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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Yes, when I find carrion, I like to clean it up. You said it, not me. The vulture metaphor is yours, ducks. The dead flesh is yours too. And Bennett’s.” “I think you like Bennett more than you admit. I think he turns you on.” “Can’t decide whether I’m queer or not,” he said, grinning. “I’ll bet that’s true.” “Think what you like, ducks. Anything to get out of really enjoying life. Anything to go on suffering. I know your type. Bloody Jewish masochist. Actually, I quite like Bennett, only he’s a bloody Chinese masochist. It would do him some good if you took off without him. It might show him that he can’t go on living this way, suffering all the time and calling in Freud as his witness.” “If I take off, I’ll lose him.” “Only if he’s not worth having.” “Why do you say that?” “It’s so obvious. If he takes off, then he’s not for you. And if he takes you back, it will be on a new footing. No more groveling. No more manipulating each other with guilt all the time. You can’t lose a thing. And meanwhile, we’ll have a great time.” I pretended to Adrian that I wasn’t tempted, but in fact I was. And sorely. When I thought about it, it did seem as if Bennett knew everything about life except that having fun ought to be part of it. Life was a long disease to be cured by psychoanalysis. You might not cure it, but eventually you’d die anyway. The base of the couch would rise around you and become a coffin, and six black-suited analysts would carry you off (and throw jargon on your open grave). Bennett knew about part objects and whole objects, Oedipus and Electra, school phobia and claustrophobia, impotence and frigidity, patricide and matricide, penis envy and womb envy, working through and free association, mourning and melancholia, intrapsychic conflict and extrapsychic conflict, nosology and etiology, senile dementia and dementia praecox, projection and introjection, self-analysis and group-therapy, symptom formation and symptom exacerbation, amnesiac states and fugue states, pathological weeping and laughter in dreams, insomnia and excessive sleeping, neurosis and psychosis until they were coming out of your ears, but he did not seem to know about laughing and joking, wisecracking and punning, hugging and kissing, singing and dancing—all the things, in short, which made life worthwhile. As if you could will life to be happy through analysis. As if you could get along without laughter as long as you had analysis. Adrian had laughter, and at that point I was ready to sell my soul for it. The smile. Who was it who said that the smile is the secret of life? Adrian had an antic grin. I too laughed all the time. When we were together we felt we could conquer anything merely by laughing. “You have to get away from him,” Bennett said, “and back into analysis. He’s not good for you.”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  All he meant to do was write a thousand-word bio, as Elisha had asked him to, and then pass it on to her so that she could notate it with one of her mini-discographies and bibliographies, pointing students to further listening and related reading. He sat down at the computer at ten in the morning. By lunchtime he’d written five thousand words. And all this without even getting to the bit where teenage Tupac leaves the East Coast for the West. Elisha suggested that instead of taking whole people as subjects he could take one aspect of rap music in general, and make a note of all incidences of that aspect, so people could cross-reference. That didn’t help. Five days ago, Carl had elected the subject of crossroads . All mention of crossroads, imagery on album covers of crossroads, and raps based on the idea of a crossroads in someone’s life journey. Fifteen thousand words and counting. It was like suddenly he had a typing disease. Where was this disease when he was in school? ‘Knock, knock,’ said Zora pointlessly, as she stuck her head into his office and tapped his door. ‘Busy? I was just passing by, so.’ Carl pushed his cap off his face and looked up from his keyboard, annoyed by the disruption. Certainly, his intention was always to be nice to Zora Belsey, for she had always been nice to him. But she did not make it easy. She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her. She ‘passed by’ his office pretty much twice a day, usually with news of her campaign to keep him in Claire Malcolm’s poetry class. He hadn’t been able to tell her yet that he no longer gave a damn if he stayed in that class or not. ‘Hard at work – as always,’ she said and stepped into the room. He was taken aback by the large amount of cleavage he was confronted with, pushed up and together in a tight white top that could not quite contain the goods it had been entrusted with. There was also a silly shawl-like thing around her shoulders instead of a  On Beauty coat, and this Zora was forced to keep rearranging, as the left side slipped down her back. ‘Hello, Professor Thomas. Thought I’d pay you a visit.’ ‘Hey,’ said Carl, and instinctively pushed his chair a little further from the door. He took his earphones out. ‘You look kinda different. You heading somewhere? You look very . . . aren’t you cold ?’ ‘No, not really – where’s Elisha? Lunch?’ Carl nodded and looked at his computer screen. He was in the middle of a sentence. Zora sat in Elisha’s chair, and moved it round the desk until it was next to Carl’s own. ‘You want to get some lunch?’ she asked. ‘We could go out. I’ve got no class till three.’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I’d also played social worker to Charlie Fielding, the conductor whose baton kept wilting. He was dazzlingly grateful. “You’re a real find,” he kept saying that first night (meaning that he expected I’d throw him out in the cold and I didn’t). He made up for it later. It was only opening nights that wilted him. But Adrian? Sexy Adrian. He was supposed to be my zipless fuck. What happened? The funny thing was, I didn’t really mind. He was so beautiful lying there and his body smelled so good. I thought of all those centuries in which men adored women for their bodies while they despised their minds. Back in my days of worshipping the Woolfs and the Webbs it had seemed inconceivable to me, but now I understood it. Because that was how I so often felt about men. Their minds were hopelessly befuddled, but their bodies were so nice. Their ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky. I had been a feminist all my life (I date my “radicalization” to the night in 1955 on the IRT subway when the moronic Horace Mann boy who was my date asked me if I planned to be a secretary), but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with your unappeasable hunger for male bodies. It wasn’t easy. Besides, the older you got, the clearer it became that men were basically terrified of women. Some secretly, some openly. What could be more poignant than a liberated woman eye to eye with a limp prick? All history’s greatest issues paled by comparison with these two quintessential objects: the eternal woman and the eternal limp prick. “Do I scare you?” I asked Adrian. “You?” “Well some men claim to be afraid of me.” Adrian laughed. “You’re a sweetheart,” he said, “a pussycat—as you Americans say. But that’s not the point.” “Do you usually have this problem?” “Nein, Frau Doktor, and I bloody well don’t want to be interrogated further. This is absurd. I do not have a potency problem—it’s just that I am awed by your stupendous ass and I don’t feel like fucking.” The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy’s encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy. “I refuse to be impaled upon a pin,” Adrian said, unaware of the pun it immediately brought to mind. “I refuse to be categorized.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  You know that awful expression “tickle the ivories"? That was how Charlie drove me wild. Sometimes we even used to fuck on the piano bench with the metronome going. We met in a funny way. On television. What can be funnier than a poetry reading on television? It isn’t poetry and it isn’t television. It’s “educational"—if you’ll excuse the expression. The program was on Channel 13 and it was a kind of salad of the seven arts—none of them lively. Why it was considered educational was anyone’s guess. There were seven young “artists” each of whom had four minutes to do his (or her) stuff. Then there was a puffy-eyed, pipe-smoking old fart with a name like Phillips Hardtack who interviewed each of us, asking us incisive questions like “what, in your opinion, is Inspiration?” or “what influence did your childhood have on your work?” For these questions (and about ten others) another four minutes was allotted. Apart from hosting shows like this, Hardtack hacked out his living writing book reviews and posing for whiskey ads—two occupations which have more in common than appears on the surface. The Scotch was always “light” and “mild” and the books were always “stark” and “powerful.” All you had to do was crank Hardtack up and out came the adjectives. Sometimes, however, he got them confused and called a book “light” and “mild” while he called the Scotch “stark” and “powerful.” 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.