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 Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  tongue as fast as I can move my head while his hips buck up and down shoving his dick into space searching for relief while his balls roll free. I take those fat nuggets in my empty hand and slowly slowly slowly start to squeeze them ever so slightly gently but more and more firmly, painfully, harder, press them because he knows I want to burst their bloody juices in my hand, and I work my tongue around the head of his cock again and again while he slaps at the bed, at his own thigh, and pinch it just exactly underneath the head front and back anytime I think he’s getting too close for my own com fort, slow him down and speed him up at once, which is what I did to the boy on my childhood bed. I smiled at him as if I knew what I was doing, took the clothesline I’d been saving for what I didn’t know till then, and tied a noose around his balls and tied them tightly to his ankles so he had to bend his knees and looked at me with fear that was almost horror and made me want to laugh. I tied his hands together to the bedpost then and said I wanted to watch him come. I spit in my hand and greased his ass and fucked him while I pulled him off and just kept fucking him while his ass rings squeezed my dick and he gushed all over the sheet and when he cried because he didn’t know what else to do I came as well, came up his ass and lost my dick in him and lost myself. Later I untied him except for the noose on his balls and the rope I had attached to them that I held like a leash while he looked up at me like a happy puppy and fell asleep in my arms until my mother called up the stairs that it was dinnertime. I got him up in the early evening light and we got dressed, he kissed me and went home alone, and I never even saw him in school again. Jason, on the other hand, will never leave because I never let him come until he’s passed the point of wanting to. I like it

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  I stayed put, rooted to the spot by my throbbing cunt. My ragged breathing prevented me from speaking. Her hand moved down to where my jeans met damp skin. I closed my eyes. Fingers entered the gap in my boxers. The Latin beat was replaced by a synthesized throbbing. “Spread your legs,” she commanded. I complied willingly. She opened my labia and entered me slightly. I pushed onto her fingers. Her strong, fleshy arm continued to grip me tightly as she bit my neck, hard. “I’m marking you, Tomboy. You’re mine tonight.” I shiv ered involuntarily. She pulled her fingers from my cunt and circled my clit slowly, her fingertips barely brushing me. “Harder—please—more,” I begged softly. I was rewarded. A moan escaped my lips, and her touch got feather-light again. Just when I thought I could take it no longer, she stroked me hard. “Come for me,” she ordered. I hadn’t realized it, but I’d been waiting for her permission. The release was sudden. It was all I could do to remain up right as I shuddered against her chest. When I was done, she turned me around and enveloped me in a hug. I sank into her arms, my scent mingling with her soap and leather. “Sorry you missed your act,” she said. My act! Damn! I missed my cue. I guess fifteen minutes wasn’t so long after all. JERRY STAHL From Perv-A Love Story I didn’t officially see her go. I made myself look away, pre tending to watch for pedestrians. But I heard her, the first quick wisssh, then the sputtering gush. I saw the pee run and puddle the damp cement. A frothsy stream ran under my work boots but I didn’t move. It wasn’t piss. It was her piss. I couldn’t believe it. After my whole life, Michele’s pussy was right there . . . and I stared somewhere else. When the puddling stopped, she tugged my pant leg. She raised her face and gave me a funny smile. “You want to?” Her voice was sweet and girlish again. “Want to what?” “You know, . . .” Shy and defiant at the same time. “Wipe me. Girls have to wipe when they pee, you know. My daddy always wiped me.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But he was coming on well. His tits now bulged out impressively; and as he raised his hands to his temples and pushed back his wet hair, his biceps doubled smoothly, sleek as coupling animals. He was the sort of boy who might be in the army, except that his weight-training suggested a labour towards some private image of himself, a solitary perfection. As often happens when I know someone else fancies a person I might otherwise have ignored, I realised that Bill’s taste for him had made me want the boy too, and I looked at him lustfully and competitively. It was getting late. I had deliberately taken my time in the gym, and spent a while joining in with some Malaysian boys, very supple and clever, who were training on the parallel bars. Old Andrews was coaching them—a man who still bore the stiffness of the drill square in his straight carriage and wiry limbs, and who, by a strange anomaly in the democratising ambience of the