth fast, who after, when his tongue is free, devoureth every food in every month; and many a lisping child loveth and hearkeneth to his mother, who after, when his speech is full, longeth to see her buried. So blackeneth at the first aspect the white skin of his fair daughter who bringeth morn and leaveth evening.14 And thou, lest thou make marvel at it, reflect that there is none to govern upon earth, wherefore the human household so strayeth from the path. But, ere that January be all unwintered by that hundredth part neglected upon earth,15 so shall these upper circles roar that the fated season so long awaited shall turn round the poops where are the prows, so that the fleet shall have straight course; and true fruit shall follow on the flower.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  But the sun and water rippled and distorted its outline, and, before Zora could figure it out, he was right beside her, his arm resting on the dividing rope, gulping for air. ‘Umm, excuse me?’ ‘Huh?’ ‘I said excuse me – I think you’ll find those are my goggles.’ ‘I can’t hear you, man – hold up a minute.’  On Beauty He heaved himself up out of the water and rested his elbows on the side. This brought his groin to meet Zora at eye level. For a full ten seconds, as if there were no material there at all, she was presented with the broad line of it running along his thigh to the left, making three-dimensional waves of his bumble-bee stripes. Beneath this arresting sight, his balls pulled at the fabric of his shorts, low and heavy and not quite lifted out of the warm water. His tattoo was of the sun – the sun with a face. She felt she had seen it before. Its rays were thick and fanned out like the mane of a lion. The boy took out two earplugs, removed the goggles, left them on the side and returned to Zora’s bobbing height. ‘Got plugs in, man – couldn’t hear a thing.’ ‘I said I think you’ve got my goggles. I put them down for like a second and they went – maybe you picked them up by mistake . . . my goggles?’ The boy was frowning at her. He shook the water from his face. ‘I know you?’ ‘What? No – look, can I see those goggles please?’ The boy, still frowning, threw his long arm up and over the side and came back with the goggles. ‘OK, so those are mine. The red strap is mine – the other one broke and I put that red one on myself, so – ’ The boy grinned. ‘Well . . . If they yours, I guess you better take ’em.’ He held out his long palm towards her – coloured a rich brown like Kiki’s, with all the lines drawn in a still darker shade. The goggles hung from his index finger. Zora moved to snatch them but instead nudged them from his finger. She thrust her hands into the water; they twirled on down to the bottom, the red band spiralling, inanimate, yet dancing. Zora took a shallow asthmatic breath and tried to dive. Halfway down the buoyancy of her own flesh reeled her back up, ass first. ‘You want me to – ?’ offered the boy and didn’t wait for the answer. He curved in on himself and shot down with barely a splash. He resurfaced a moment later with the goggles hanging from his wrist. He dropped them into her hands, another fumbling  the anatomy lesson move, for it took all the energy Zora had to tread water while simultaneously opening her palms to receive them.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  After Louise had gone, I inspected the icebox, and finding it much too puritanic, walked to town and bought the richest foods available. I also bought some good liquor and two or three kinds of vitamins. I was pretty sure that with the aid of these stimulants and my natural resources, I would avert any embarrassment that my indifference might incur when called upon to display a strong and impatient flame. Again and again resourceful Humbert evoked Charlotte as seen in the raree-show of a manly imagination. She was well groomed and shapely, this I could say for her, and she was my Lolita’s big sister—this notion, perhaps, I could keep up if only I did not visualize too realistically her heavy hips, round knees, ripe bust, the coarse pink skin of her neck (“coarse” by comparison with silk and honey) and all the rest of that sorry and dull thing: a handsome woman. The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog—I loathe dogs—had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras! There are some eructations that sound like cheers—at least, mine did. An old fence at the back of the garden separated us from the neighbor’s garbage receptacles and lilacs; but there was nothing between the front end of our lawn (where it sloped along one side of the house) and the street. Therefore I was able to watch (with the smirk of one about to perform a good action) for the return of Charlotte: that tooth should be extracted at once. As I lurched and lunged with the hand mower, bits of grass optically twittering in the low sun, I kept an eye on that section of suburban street. It curved in from under an archway of huge shade trees, then sped towards us down, down, quite sharply, past old Miss Opposite’s ivied brick house and high-sloping lawn (much trimmer than ours) and disappeared behind our own front porch which I could not see from where I happily belched and labored. The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple. Two little girls, Marion and Mabel, whose comings and goings I had mechanically followed of late (but who could replace my Lolita?) went toward the avenue (from which our Lawn Street cascaded), one pushing a bicycle, the other feeding from a paper bag, both talking at the top of their sunny voices.