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. The train enters a galleria , or tunnel, and in the semi-darkness the symbolism is consummated. There is the soldier’s boot in the air and the dark walls of the tunnel and the hypnotic rocking of the train and the long high whistle as it finally emerges. Wordlessly, she gets off at a town called, perhaps, bivona . She crosses the tracks, stepping carefully over them in her narrow black shoes and heavy black stockings. He stares after her as if he were Adam wondering what to name her. Then he jumps up and dashes out of the train in pursuit of her. At that very moment a long freight train pulls through the parallel track obscuring his view and blocking his way. Twenty-five freight cars later, she has vanished forever. One scenario of the zipless fuck. Zipless, you see, not because European men have button-flies rather than zipper-flies, and not because the participants are so devastatingly attractive, but because the incident has all the swift compression of a dream and is seemingly free of all remorse and guilt; because there is no talk of her late husband or of his fiancée; because there is no rationalizing; because there is no talk at all. The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We make our way out of the palace and into another courtyard which is now chiefly used as a parking lot. Amid the ghosts of Opels and Volkswagens and Peugeots we embrace. Mouth to mouth and belly to belly. Adrian must have the wettest kiss in history. His tongue is everywhere, like the ocean. We are sailing away. His penis (bulging under his corduroy pants) is the tall red smokestack of an ocean liner. And I am moaning around it like the ocean wind. And I am saying all the silly things you say while necking in parking lots, trying somehow to express a longing which is inexpressible—except maybe in poetry. And it all comes out so lame. I love your mouth. I love your hair. I love your ears. I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you. Because this is almost too good to be love. Too yummy and delicious to be anything as serious and sober as love. Your whole mouth has turned liquid. His tongue tastes better than a nipple to an infant. (And don’t throw me any psychiatric interpretations, Bennett, because I’ll throw them right back. Infantile. Regressed. Basically Incestuous. No doubt. But I’d give my life just to go on kissing him like this and how are you going to analyze that?) Meanwhile, he’s got my ass and is cupping it with both hands. He’s put my book on the fender of a Volkswagen and he’s grabbed my ass instead. Isn’t that why I write? To be loved? I don’t know anymore. I don’t even know my own name. “I’ve never met an ass to rival yours,” he says. And that remark makes me feel better than if I’d just won the National Book Award. The National Ass Award—that’s what I want. The Transatlantic Ass Award of 1971. “I feel like Mrs. America at the Congress of Dreams,” I say. “You are Mrs. America at the Congress of Dreams,” he says, “and I want to love you as hard as I possibly can and then leave you.” Forewarned is forearmed, supposedly. But who was listening? All I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. — The rest of the evening was a dream of reflections and champagne glasses and drunken psychiatric jargon. We wended our way back through the hallway of mirrors. We were so excited that we scarcely bothered to make any plans about when we’d meet again.

• 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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Don’t play around public toilets. Don’t take candy or rides from strangers. If picked up, mark down the license of the car.” “... and the brand of the candy,” I volunteered. She went on, her cheek (recedent) against mine (pursuant); and this was a good day, mark, O reader! “If you don’t have a pencil, but are old enough to read—” “We,” I quip-quoted, “medieval mariners, have placed in this bottle—” “If,” she repeated, “you don’t have a pencil, but are old enough to read and write—this is what the guy means, isn’t it, you dope— scratch the number somehow on the roadside.” “With your little claws, Lolita.’ ” 3 She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would—invariably, with icy precision—plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke. Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy. Reader must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  20By permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit. It now appeared that it had not been merely a matter of learning the answers to such questions as what is the basic conflict in “Hedda Gabler,” or where are the climaxes in “Love Under the Lindens,” or analyze the prevailing mood of “Cherry Orchard”; it was really a matter of learning to betray me. How I deplored now the exercises in sensual simulation that I had so often seen her go through in our Beardsley parlor when I would observe her from some strategic point while she, like a hypnotic subject or a performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated versions of infantile make-believe by going through the mimetic actions of hearing a moan in the dark, seeing for the first time a brand new young stepmother, tasting something she hated, such as buttermilk, smelling crushed grass in a lush orchard, or touching mirages of objects with her sly, slender, girl-child hands. Among my papers I still have a mimeographed sheet suggesting: Tactile drill. Imagine yourself picking up and holding: a pingpong ball, an apple, a sticky date, a new flannel-fluffed tennis ball, a hot potato, an ice cube, a kitten, a puppy, a horseshoe, a feather, a flashlight. Knead with your fingers the following imaginary