Corry, was always known simply as Andrews: Andrews himself wore this as the badge of an old-school sense of equality, though it sometimes sounded, in the mouths of the boys who, vaulting and balancing, literally passed through his hands, like an old-school formula of command. He was a difficult, demanding man, from whom those who used the gym a lot could win a tight-lipped affection. This evening his discipline was what I needed after the anxiety of home, and the oriental boys, with their intuitive sense of space and balance, and their wide, courteous smiles, provided a brief antidote to Arthur and our joint troubles. Then the nearly deserted pool, the water lapping at the edge, had tired me and calmed me more. I watched Phil spring up out of the bath, shoot me a little look, self-conscious but somehow, I felt, pleased, and amble off to the stairs. His trunks were becoming small for the weight he was putting on in the ass. It would have been trite to follow him too soon, and I kicked about for a minute more. As I did so a head approached, old and large, held above the water, but given a sinister vacuity by pinktinted goggles and a white rubber bathing-cap. Its progress was extremely slow, and each time it rode up and pale, heavy shoulders were seen, a weak opening of the arms, a nugatory kicking of the legs, had evidently taken place. When it got very close it submerged completely for several seconds, then came up looking at me, as it had clearly been doing beneath the water, stopped dead and lurched up to the full height of a plump, dripping, wheezing old man, with smooth, drooping breasts.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  She loves me. Wrist gliding to the left, my fingers arched, stroking up and over, finding the firm nubbled spot where you like to feel my first knuckles rub. She loves me not. To the right then, my fingers bent double, doubly thick, feeling you spread your legs reflexively, opening to me, your cunt stretched around me, almost but not quite a fist. She loves me. You rolled back against me, pressing your ass hard against me, sweet sensation having woken you slightly. She loves me not. I let you turn onto your back, shifting with you so that I didn’t have to stop fuck ing your voluptuous sleepy cunt. You seemed not to mind, not even to be surprised, that you woke with my fingers inside you: you wanted it as much as I thought you did, my intrusion not only tolerated but welcomed with a short soft cry. Reaching up as I settled on my belly between your sloppily splayed, sleep limp legs, I plucked your nipple again. She loves me. You hovered somewhere just this side of sleep as I straight ened my fingers again to reach farther into you. You’ve always liked me to stroke the scalloplike slickness of your cervix with my fingertips, the sensation so deep, so intense and primal, that hidden bit of you found out and gently burnished as if such polishing could make it shine like gold. My fingers swim ming through the honeyed heat that had begun to seep out of you and trickle down along my wrist, you moaned, beginning to arch toward me in a slow agonized rhythm. I looked up at you, your hands on your breasts, fingers splayed, mauling your own soft flesh with the same insensible heartlessness with which your cat, in similar states of bliss, will knead her pin sharp claws into my thigh while I cringe and keep on petting her.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Oh—er, no,’ he replied, half turning his head but still shyly concealing his face. I took the three or four steps it required to cross the room and stand beside and slightly behind him. Outside, beyond where the light from our window fell, there was a deep inner well. The roof in which these rooms were built dropped steeply away, and facing us across the void were other similar dormers, unlit, their windows open into shadowy stillness. Above the roofline the sky was amorously transformed by the pink glare of the London dusk. I put my arm around Phil’s shoulder. He immediately began talking. ‘We can go on the roof,’ he said. ‘During the day the staff sunbathe up there. There’s a really good view.’ Nothing was going to get done unless I took command. Lifting my other hand I gripped his jaw, turned his head towards me and kissed him. Slowly, clumsily, as if being brought back to life, he swivelled round, put his arms around me and then held me extremely tight. I had wanted to kiss him for such a long time that I clung on, forcing my long, pointed tongue to the back of his throat; pulling out and biting his lips till I tasted the blood on my tongue. He was powerless and amazed. When I drew my head back a string of saliva swung between our mouths and I wiped it brutally from his chin. He had gone a deep, searching red. I tugged out the bottom of his T-shirt and slid it up over his rhythmic stomach. The T-shirt was very tight, so I only pushed it into a roll under his armpits and stretched across his hard, jutting tits; I twisted his nipples between my thumb and forefinger and