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  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.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The conversation went on in that absurd literary-chauvinist vein. We were discussing surrealism and its relation to South American politics—which I know nothing whatever about. But I know about surrealism. Surrealism, you might say, is my life. Adrian tapped me on the shoulder just as I was spouting something about Borges and his Labyrinths. Talk about the minotaur. He was right there behind me—all horns. My heart catapulted up into my nose. Did I want to dance? Of course I wanted to dance and that wasn’t all. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon,” he said. “Where were you?” “With my husband.” “He looks a bit wet, doesn’t he? What have you been making him miserable with?” “You, I guess.” “Better watch that,” he said. “Don’t let jealousy rear its ugly head.” “It already has.” We talked as if we were already lovers, and, in a sense, we were. If intent is all, we were as doomed as Paolo and Francesca. But we had no place to go, no way to sneak out of there and away from the people who were watching us, so we danced. “I can’t dance very well,” he said. And it was true, he couldn’t. But he made up for it by smiling like Pan. He shuffled his little cloven hooves. I was laughing a bit too hysterically. “Dancing is like fucking,” I said, “it doesn’t matter how you look—just concentrate on how you feel.” Wasn’t I the brazen one? What was this woman- of-the-world act anyway? I was half-crazed with fear. I closed my eyes and gyrated inside the music. I bumped and ground and undulated. Somewhere back in the ancient days of the Twist, it had suddenly occurred to me that nobody knew how to do these dances—so why feel self-conscious? In social dancing, as in social life, chutzpah is all. From then on I became a “good dancer,” or at least I enjoyed it. It was like fucking—all rhythm and sweat. Adrian and I danced the next five or six sets—until we were exhausted, soaked, and ready to go home together. Then I danced with one of the Austrian candidates for the sake of appearances—which were getting harder and harder to keep up. And then I danced with Bennett who is a marvelous dancer. I was enjoying the fact that Adrian was watching me dance with my husband. Bennett danced so much better than Adrian anyway, and he had just the kind of grace that Adrian lacked. Adrian sort of bumped along like a horse and buggy. Bennett was all sleek and smooth: a Jaguar XKE. And he was so damned nice. Ever since Adrian had appeared on the scene, Bennett had become so gallant and solicitous. He was wooing me all over again. It made things so much harder. If only he would be a bastard! If only he would be like those husbands in novels—nasty, tyrannical, deserving of cuckoldry.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we nympholepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just nice, or “cute,” or even “sweet” and “attractive,” ordinary, plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at the ugly dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed into stunning stars of the screen). A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power. Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s spell.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  This fivesome bounces along for a while, the widow and the fat woman keeping silent, the mother and grandmother talking to the child and each other about the food. And then the train screeches to a halt in a town called (perhaps) CORLEONE. A tall languid-looking soldier, unshaven, but with a beautiful mop of hair, a cleft chin, and somewhat devilish, lazy eyes, enters the compartment, looks insolently around, sees the empty half-seat between the fat woman and the widow, and, with many flirtatious apologies, sits down. He is sweaty and disheveled but basically a gorgeous hunk of flesh, only slightly rancid from the heat. The train screeches out of the station. Then we become aware only of the bouncing of the train and the rhythmic way the soldier’s thighs are rubbing against the thighs of the widow. Of course, he is also rubbing against the haunches of the fat lady—and she is trying to move away from him—which is quite unnecessary because he is unaware of her haunches. He is watching the large gold cross between the widow’s breasts swing back and forth in her deep cleavage. Bump. Pause. Bump. It hits one moist breast and then the other. It seems to hesitate in between as if paralyzed between two repelling magnets. The pit and the pendulum. He is hypnotized. She stares out the window, looking at each olive tree as if she had never seen olive trees before. He rises awkwardly, half-bows to the ladies, and struggles to open the window. When he sits down again his arm accidentally grazes the widow’s belly. She appears not to notice. He rests his left hand on the seat between his thigh and hers and begins to wind rubber fingers around and under the soft flesh of her thigh. She continues staring at each olive tree as if she were God and had just made them and were wondering what to call them. Meanwhile the enormously fat lady is packing away her pulp romance in an iridescent green plastic string bag fall of smelly cheeses and blackening bananas. And the grandmother is rolling ends of salami in greasy newspaper. The mother is putting on the little girl’s sweater and wiping her face with a handkerchief, lovingly moistened with maternal spittle. The train screeches to a stop in a town called (perhaps) PRIZZI, and the fat lady, the mother, the grandmother, and the little girl leave the compartment. Then the train begins to move again. The gold cross begins to bump, pause, bump between the widow’s moist breasts, the fingers begin to curl under the widow’s thighs, the widow continues to stare at the olive trees. Then the fingers are sliding between her thighs and they are parting her thighs, and they are moving upward into the fleshy gap between her heavy black stockings and her garters, and they are sliding up under her garters into the damp unpantied place between her legs.