things: a piece of bread, india rubber, a friend’s aching temple, a sample of velvet, a rose petal. You are a blind girl. Palpate the face of: a Greek youth, Cyrano, Santa Claus, a baby, a laughing faun, a sleeping stranger, your father. But she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate spells, in the dreamy performance of her enchantments and duties! On certain adventurous evenings, in Beardsley, I also had her dance for me with the promise of some treat or gift, and although these routine leg-parted leaps of hers were more like those of a football cheerleader than like the languorous and jerky motions of a Parisian petit rat, the rhythms of her not quite nubile limbs had given me pleasure. But all that was nothing, absolutely nothing, to the indescribable itch of rapture that her tennis game produced in me—the teasing delirious feeling of teetering on the very brink of unearthly order and splendor.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Zora could clearly see people stealing a look, and lingering, not wanting to release the imprint of Carl from their retinas, especially if it was only to be replaced by something as mundane as a tree or the library or two kids playing cards in the yard. What a thing he was to look at! ‘Anyway,’ he said, enthusiasm shading off into disappointment at her silence, ‘I been wanting to tell you that and now I told ya, so . . .’ Zora snapped out of it. ‘You wanted to tell me that?’ ‘No, no, no – it ain’t like that.’ He laughed raucously. ‘ Damn , girl, I’m not a stalker – sister, seriously – ’ He patted her softly on her left arm. Nothing less than electricity shot right through her body, into her groin and ended up somewhere round her ears. ‘I’m just saying that it stuck in my mind, right – ’cos I go to stuff in the city and usually I’m the only Negro , right – don’t see many black folk at things like that and I thought: Now, if I ever see that bad-tempered black girl again, I’m gonna lay some of my Mozart thoughts on her head, see how she takes them – that’s all. That’s college, right? That’s what you paying all that money for – just so you get to talk to other people about that shit. That’s all you’re paying for.’ He nodded his head authoritatively. ‘That’s it.’ ‘I guess.’ ‘It’s nothing more than that,’ Carl insisted. The college bell started up, pompous and monotonous, then the jollier four-note tune of the Episcopalian church across the road.  On Beauty Zora took a risk: ‘You know, you should meet my other brother, Jerome. He’s a total music-head and poetry-head – he can be a little bit of an uptight asshole, but you should totally come by some time, I mean, if you want to talk and stuff – He’s at Brown right now, but he comes back every few weeks . . . it’s a pretty amazing household for talking even though they all kind of drive me a little crazy sometimes . . . my dad’s like a professor so – ’ Carl’s head jerked back in surprise. ‘No, but he’s cool . . . and he’s pretty incredible to talk to . . . but seriously, you should really feel free, just to come by and talk and just . . .’ Carl looked frostily at Zora.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Then, figuratively speaking, I shattered the glass, and boldly imagined (for I was drunk on those visions by then and underrated the gentleness of my nature) how eventually I might blackmail—no, that is too strong a word—mauvemail big Haze into letting me consort with little Haze by gently threatening the poor doting Big Dove with desertion if she tried to bar me from playing with my legal step-daughter. In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard. And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman. It is with a great effort of will that in this memoir I have managed to tune my style to the tone of the journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze was to me but an obstacle. That journal of mine is no more; but I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now. Fortunately, my story has reached a point where I can cease insulting poor Charlotte for the sake of retrospective verisimilitude. Wishing to spare poor Charlotte two or three hours of suspense on a winding road (and avoid, perhaps, a head-on collision that would shatter our different dreams), I made a thoughtful but abortive attempt to reach her at the camp by telephone. She had left half an hour before, and getting Lo instead, I told her—trembling and brimming with my mastery over fate—that I was going to marry her mother. I had to repeat it twice because something was preventing her from giving me her attention. “Gee, that’s swell,” she said laughing. “When is the wedding? Hold on a sec, the pup—That pup here has got hold of my sock. Listen—” and she added she guessed she was going to have loads of fun ... and I realized as I hung up that a couple of hours at that camp had been sufficient to blot out with new impressions the image of handsome Humbert Humbert from little Lolita’s mind. But what did it matter now? I would get her