then, holding his eyes with a passionate stare that at once felt almost cruel, I grabbed at his crotch, fumbled and tore open his fly, and pulled down his trousers and underpants to his knees. Through all this he stood, arms away from his sides, impassive, like a child in a doctor’s surgery, or someone being measured for a suit. He made no gesture towards me, except by a curious, serious facial expression: this was what he’d heard about, this was what he wanted us to do. His cock remained as inert as it always had in the showers: circumcised, wrinkled, self-contained as the rest of him; it seemed equally to await discovery. I held it in the palm of my hand and ran my thumb backwards and forwards over it as if it had been a pet mouse. Nothing happened—or if anything, it shrank a little. I was taking things too fast.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Keep your eyes skinned when you’re going for a walk or anything’ (here he rubbed his eyes quickly, carrying out my orders at once) ‘and if you do see him, and you’re really sure it’s him, why don’t you give me a ring?’ ‘All right,’ he said. I was glad I had made a little game or experiment out of it, and began already to look anxiously forward to it. We went back towards Phil, who had been left in the middle of the pavement. I grinned at his fidelity, his cleanness, the plump relief of his … copper’s helmet. Rupert shook hands with both of us and made off, looking about like anything. When he was out of view Phil and I walked up the short flagged path to the front door of Staines’s house; it was the left-hand portion of a spacious 1830s villa, with a woody privet hedge (the kind with rooms inside it large enough for a child to hide in) round the garden, and curtains at the downstairs windows drawn in a degenerate way suggestive of late rising and afternoon TV. Staines came to the door and welcomed the two of us with the air of a man who has a good appetite. As I thought when I had met him before at Wicks’s, there was someone strangely passionate and slavish holed up inside his immaculate clothes—today an almost transparent suit of sour cream Indian silk. ‘I’m so glad Charles got you ,’ he said. ‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Do you mean there have been others?’ ‘Oh, there was a frightfully old young man with bad breath who ran a printing press. He was around a lot last year, looking at everything. Happily Charles got rid of him, for being too snobbish.’ We went through into a drawing room with heavy theatrical curtains held back by tasselled cords, and floor-length windows open onto a terrace; a lawn and a huge weeping beech were visible beyond. A zealous sense of good taste pervaded the room: unread classics in the bookcase showed the uniform gilding of their spines, and the flowers could have graced a wedding of minor royalty. On a Sheraton side-table lay a vast, tooled portfolio; a crowd of framed photographs surmounted a mahogany writing-desk and gave the impression of a glamorous and sentimental past. Phil, trained to accommodate the whims of guests, seemed uncomfortable to be a guest himself. He hung back awkwardly, unable to get his hands in his pockets. ‘And what do you do?’ Staines asked him. ‘I’m a waiter.’ ‘Ooh.’

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  526 Lecture 77: James Joyce roused the Catholic priests against him, and he was politically ruined. His fall provokes a heated debate on Christmas day at the Dedalus house during Stephen’s childhood. Explaining to Davin why he won’t support the nationalists, Stephen echoes Mr. Casey’s Christmas speech about Ireland’s betrayal of its champions. Stephen scathingly calls Ireland “the old sow that eats her farrow.” He thus recalls the biblical Stephen, who— before he was stoned by order of the Jewish elders—argued that the Jewish people had repeatedly rejected their own prophets—right up to Christ. Like the biblical Stephen, a man of eloquence, Joyce’s Stephen aims to master language—in his case, the English language. His response to the opening words of the story shows his creative mind at work early. Language instantly takes a place in his mind. He sings a song that creatively transposes the words he has heard. He uses language to create a world around him. Words can be frightening, mystifying, or stimulating. Such words as “lazy, idle loafer” and “Foetus” menace him. Such phrases as “Tower of Ivory” mystify him until they stimulate him to discover their meaning. Though Eileen’s hands and hair suggest the Virgin Mary, they also initiate a process that brings Stephen to sexual experience. Approaching his fi rst sexual experience, Stephen feels a paradoxical combination of reverence, aggression, and passivity. He envisions the moment as a “holy encounter” wherein weakness and timidity will fall from him. He sees himself as a sexual aggressor. He sees himself as the passive, virginal object of lust. At the moment he’s taken by a prostitute, he feels like a child in the arms of its mother. The sexual experience that marks the end of chapter 2 takes its place in a traditional pattern of innocence, fall into sin, and repentance. As we move from chapter 1 to chapter 2, Stephen moves from boyhood innocence to lust. Like the biblical Stephen, a man of eloquence, Joyce’s Stephen aims to master language—in his case, the English language.