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Those few, golden years when he believed Heidegger would save his life. Everybody began packing away their things. Zora gave her father the thumbs-up and rushed off; because of a scheduling glitch she always missed the first ten minutes of Claire’s poetry class anyway. Christian and Veronica, who were sitting in as entirely unnecessary teaching assistants (given the small class number), passed out worksheets for the following week. When Christian reached Howard’s end of the table he crouched down in his creepily limber way to Howard’s level, and with one hand reslicked his side parting. ‘That was amazing.’ ‘Went well, yes, I thought,’ said Howard, and took a worksheet from Christian’s hands. ‘I think the worksheet prompted a dialogue,’ began Christian cautiously, awaiting confirmation. ‘But it’s sincerely the way you then take that dialogue and refashion it – that’s the ignition.’ Howard both smiled and frowned at this. There was something strange about Christian’s English, despite the fact he was apparently an American. It was as if he were being translated as he spoke. ‘Worksheet definitely set us off,’ agreed Howard, and received waves of grateful protest from Christian. It was Christian himself who had made these worksheets. Howard always meant to read them more thoroughly but would, this week as ever, end up skimming the pages the morning before the class. They both knew this well. ‘Did you get the memo about the faculty meeting being postponed?’ asked Christian. Howard assented. ‘It’s January tenth, first meeting after Christmas. Will you need me to be there?’ asked Christian. Howard doubted this would be necessary. ‘Because, I did all that research, re, the limits of political speech on campus. I mean, not that it matters especially . . . I’m sure you won’t need it . . . but I think it’ll be helpful, although we would need to know the content of Professor Kipps’s proposed lectures to be quite certain,’ said Christian and began to pull papers from his  the anatomy lesson satchel. As Christian continued speaking at him, Howard kept an eye out for Victoria. But Christian went on too long; Howard watched with dismay her long-legged coltish stumble out of the door, pressed in on both sides by male friends. Each leg was perfectly wrapped, separated and fetishized in its tube of denim. Her ankles clicked together in those tan leather boots. The last thing he saw was the perfection of her ass – so high, so round – turning a corner; leaving. In twenty years of teaching he had never set eyes on anything like her. The other possibility, of course, was that in fact he had seen many such girls over the years, but it was only this year that he noticed. Either way, he was resigned to it.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Twenty years ago, maybe, he would have been repelled. Not now. Victoria sent  On Beauty him images of orifices and apertures that were simply awaiting him – with no conversation and no debate and no conflicting personalities and no sense of future trouble. Howard was fifty-seven years old. He had been married for thirty years to a difficult woman. Entering waiting orifices was about as much as he felt he could handle now, in the arena of personal relations. There was nothing left to fight for or rescue. Soon, surely, he would be sent off to find an apartment of his own, to live as so many of the men he knew lived, alone and defiant and always slightly drunk. And so it was all much of a muchness. It was inevitable, what was coming. And here it – she – was. The revolving doors spat her out looking predictably lovely, in a high-collared, very yellow coat with big, square buttons made of horn. They barely spoke. Howard went to the desk to get the key. ‘It’s a street-facing room, sir,’ said the hotel guy, because Howard had pretended he was staying overnight. ‘And it may be a bit noisy today. A march is going through town – if you find it unbearable, please call down to us and we’ll see if we can fix you up with something on the other side of the building. Have a nice day.’ They took the elevator up alone and she pressed her hand against his crotch. Room . At the door, she pushed him up against the wall and started to kiss him. ‘You’re not going to run away again, are you?’ she whispered. ‘No . . . wait, let’s get inside first,’ he said, and slid the credit-card key into its sheath. The green light came on, the door clicked. They found themselves in a musty, afternoon room with the curtains closed. There was a cutting little breeze, and Howard could hear muffled chanting. He went over to find the open window. ‘Leave the curtains closed – I don’t want everybody to see the floor show.’ She dropped her yellow coat to the floor. She stood there in all her youthful glory in the dust-flecked light. Corset, stockings, G-string, garters – not one dreary detail had been neglected. ‘Oh! Pardon! Excuse me, please!’ A woman in her fifties, a black woman, in a T-shirt and sweat-pants, had emerged from the bathroom with a bucket in her  on beauty and being wrong hand. Victoria screamed and sank to the floor to retrieve her coat. ‘Sorry, please,’ said the woman. ‘I clean – later, I come – ’ ‘Didn’t you hear us come in?’ asked Victoria heatedly, rising swiftly. The woman looked to Howard for mercy. ‘I’m asking you a question,’ said Victoria, coat draped like a cape over her now. She stepped in front of her quarry. ‘My English – sorry, can you – repeat, please?’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. Though she denied it, we secretly told each other that she had probably “gone all the way.” “At the very least, she’s a demi-vierge ,” Pia said. I nodded knowingly. Later I looked it up. There were only two boys who were allowed into the group, and we treated them as scornfully as possible to make sure they understood they were only there on sufferance. Since they were our classmates and not “college men,” we wanted it clear that we would only consider them as “platonic” friends. John Stock was the son of old friends of my parents. He was chubby and blond and wrote short stories. His favorite phrase was “paroxysms of passion.” It cropped up at least once every story he wrote. Ron Perkoff (whom we, of course, called Jerkoff) was in love with me. Tall, skinny, with a huge hooked nose and a truly incredible assortment of blackheads and pimples (which I longed to squeeze), he was an Anglophile. He subscribed to Punch and the airmail edition of the Manchester Guardian , carried a tightly rolled umbrella (in all kinds of weather), pronounced “banal” (one of his favorite words) with the accent on the second syllable, and peppered his speech with phrases like “bloody rotter” and “mucking about.” After the agony of college boards and waiting for letters of acceptance was over, the six of us mucked about chiefly in my parents’ apartment as we whiled away the long idle spring term waiting impatiently for graduation. Sitting on the floor of the living room, we consumed tons of fruit, cheese, peanut-butter sandwiches and cookies, listened to Frank Sinatra albums, and wrote communal epics which we tried to make as pornographic as our limited experience would allow. We composed on my portable Olivetti which we passed around from lap to lap. Whenever John was there, paroxysms of passion were the order of the day. Not many of these communal creations survived, but recently I came across a fragment which more or less conveys the spirit of all those other lost masterpieces. It was our habit to plunge into the action with as few preliminaries as possible, so the texture of the narrative was always somewhat choppy. One of the rules was that each author was allowed three minutes before having to pass the typewriter along to the next person, and this naturally increased the spastic quality of the prose.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  All at once, with a burst of rough glee (the sign of the nymphet!), she put her mouth to my ear—but for quite a while my mind could not separate into words the hot thunder of her whisper, and she laughed, and brushed the hair off her face, and tried again, and gradually the odd sense of living in a brand new, mad new dream world, where everything was permissible, came over me as I realized what she was suggesting. I answered I did not know what game she and Charlie had played. “You mean you have never—?”—her features twisted into a stare of disgusted incredulity. “You have never—” she started again. I took time out by nuzzling her a little. “Lay off, will you,” she said with a twangy whine, hastily removing her brown shoulder from my lips. (It was very curious the way she considered—and kept doing so for a long time—all caresses except kisses on the mouth or the stark act of love either “romantic slosh” or “abnormal”.) “You mean,” she persisted, now kneeling above me, “you never did it when you were a kid?” “Never,” I answered quite truthfully. “Okay,” said Lolita, “here is where we start.” However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of Lolita’s presumption. Suffice it to say that not a trace of modesty did I perceive in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved. She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults. What adults did for purposes of procreation was no business of hers. My life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget unconnected with me. While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid’s life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up; for, in my strange predicament, I feigned supreme stupidity and had her have her way—at least while I could still bear it. But really these are irrelevant matters; I am not concerned with so-called “sex” at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets. 30 I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It certainly did. She had had a long long day, she had gone rowing in the morning with Barbara whose sister was Waterfront Director, as the adorable accessible nymphet now started to tell me in between suppressed palate-humping yawns, growing in volume—oh, how fast the magic potion worked!—and had been active in other ways too. The movie that had vaguely loomed in her mind was, of course, by the time we watertreaded out of the dining room, forgotten. As we stood in the elevator, she leaned against me, faintly smiling—wouldn’t you like me to tell you?