back as soon as a decent amount of time after the wedding had elapsed. “The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave,” as a poet might have said. But I am no poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Thus while I-reasoned with myself, I came to Milo’s door persevering still in my purpose, but I found neither Milo nor his wife at home, but only my dear and sweet love Fotis mincing pigs’ meat as if for stuffing, and slicing flesh, and making pottage for her master and mistress, and I thought I smelled even from thence the savour of some haggis very sweet and dainty. She had about her middle a white and clean apron, and she was girded high about her body beneath her breasts with a girdle of red shining silk, and she stirred the pot and turned the meat with her fair and white hands, in such sort and with such stirrings and turning the same that her loins and hips did likewise gently move and shake, which was in my mind a comely sight to see. These things when I saw I was half amazed, and stood 59 LUCIUS APULEIUS mirabundus steti, steterunt et membra quae iacebant ante. Et tandem ad illam * Quam pulchre quamque festive " inquam “ Fotis mea, ollulam istam cum nati- busintorques! Quam mellitum pulmentum apparas ! Felix et certius beatus cui permiseris illuc digitum intingere! " Tune illa lepida alioquin et dicacula puella * Discede" inquit * Miselle, quam procul a meo foculo discede. Nam si te vel modice meus igniculus afflaverit, ureris intime nec ullus extinguet ardorem tuum nisi ego, quae dulce condiens et ollam et lectulum suave quatere novi." 8 Haec dicens in me respexit et risit. Nec tamen ego prius inde discessi, quam diligenter omnem eius explorassem habitudinem. Velquid ego de ceteris aio? Cum semper mihi unica cura fuerit caput capillumque sedulo et publice prius intueri et domi postea perfrui, sitque iudicii huius apud me certa et statuta ratio, vel quod praecipua pars ista corporis in aperto et per- spicuo posita prima nostris luminibus occurrit, et quod in ceteris membris floridae vestis hilaris color, hoc in capite nitor nativus operatur: denique pleraeque in- dolem gratiamque suam probaturae lacinias omnes exuunt, amicula dimovent, nudam pulchritudinem suam praebere se gestiunt, magis de cutis roseo rubore quam de vestis aureo colore placiturae. At vero (quod nefas dicere, ne quid sit ullum huius rei tam dirum exemplum) si cuiuslibet eximiae pul- cherrimaeque feminae caput capillo spoliaveris et faciem nativa specie nudaveris, licet illa caelo deiecta, 60 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK II

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He puffed his pipe and looked off into the distance. The corners of his eyes crinkled into about a hundred tiny lines and his mouth curled up in a sort of smile even when he wasn’t smiling. I knew I’d say yes to anything he asked. My only worry was: maybe he wouldn’t ask soon enough. “Polish Jews on one side, Russian on the other—” “I thought so. You look Jewish.” “And you look like an English anti-Semite.” “Oh come on—I like Jews....” “Some of your best friends...” “It’s just that Jewish girls are so bloody good in bed.” I couldn’t think of a single witty thing to say. Sweet Jesus, I thought, here he was. The real z.f. The zipless fuck par excellence. What in God’s name were we waiting for? Certainly not Rodney Lehmann. “I also like the Chinese,” he said, “and you’ve got a nice-looking husband.” “Maybe I ought to fix you up with him. After all, you’re both analysts. You’d have a lot in common. You could bugger each other under a picture of Freud.” “Cunt,” he said. “Actually, it’s more Chinese girls, I fancy—but Jewish girls from New York who like a good fight also strike me as dead sexy. Any woman who can raise hell the way you did up at registration seems pretty promising.” “Thanks.” At least I can recognize a compliment when I get one. My underpants were wet enough to mop the streets of Vienna. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who thought I looked Jewish,” I said, trying to get the conversation back to more neutral territory. (Enough of sex. Let’s get back to bigotry.) His thinking I looked Jewish actually excited me. God only knows why. “Look—I’m not an anti-Semite, but you are. Why do you think you don’t look Jewish?” “Because people always think I’m German—and I’ve spent half my life listening to anti-Semitic stories told by people who assumed I wasn’t—” “That’s what I hate about Jews,” he said. “They’re the only ones allowed to tell anti-Semitic jokes. It’s bloody unfair. Why should I be deprived of the pleasure of masochistic Jewish humor just because I’m a goy?” He sounded so goyish saying goy. “You don’t pronounce it right.” “What? Goy?” “Oh, that’s OK, but masochistic.” (He pronounced the first syllable mace, just like an Englishman.) “You’ve got to watch how you pronounce Yiddish words like masochistic,” I said. “We Jews are very touchy.” We ordered another round of drinks. He kept making a pretense of looking around for Rodney Lehmann and I came on with a very professional spiel about the article I was going to write.