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  This evening was windless, with high grand cloud that the afterglow made into dream-towers of pink. A hawk went over in the dusk as I climbed to the top, then there was a nagging squeak—I thought of a small night animal, but it was only a boy on a bike, braking and juddering around the steep rutted paths. Well, others could share the twilight too. There would sometimes be a couple with a dog, relishing the cool, or kids from the Flats, not quite ready to go in. Charlie said the queers went up by the wood at night, and I imagined them with a mixture of distrust and fascination. I leant on the trig-point, and saw the bike approaching again. What an effort to have walked it all the way up here, even if he came by the gentler climb from the other side. I was aware of the wheels wobbling by me, the squeak of the brake again, a plimsolled foot scraping for balance. It was Dawn. He fell against me, hand round my throat to keep him steady, so that I choked for a second, like in a fight. He let the bike slither under him across the path and hopped free of it while a wheel still lazily spun. Then there was a second embrace, an arm round my shoulder in apology and surprise. It seemed we were being matey: Dawn's arm stayed heavily where it was, his fingers absent-mindedly doodling on my collarbone. We gazed out at the glimmering pinky-mauve crag of cloud that stood motionless to the west. He was very warm from exercise, and lightly sweaty in a tracksuit—not the sleazy multi-coloured modern kind but the soft old navy-blue kind that was like a rugged form of undress, like slumberwear worn out of doors. I always felt disadvantaged in sports gear, and envied boys like Dawn who came to life in it. I was analysing the slight discomfort in our stance, a hollowness in my stomach, an ache down my thighs like I got on a high building. I raised my arm and rested it on his back. "I should have known I'd meet you up here," he said, with a hint of routine school jeering, and a hint of flattery too, as if I figured in his thoughts, a poetic type from the Lower Sixth who might be worth wary emulation. "I'm always up here," I said, to counter any suggestion it was his place, not mine. "Yeah, I come over on my bike sometimes, since we moved. We should arrange to meet up."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We hiked up the familiar paths, Dawn deliberately testing my loyalties with a good imitation of my uncle. Mimicry, like drawing, was one of his gifts, and both were literal and so at times unsettling. I responded with cowardly jabs and pinches, knowing that he would get me back later with some stifling, bare-breasted wrestling hold. It was still quite early and we wandered across the network of summer paths scuffed and scrawled through the dry grass; we didn't want to pitch our tent in the dark but felt self-conscious about doing so whilst walkers and lyrical late kite-fliers were still about. Probably the best place would be on the far side, the way Dawn came from home, where there would be shelter by the copse-like remains of ancient hedgerows. We circled back to the pond and sat on the bench, eating our scotch eggs and watching anglers packing up their gear. The boys among them trudged away with their rods and camp-stools like little old men. Behind them the silhouettes of pines and poplars were reflected and the sunset opened canyons of pink and ultrarnarine in the pond's muddy depths. "Better look out for the folding star," I said. "What is this folding star?" said Dawn, with the annoyance of hearing me keep saying it and having pretended before that he understood it. "Don't you know your Milton?" I said pityingly. "The star that bids the shepherd fold? As when the folding star arising shows His paly circlet? . . . Dear me." I put an arm round his muscly shoulders and squeezed. "It's when you know you've got to put the sheep all safely in the fold." He shrugged himself free. "What about putting the boys all safely in their tent?" he said. "Yeah." I couldn't actually see the star in question but maybe it was best to set about it. I was always spoiling things with my quotations—he saw them as a kind of sarcasm against himself. The Pilgrim took about five minutes to put up. Dawn dived into it as if scoring a try and when I looked in through the flap he seemed to take up all the space. I felt he'd laid a claim to it that I would never be able to challenge. I slid in alongside him, in the mackintosh-scented gloom, shocked by the lumps in the ground. "It's a good job we like each other," I said, slipping a hand between his legs and stroking his balls through the soft cotton of his tracksuit bottoms. "Just think. Nice. Antibes. Juan-les-Pins"—each name said with savoured French Oral vowels. "Mm."