—half closing her dark-lidded eyes. “Sleepy, huh?” said Uncle Tom who was bringing up the quiet Franco-Irish gentleman and his daughter as well as two withered women, experts in roses. They looked with sympathy at my frail, tanned, tottering, dazed rosedarling. I had almost to carry her into our room. There, she sat down on the edge of the bed, swaying a little, speaking in dove-dull, long-drawn tones. “If I tell you—if I tell you, will you promise [sleepy, so sleepy—head lolling, eyes going out], promise you won’t make complaints?” “Later, Lo. Now go to bed. I’ll leave you here, and you go to bed. Give you ten minutes.” “Oh, I’ve been such a disgusting girl,” she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon. “Lemme tell you —” “Tomorrow, Lo. Go to bed, go to bed—for goodness sake, to bed.” I pocketed the key and walked downstairs. 28 Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time! So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties—she had always been singularly absent-minded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in—after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes—say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say—I would let myself into that “342” and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, emprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key “342” at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,—indeed, the globe—that very same night.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It’s meant to be Johnson’s chair, right? Sitting at the crossroads . And that’s totally filtered through hip-hop – and that, like, reveals to me the essence of rap. YOU GOTTA PAY YOUR DUES. That’s what’s written on the top of that mural, right? Near the chair? And that’s the first principle of rap music . You gotta pay your dues, man. So, it’s like . . . I’m tracing that idea through – man , those brothers make a lot of noise! I can’t hear myself thinking in here!’ ‘The top bit of the window is open.’ ‘I know, I don’t how to close that – these windows don’t close right.’ ‘Yeah, they do, you just can’t do it – there’s a knack to it.’ ‘Now, what would I do without my Boo, huh?’ asked Carl, as  on beauty and being wrong Zora stood up. He smacked her playfully on her big butt. ‘You always got my back. Knows everything ’bout everything .’ Zora took her chair to the window and demonstrated the technique. ‘ That’s better,’ said Carl. ‘Little peace for a brother when he’s working.’ You never know what the hotels are like in your hometown because you never have to stay in them. Howard had been recommend-ing the riverside Barrington to visiting professors for ten years, but, aside from a slight familiarity with the lobby, he really knew nothing about the place. He was about to find out. He was sitting on one of their reproduction Georgian sofas, waiting for her. From a window he could see the river and the ice on the river and the white sky reflected in the ice. He was feeling absolutely nothing. Not even guilt, not even lust. He had been compelled to come here by a series of e-mails she’d sent in the past week, liberally illustrated with the kind of home-made digital camera pornography that every teenage girl now seems so expert at. Her motivations were obscure to him. The day after the dinner she had sent him a livid e-mail, in reply to which he had sent a feeble apology, with no expectation of hearing from her again. But this was not like being married, as it turned out: Victoria forgave him at once. His disappearing act at the dinner seemed only to have intensified her determination to repeat what had happened in London. Howard felt himself too weak to fight anyone who had resolved to have him. He opened all her attachments and passed a lusty week of intense hard-ons at his desk – lurid visions of letting her do what she had asked to do. Crawl under your desk. Open my mouth. Suck it. Suck it. Suck it. How sexy the words are! Howard, who had almost no personal experience of pornography (he had contributed to a book denouncing it, edited by Steinem), was riveted by this modern sex, hard and shiny and fluid-free and violent. It suited his mood.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  For twenty-year-old Scotch and geriatric authors who had published memoirs, Hardtack reserved the word “mellow.” And for young authors and Brand X’s Scotch, Hardtack had this automatic response: “Lacks smoothness.” Most of the “artists” on that show deserved Hardtack. There was a young fool who called himself a “cinemaker” and showed four minutes of shaky, overexposed film of what looked like two (or possibly three) amoebas dancing pseudopod to pseudopod; a black painter who called himself an activist-painter and only painted chairs (a strangely pacifist subject for an activist-painter); a soprano with very yellow, very buck teeth (Charlie was there to accompany her four minutes of trembling Puccini); a one-man percussion section named Kent Blass who jumped around spastically, playing drums, xylophones, glass fish tanks, pots and pans; a modern dancer who never said the noun “dance” without using the definite article; a social-protest folksinger whose native Brooklynese had been laced with elocution lessons, with the bizarre result that he pronounced God, “Garrd”; and then there was me. They had rigged me up inside a gray plywood picture frame for my four minutes of poetry, and in order to reach it, I had to perch on a kind of scaffolding. Charlie was right below, sitting at the piano and staring up my skirt. While I read my poetry, his eyes were burning holes in my thighs. A day later he called me up. I didn’t remember