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The ‘funnel’ that Jack French had predicted now manifested itself, in the doorway, as many faculty members forced themselves through a small gap. Howard  on beauty and being wrong 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.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But my tale is sufficiently incondite already. After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth and suddenly—Suddenly, gentlemen of the jury, I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun. I imagined (under conditions of new and perfect visibility) all the casual caresses her mother’s husband would be able to lavish on his Lolita. I would hold her against me three times a day, every day. All my troubles would be expelled, I would be a healthy man. “To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss ...” Well-read Humbert! Then, with all possible caution, on mental tiptoe so to speak, I conjured up Charlotte as a possible mate. By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast. Humbert Humbert sweating in the fierce white light, and howled at, and trodden upon by sweating policemen, is now ready to make a further “statement” (quel mot!) as he turns his conscience inside out and rips off its innermost lining. I did not plan to marry poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in some vulgar, gruesome and dangerous manner such as killing her by placing five bichloride-of-mercury tablets in her preprandial sherry or anything like that; but a delicately allied, pharmacopoeial thought did tinkle in my sonorous and clouded brain. Why limit myself to the modest masked caress I had tried already? Other visions of venery presented themselves to me swaying and smiling. I saw myself administering a powerful sleeping potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the latter through the night with perfect impunity. The house was full of Charlotte’s snore, while Lolita hardly breathed in her sleep, as still as a painted girl-child. “Mother, I swear Kenny never even touched me.” “You either lie, Dolores Haze, or it was an incubus.” No, I would not go that far. So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed—and the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the bliss of past and future nights.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Despite the pervasiveness of the American mind-set, there are plenty of women who mount daily insurrections against the denial of eros. For them, motherhood heralds newfound sexual confidence, womanliness, and even the restitution of a wounded body. One day, I had back-to-back sessions, first with Stephanie, then with Amber. The realities of their daily lives had an uncanny resemblance, but their experiences couldn’t have been farther apart. Amber told me, “I used to say no to sex as a matter of course. Who knows why? Denial of any desire, even hunger, was modeled for me by my 105-pound mother. Before I had kids, whenever my husband asked me if I wanted to eat, I also said no. I refused out of habit, before actually registering the question. “Now I know far more profound reasons to say no to sex: the desperate fatigue of new motherhood; the seemingly bottomless rage at my two-and-a-half-year-old for waking up his sleeping infant brother; the bitterness of feeling unsupported, a workhorse for our home and children. And yet I am the one who feels hungry for sex, who demands it or mopes about not getting it. I give all day in very physical ways: nursing, cooking, stooping to pick up toys, carrying children, changing diapers. After a few days of peanut butter sandwiches and Wiggles CDs, when I am a participant in my children’s world to the exclusion of my own, I want my glass of sherry, my music, and my man. I long to be yanked out of the messy hair, spit-up-on shirt, mac-and-cheese-encrusted jeans that I think of as the ‘mother body.’ As often as I can, I put that body to bed with the kids.” Another patient, Charlene, is being tutored by her children. “My kids have taught me how to be greedy. My fifteen-month-old can suck on me for half an hour, walk off to play, and be back for more within minutes. He shakes his head no when I offer him milk in a cup or bottle, pulls up my shirt, and squeals until I unsnap my bra for him. When he sees my nipple he smiles, coos, and dives in. The three-year-old wants my lap, my time, my attention as often as he can steal it from his brother. He will tell me how to position my body on the floor, exactly how I should push the truck, and feels no guilt or shame in declaring which parent he wants to play with or put him to bed. Of course they don’t always get what they want, but I am impressed by their fluid transmission of desire between body and mind. They let themselves feel in a way I’d forgotten, or been trained away from; and watching them makes me more aware of my own body and reminds me of my own desire.”