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "He isn't, I'm afraid. Not this one. He's a fat little fellow with asthma." I leaned in at the open door. Matt's right hand lay on the passenger seat still, its veins sexily fat and blue over the delicate bones, the nails shockingly bitten. I imagined it moving up my thigh as I sat beside him and we burned out of town. "Where is it you live?" "Just there. The white house on the corner." "It looks very grand." "Yes, doesn't it?" We gazed at it as if I was the lucky owner of the whole thing. "And who's that?" The wicket at the side had opened and an incredibly pretty boy with curly dark hair came out, checking his fly and looking pleased with himself. "Oh, that," I said wonderingly. Matt and I watched him go past on the other side of the street apparently quite unaware of our scorching attention. "Another of your cast-offs, don't tell me." He had turned and was craning through the polythene rear window of the hood to catch every last possible second of the sight of the young man. Then he swung back with a grin of lust. "How did you get on the other night?" "Okay, thanks." "You made out?" "Yep. I got lost for a few hours, but I made out in the end." He was nodding and staring: I was clearly meant to ask him the same question. "How about you? Did you find your builder?" "The fucker wasn't there. Or if he was he found someone else first. No, I ended up with your friend, the Frenchman, the Moroccan." Matt looked at me narrowly, like a sadistic child, knowing his words would have some effect but unsure what. "Ed, you ought to look after that man. He told me that he loves you, and he is wild. We fucked each other every which way." "Yes, Cherif’s good," I said, swallowing the passing heartburn of his remark. "But he's not really in love with me. And you forget that I am in love with someone else." He looked at me sceptically, and revved the rough-throated engine a couple of times. "What are you doing this evening?" I thought of one or two lies (going to a dance in a barracks, supper with Luc at a country hotel). "Oh, the usual," I said. "Chasing oblivion at the Cassette." "Have you been to the Town Baths yet?" "Do you mean a swimming-pool or something else?" "Yes, the swimming-baths. The Town Baths. Why don't you come with me for some hard exercise before your drinking begins?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I felt charmed, and a little intimidated—even though he laid the letter out as an inventive uncle might for a bright child, with a sketch at the bottom of himself disappearing under stacks of paper, and his name written with streaming tendrils for serifs, like the visiting-card of the South-West Wind in a children's book I'd had. I felt the ghostly oppression of work, the wrong way you had to do for money what you wouldn't do otherwise; I was thinking like a child who can't see the point of things, but whose questions to a jovial grown-up touch even so on some uncomfortable flaw. Then I saw myself, still about nine years old, sitting at Paul Echevin's immense desk, chin on forearm, in the first week of wintertime, in the teatime lamplight and gloom and the busy adult silence, lost in a world of words and pictures. It was dark on the stairs, dark in the room at the top, but the darkness there was like the darkness in films, where sleepers lie in blue shadow; or there was a phosphorescence in the air, the curtains, the sheets and pillowcase were mildly luminous. I stepped cautiously over dropped clothes, a screwed-up dress shirt, upsettingly jokey boxer-shorts, anxious above all not to tread on a pair of glasses. Luc was asleep, on his back, his pyjama-jacket open, his nipples wide, brown and rough, he held back the greedy duvet with a leather-gloved hand. I thought if I could unbutton that glove at the wrist and coax it off those long, nervous fingers it would be a very beautiful achievement. I perched on the edge of the bed and looked minutely at his stomach as it dropped with the long-delayed breaths of deep sleep, the tongue-tempting crevice of his navel. His anatomy was grand and somehow luminous itself, and where the blue veins thickened in his neck they seemed transparent, as in a model or a chart. The model of a man . . . I pressed back the bedclothes devoutly and saw his cock asleep in the heedless gape of his pyjamas. It was heavy and warm in my hand, silky, the skin slid back with an intimate moist whisper. When he opened his eyes I was the first thing he saw. He was too moved to smile, it was love like a tranced levitation, cosy and radiant like divisi strings, a saint's vision perhaps of the timeless in the humdrum. It was ours. His arms circled my head and brought me down to him.