him. Then he said that he wanted to set my poems to music, so I met him for dinner. I’ve always been very naive about ploys like that. “Come up to my apartment and let me set your poems to music” and I always come. Or at least go. But Charlie surprised me. He looked scrawny and unwashed and hook-nosed when he came to my door, but in the restaurant he displayed his gigantic knowledge of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart and Gershwin: all the songs my father had played on the piano when I was a kid. Even the obscure Cole Porter songs, the almost-forgotten Rodgers and Hart songs from obscure musicals, the least-known Gershwin songs—he knew them all. He knew even more of them than me—with my total recall for catchy lines. It was then that I fell absurdly in love with him, transformed him from an unwashed hook-nosed frog—into a prince—a piano-playing Jewish prince at that. As soon as he recited the last stanza of “Let’s Do It” and got the words all right , I was ready to do it with him. A simple case of Oedipussy. We went home to bed.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Exit husband numero uno. Enter a strange procession of opposite numbers. But I knew at least what I was looking for in numero due: a good solid father figure, a psychiatrist as an antidote to a psychotic, a good secular lay as an antidote to Brian’s religious fervor which seemed to preclude fucking, a silent man as an antidote to a noisy one, a sane gentile as an antidote to a crazy Jew. Bennett Wing appeared as in a dream. On the wing, you might say. Tall, good-looking, inscrutably Oriental. Long thin fingers, hairless balls, a lovely swivel to his hips when he screwed—at which he seemed to be absolutely indefatigable. But he was also mute and at that point his silence was music to my ears. How did I know that a few years later, I’d feel like I was fucking Helen Keller? Wing. I loved Bennett’s name. And he was mercurial, too. Not wings on his heels but wings on his prick. He soared and glided when he screwed. He made marvelous dipping and corkscrewing motions. He stayed hard forever, and he was the only man I’d ever met who was never impotent—not even when he was depressed or angry. But why didn’t he ever kiss? And why didn’t he speak? I would come and come and come and each orgasm seemed to be made of ice. Was it different in the beginning? I think so. I was dazzled by his silence then as I had once been overwhelmed by Brian’s astonishing torrent of speech. Right before Bennett, there had been that conductor who loved his baton (but never wiped his behind), a Florentine philanderer (Alessandro the Gross), an incestuous Arab brother-in-law (later, later), a professor of philosophy (U. of Cal.), and any number of miscellaneous lays in the night. I’d followed the conductor across Europe watching him perform, carrying his scores, and finally he took off and left me for an old girlfriend in Paris. So I had been wounded by music, madness, and miscellaneousness. And silent Bennett was my healer. A physician for my head and a psychoanalyst for my cunt. He fucked and fucked in ear splitting silence. He listened. He was a good analyst. He knew all Brian’s symptoms before I told him. He knew what I’d been through. And most astonishing of all—he still wanted to marry me after I told him about myself. “Better find a nice Chinese girl,” I said. It wasn’t racism, just my skittishness about marriage. Such permanence terrified me. Even the first time, with Brian, it had terrified me, and I had married against my better judgment. “I don’t want a nice Chinese girl,” Bennett said. “I want you.” (It turned out Bennett had never taken out a Chinese girl in his whole life—much less screwed one. He was all hung up on Jewish girls. Men like that seem to be my fate.) “I’m glad you want me,” I said. Grateful. I was really grateful.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  * Thrasyllus had long pondered within himself, perceiving that it was a hard matter to break his mind secretly to Charite, and that he was wholly barred from accomplishment of his luxurious appetite both by the multitude of her guards and servitors, and because the love of her and her husband was so strongly linked together that the bond between them might in no wise be dissevered ; and moreover it was a thing impossible to ravish her, because even if she would, although she would not, she knew nothing of the arts of deceiving a spouse. Yet was he still provoked forward by an obstinate madness to that very thing which he could not, as though he could. At length the thing which seemeth so hard and difficult, when love has been fortified through time, doth ever at last appear easy and facile; but mark, I pray you, diligently, to what end the furious force of his inordinate desire came. * On a day Tlepolemus went to the chase with Thrasyllus to hunt for wild beasts, but only for goats —if indeed goats be wild beasts—for his wife Charite desired him earnestly to meddle with no other beasts which were of more fierce and wild nature, armed with tusk or horn. When they were come within the chase to a great thicket on a hill, fortressed about with briars and thorns, they com- passed round the goats, which had been spied out by trackers; and by and by warning was given to let loose the dogs, that had been bred of a noble stock, to rout up the beasts from their lairs. They, re- membering all their careful teaching, spread out and covered every entry; and first they did not give tongue, but when on a sudden the signal was given they rushed in with such a cry that all the forest rang again with the noise; but behold there leaped out 349 LUCIUS APULEIUS invitus dominum suum devolvit ad terram: nec diu, et eum furens aper invadit iacentem ac primo lacinias eius, mox ipsum resurgentem multo dente laniavit. Nec coepti nefarii bonum piguit amicum vel suae saevitiae litatum saltem tanto perieulo cernens potuit expleri, sed percito atque plagoso, eruda vulnera contegenti suumque auxilium miseriter roganti per femus dexterum dimisit lanceam, tanto ille quidem fidentius quanto crederet ferri vulnera similia futura prosectu dentium: neenon tamen ipsam quoque bestiam facili manu transadigit. 