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Faced with the complications of affairs, divorce, and remarriage, some of my patients attempt a different course. Nonmonogamous people value the freedom of sexual expression, and they try to reconcile the perennials of love with the surprises of desire, hoping to resist the lassitude that creeps in with time. To repeat Marguerite’s words, this is not a recipe for everyone. The presence of the third is a fact of life; how we deal with it is up to us. We can approach it with fear, avoidance, and moral outrage; or we can bring to it a robust curiosity and a sense of intrigue. In his steamy affair, Doug courts it secretly. Bill’s devastation is born of a desperate attempt to deny it. Selena and Max invite it in fantasy, but draw the line there. Joan and Hiro escort the third straight into their bedroom. Marriage has become a matter of love; love is a matter of choice; and choice implies renouncing others. But that doesn’t mean the others are dead. Nor does it mean that we need to deaden our senses so as to protect ourselves from their allure. Acknowledging the third has to do with validating the erotic separateness of our partner. It follows that our partner’s sexuality does not belong to us. It isn’t just for and about us, and we should not assume that it rightfully falls within our jurisdiction. It doesn’t. Perhaps that is true in action, but certainly not in thought. The more we choke each other’s freedom, the harder it is for desire to breathe within a committed relationship. Pursue the logic, and you have the itinerary for an emotionally enlarging journey. It goes something like this: I know you look at others, but I can’t fully know what you see. I know others are looking at you, but I don’t really know who it is they’re seeing. Suddenly you’re no longer familiar. You’re no longer a known entity that I need not bother being curious about. In fact, you’re quite a mystery. And I’m a little unnerved. Who are you? I want you. Accommodating the third opens up an erotic expanse where eros needn’t worry about wilting. In that expanse, we can be deeply moved by our partner’s otherness, and soon thereafter deeply aroused. I’d like to suggest that we view monogamy not as a given but as a choice. As such, it becomes a negotiated decision. More to the point, if we’re planning to spend fifty years with one soul—and we want a happy jubilee—it may be wiser to review our contract at various junctures. Just how accommodating each couple may be to the third varies. But at least a nod is more apt to sustain desire with our one and only over the long haul—and perhaps even to create a new “art of loving” for the twenty-first century couple. 11 Putting the X Back in SexBringing the Erotic Home

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

  I answer that, Long deliberation and the advice of many are required in great matters of doubt, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. iii, 3); while advice is unnecessary in matters that are certain and fixed. Now with regard to entering religion three points may be considered. First, the entrance itself into religion, considered by itself; and thus it is certain that entrance into religion is a greater good, and to doubt about this is to disparage Christ Who gave this counsel. Hence Augustine says (De Verb. Dom., Serm. c, 2): “The East,” that is Christ, “calleth thee, and thou turnest to the West,” namely mortal and fallible man. Secondly, the entrance into religion may be considered in relation to the strength of the person who intends to enter. And here again there is no room for doubt about the entrance to religion, since those who enter religion trust not to be able to stay by their own power, but by the assistance of the divine power, according to Is. 40:31, “They that hope in the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall take wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Yet if there be some special obstacle (such as bodily weakness, a burden of debts, or the like) in such cases a man must deliberate and take counsel with such as are likely to help and not hinder him. Hence it is written (Ecclus. 37:12): “Treat with a man without religion concerning holiness [*The Douay version supplies the negative: ‘Treat not . . . nor with . . . ‘], with an unjust man concerning justice,” meaning that one should not do so, wherefore the text goes on (Ecclus. 37:14,15), “Give no heed to these in any matter of counsel, but be continually with a holy man.” In these matters, however, one should not take long deliberation. Wherefore Jerome says (Ep. and Paulin. liii): “Hasten, I pray thee, cut off rather than loosen the rope that holds the boat to the shore.” Thirdly, we may consider the way of entering religion, and which order one ought to enter, and about such matters also one may take counsel of those who will not stand in one’s way. Reply to Objection 1: The saying: “Try the spirits, if they be of God,” applies to matters admitting of doubt whether the spirits be of God; thus those who are already in religion may doubt whether he who offers himself to religion be led by the spirit of God, or be moved by hypocrisy. Wherefore they must try the postulant whether he be moved by the divine spirit. But for him who seeks to enter religion there can be no doubt but that the purpose of entering religion to which his heart has given birth is from the spirit of God, for it is His spirit “that leads” man “into the land of uprightness” (Ps. 142:10).

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  SIXParoxysms of Passion or the Man Under the Bed Among all the forms of absurd courage, the courage of girls is outstanding. Otherwise there would be fewer marriages and still less of the wild ventures that override everything, even marriage…. —Colette Not that falling madly in love was at all unusual for me. All year I had fallen in love with everyone. I fell in love with an Irish poet who kept pigs on a farm in Iowa. I fell in love with a six-foot-tall novelist who looked like a cowboy and only wrote allegories about the effects of radiation. I fell in love with a blue-eyed book reviewer who had raved about my first book of poems. I fell in love with a surly painter (whose three wives had all committed suicide). I fell in love with a very courtly professor of Italian Renaissance philosophy who sniffed glue and screwed freshman girls. I fell in love with a UN interpreter (Hebrew, Arabic, Greek) who had five children, a sick mother, and seven unpublished novels in his sprawling apartment on Morningside Drive. I fell in love with a pale WASP of a biochemist who took me to lunch at the Harvard Club and had been married to two other women writers—both of them nymphomaniacally inclined. But nothing came of anything. Oh there were cuddles in the backs of cars. And long drunken kisses in roachy New York kitchens over pitchers of warm martinis. And there were flirtations over fattening expense-account lunches. And pinches in the stacks of Butler Library. And embraces after poetry readings. And hand squeezes at gallery openings. And long meaningful telephone conversations and letters heavy with double entendres. There were even some frank and open propositions (usually from men who didn’t attract me at all). But nothing came of anything. I would go home instead, and write poems to the man I really loved (whoever he might be). After all, I had screwed enough guys to know that one prick wasn’t that different from the next. So what was I looking for? And why was I so restless? Maybe I resisted consummating any of these flirtations because I knew that the man I really wanted would continue to elude me and I would only wind up disappointed. But who was the man I really wanted? All I knew was that I had been desperately searching for him from the age of sixteen on.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  If at least you loved me—” “Don’t bring love into it and muck everything up. That’s a copout if I ever heard one. What does love have to do with it?” “Everything.” “Bullshit. You say love—but you mean security. Well, there’s no such thing as security. Even if you go home to your safe little husband—there’s no telling that he won’t drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow or piss off with another bird or just plain stop loving you. Can you read the future? Can you predict fate? What makes you think your security is so secure? All that’s sure is that if you pass up this experience, you’ll never get another chance at it. Death’s definitive, as you said yesterday.” “I didn’t think you were listening.” “That’s how much you know.” He stared at the steering wheel. “Adrian, you’re right about everything except love. Love does matter. It matters that Bennett loves me and you don’t.” “And who do you love? Have you ever let yourself think about it? Or is it all a question of who you can exploit and manipulate? Is it all a question of who gives you more? Is it all a question, ultimately, of money?” “That’s crap.” “Is it now? Sometimes I think it’s just that you know I’m poor, that I want to write books and don’t give a damn about practicing medicine—unlike your rich American doctors.” “On the contrary, your poverty appeals to my reverse snobbery. I like your poverty. Besides, if you do as well as old Ronnie Laing, you won’t be poor. You’ll go far, my boy. Psychopaths always do.” “Now you sound like you’re quoting Bennett.” “We do agree that you’re a psychopath.” “We, we, we—the smug editorial ‘we.’ My—it must be awfully cozy to be boringly married and use the editorial we. But is it conducive to art? Isn’t all that coziness stultifying? Isn’t it high time you changed your life?” “Iago—that’s what you are. Or the serpent in the Garden of Eden.” “If what you have is Paradise—I thank God I’ve never had the experience.” “I’ve got to get back.” “Back where?” “To Paradise, to my cozy little marital boredom, to my editorial we, to my stultification. I need it like a fix.” “Just as you need me like a fix when you get bored with Bennett.” “Look—you said it—it’s over.” “So it is.” “Well, then drive me back to the hotel. Bennett will be back soon. I don’t want to be late again. He’s just heard a paper on ‘Aggression in Large Groups.’ It might give him ideas.” “We’re a small group.” “True, but you never can tell.” “You’d really like him to beat the shit out of you—wouldn’t you? Then you’d feel properly martyred.” “Perhaps.” I was aping Adrian’s cool. It was infuriating him. “Look—we might just do a communal thing—you and me and Bennett.