6 Ad hune modum definito iuvene exciti latibulo suo quisque familia maesta concurrimus: at ille quan- quam perfecto voto, prostrato inimico laetus ageret, vultu tamen gaudium tegit et trontem asseverat et dolorem simulat, et cadaver, quod ipse fecerat, avide circumplexus, omnia quidem lugentium officia sol- lerter affinxit ; sed solae lacrimae procedere noluerunt. Sic ad nostri similitudinem, qui vere lamentabamur, conformatus manus suae eulpam bestiae dabat.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  After that I would like him, perhaps even love him—but without passion. And it was passion that I wanted. I had also learned that a sure way to exorcise an infatuation was to write about someone, to observe his tics and twitches, to anatomize his personality in type. After that he was an insect on a pin, a newspaper clipping laminated in plastic. I might enjoy his company, even admire him at moments, but he no longer had the power to make me wake up trembling in the middle of the night. I no longer dreamed about him. He had a face. So another condition for the zipless fuck was brevity. And anonymity made it even better. During the time I lived in Heidelberg I commuted to Frankfurt four times a week to see my analyst. The ride took an hour each way and trains became an important part of my fantasy life. I kept meeting beautiful men on the train, men who scarcely spoke English, men whose clichés and banalities were hidden by my ignorance of French, or Italian, or even German. Much as I hate to admit it, there are some beautiful men in Germany. One scenario of the zipless fuck was perhaps inspired by an Italian movie I saw years ago. As time went by, I embellished it to suit my head. It used to play over and over again as I shuttled back and forth from Heidelberg to Frankfurt, from Frankfurt to Heidelberg: A grimy European train compartment (Second Class). The seats are leatherette and hard. There is a sliding door to the corridor outside. Olive trees rush by the window. Two Sicilian peasant women sit together on one side with a child between them. They appear to be mother and grandmother and granddaughter. Both women vie with each other to stuff the little girl’s mouth with food. Across the way (in the window seat) is a pretty young widow in a heavy black veil and tight black dress which reveals her voluptuous figure. She is sweating profusely and her eyes are puffy. The middle seat is empty. The corridor seat is occupied by an enormously fat woman with a mustache. Her huge haunches cause her to occupy almost half of the vacant center seat. She is reading a pulp romance in which the characters are photographed models and the dialogue appears in little puffs of smoke above their heads.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  That is, he could photocopy the backlog of album covers for the next six months, but this had begun to seem pointless work, work they were giving him because they didn’t think him capable of anything more. In fact, he had all kinds of ideas on how to improve the archive, how to make it more  On Beauty student-friendly. He wanted to get it set up like the big record stores, where you can walk in, pick up a pair of earphones and have access to hundreds of different songs – except in Carl’s archive, the earphones would be attached to computer equipment that automatically displayed the research articles that Elisha wrote and collated about the music in the archive. ‘That sounds expensive,’ said Elisha, upon hearing this plan. ‘OK, sure, but somebody please tell me what the point of a library resource is if you can’t even access the resources? Ain’t nobody gonna borrow the old records – most kids don’t even know what a record player is any more.’ ‘Still sounds expensive.’ Carl tried to get a meeting with Erskine to discuss his ideas, but the brother was never available, and when Carl bumped into him by chance in a hallway, Erskine appeared confused as to who Carl even was, and suggested he address all queries to the librarian – what was her name? Oh, yes, Elisha Park. When Carl retold this story to Elisha, she took off her glasses and said something to Carl that resonated deeply with him, something he grasped and held to his heart like a lyric. ‘This is the kind of job,’ said Elisha, ‘that you have to make something of for yourself . It’s all very well walking through those gates and sitting in the lunchroom and pretending that you’re a Wellingtonian or whatever – ’ Here, if Carl’s skin could blush, it would have. Elisha had his number. He did thrill to walk under those gates. He did love walking across the snowy quad with a knapsack on his back or sitting in that bustling cafeteria, for all the world as if he were the college student his mother had always dreamed he would be. ‘But people like you and me,’ continued Elisha severely, ‘we’re not really a part of this community, are we? I mean, no one’s gonna help us feel that way. So if you want this job to be something special, you got to make it something special. No one’s gonna do it for you, that’s the truth.’ So, in his third week of work, Carl started to get into the research end of things. Economically and time-wise it didn’t make any sense to do this – no one was going to pay him more for the extra work.  on beauty and being wrong But for the first time in his life he found he was interested in the work he was doing – he wanted to do it.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  You like it here?’ ‘Sure. Well . . . it’s a little tight-assed sometimes, but the Black Studies Department is cool. You can get a lot done in a place like this – hey, I see your dad all the time. He works just down there.’ Levi, concentrating on the many strange facts being put before him, ignored this last. ‘So, wait: you ain’t making music no more?’ Carl shifted the knapsack on his back. ‘Aw . . . I’m doing a little but . . . I don’t know, man, the rap game . . . it’s all gangstas and playas now . . . that’s not my scene. Rap should be all about proportion , for me, as I see it. And it’s like, you go to the Bus Stop these days, it’s all these really angry brothers kinda . . . ranting . . . and I’m not really feeling that, so, well . . . you know how it is . . .’ Levi unwrapped a gum and put it in his mouth without offering Carl one. ‘Maybe they got shit they angry about,’ said Levi frostily. ‘Yeah . . . well – look, man – I actually got to run, I got this . . . thing – hey, you should come by the library sometime – we’re gonna start this open-listening afternoon, where you can pick any record and play it through – we got some really rare shit, so, you should come by. Come by tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you do that?’ ‘It’s the second march tomorrow. We marching all week.’ ‘March?’ Just then the front doors opened and they were joined, for a moment, by one of the most incredible-looking women either boy had ever seen. She was walking at high speed, past them and on towards the Humanities departments. She was dressed in tight jeans and pink polo neck and high tan boots. A long silky weave fell down her back. Levi did not connect her with the weeping, short-  on beauty and being wrong haired girl dressed in black that he had seen a month ago, walking, in more sedate and pious mode, behind a coffin. ‘Sister – damn! ’ murmured Carl, loud enough to be heard, but Victoria, practised in ignoring such comments, simply continued along her way. Levi stared after the incendiary rear view. ‘Oh, my God . . .’ said Carl, and held his hand to his breast. ‘Did you see that booty? Oh, man , I’m in pain.’ Levi had indeed seen that booty, but suddenly Carl was not the person with whom he wanted to discuss it. He had never known Carl well, but, in the way of a teenage crush, he had thought a great deal of him. Just shows what happens when you mature.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I was not yet at that stage; I merely want to convey the ease of the act, the nicety of the setting! So there was Charlotte swimming on with dutiful awkwardness (she was a very mediocre mermaid), but not without a certain solemn pleasure (for was not her merman by her side?); and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know—trying to see things as you will remember having seen them), the glossy whiteness of her wet face so little tanned despite all her endeavors, and her pale lips, and her naked convex forehead, and the tight black cap, and the plump wet neck, I knew that all I had to do was to drop back, take a deep breath, then grab her by the ankle and rapidly dive with my captive corpse. I say corpse because surprise, panic and inexperience would cause her to inhale at once a lethal gallon of lake, while I would be able to hold on for at least a full minute, open-eyed under water. The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the contemplated crime. It was like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer holding the ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery twilight. I might come up for a mouthful of air while still holding her down, and then would dive again as many times as would be necessary, and only when the curtain came down on her for good, would I permit myself to yell for help. And when some twenty minutes later the two puppets steadily growing arrived in a rowboat, one half newly painted, poor Mrs. Humbert Humbert, the victim of a cramp or coronary occlusion, or both, would be standing on her head in the inky ooze, some thirty feet below the smiling surface of Hourglass Lake. Simple, was it not? But what d’ye know, folks—I just could not make myself do it! She swam beside me, a trustful and clumsy seal, and all the logic of passion screamed in my ear: Now is the time! And, folks, I just couldn’t! In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned, and still hell screamed its counsel, and still I could not make myself drown the poor, slippery, big-bodied creature. The scream grew more and more remote as I realized the melancholy fact that neither tomorrow, nor Friday, nor any other day or night, could I make myself put her to death. Oh, I could visualize myself slapping Valeria’s breasts out of alignment, or otherwise hurting her—and I could see myself, no less clearly, shooting her lover in the underbelly and making him say “akh!” and sit down. But I could not kill Charlotte—especially when things were on the whole not quite as hopeless, perhaps, as they seemed at first wince on that miserable morning.