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was clear to me as we walked across the empty town that I had picked up a pretty heavy bore; every time I pushed the conversation gratingly towards men and sex he said "Yes, yes" as though he didn't quite understand, and then went on in his dogged English about Richard Adams. I began to wonder if he knew the Cassette was a gay bar. And then the Spanish girls, the voices in the woodwork, murmuring and shrieking in what felt like derision as I sat in Frits's lap in the armchair and slipped my hand inside his denim shirt and jiggled backwards and forwards on him until he had a big fat hard-on. "Yes," he said, "I began to know that the life of being in an office all day, every day, was not for me. I then needed to take time to find out what it was that I really wanted to do. I wanted to read good literature, and travel around the place. I had to get out of the mouse-market, Edward. I lifted the bedclothes a little and looked at his sleeping body in the greyish light, slumped, hairy, held in, it almost seemed, by a long brown hairless scar, the plump bud of his cock shifting and stiffening as he rose himself into the light of early dreams. Chapter 11 The next time I went to Luc's house, the door was opened by an anxious girl like a cockney parlour-maid, who eyed me up and down before standing aside: I stepped in over various boxes and the flex of a floor-polisher. Luc was trotting down the stairs. "Frightful bore," he said, in his most startling Englishism so far. "My father's coming to visit us, and all is on its ears." Mrs Altidore came out of the dining-room. "I can't have you in here," she said, frowning at us in turn and giving me at least a feeling of being linked with Luc in some wonderful delinquency. Luc himself was gaping and shrugging exaggeratedly, gently taking a rise out of her panic and its thin veil of disdain. If I hadn't been there she might have raised her voice or given him a harmless hit on the upper arm. She stooped and snatched up a small rug and shooed us towards the stairs with it. "Take Edward Manners up to your room, darling, and let Rosa and me get on." "But . . ."—Luc was beginning some further broad objections, just coloured, I thought, with a real unwillingness to have me up there. I thought for a flash of Julien Rostand's room, out at the coast, the protocols of an adult-free zone—"Prive, Danger de Mort".

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And why it has not been at all easy to get him to part with it. I've had to be quite flirtatious on the phone. However, I believe he will now lend it to us, and as the wing from Switzerland will arrive on permanent loan next month, we might well be able to reassemble a major lost work by the end of the year." "What a ghastly experience," said Maurice. "He was quite a handsome dentist," said Echevin with a teasing shake of the head. There was a moment of mutual adjustment, of taking the ethical temperature. I was feeling terrifically queer tonight, but none the less anxious not to alienate the strait-laced Maurice or lead him to suspect that under the benign curiosity I would show about Luc I was aching for the boy's arse and touch and lips and tongue and tits and legs and salty toes and involuntarily spurting cock. The talk ambled and clumped through dessert, prompted and set askew by drink. There was that common dinnerparty sense that no one truly knew what they were talking about, Helene, who played the piano, keen but clueless about music, Maurice with his fudged quotations and half-forgotten stories from the evening news, and me pretending to have half-forgotten books I had never read. Echevin, of course, truly knew about Edgard Orst, but when the talk turned to football and boxing, on which Inge had vigorous views, he was soon feinting and conceding. For a minute or two I played a game of introducing the name covertly into the chatter, as I remembered doing with long-ago infatuations, asking or rather telling Helene about Gluck, or swapping Cavalier quotes with Maurice, jealously watching him shape and just exactly mispronounce the word Lucasta, the darting buss with which it began, the upward and downward flicker of the tongue against the teeth. Then he said, firmly and uncorrectably, "If I have freedom in my love And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty." It was only when we returned to the other room and stood around with our coffee-cups, filling the contented pauses with long looks at the paintings, that I at last brought out my question: "I wonder if you taught my other pupil, the Altidore lad." Even to my ears it sounded deranged, bumblingly casual for the first few words and then, as the sacred name approached, slipping the gears with a reckless snarl. I tried to pass it off as a smothered belch, cough and sneeze. "What's that? Um . . . No." He took a sip of coffee, and looked around. "Don't be ridiculous," I felt like saying; but waited and then prompted: "He seems a very clever fellow."

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was fun, too, & we drank champagne and smoked Turkish cigarettes & sprawled on the benches. Eddy St Lyon was there with an actorish young man & winked at us hugely across the room; he has aged extraordinarily & looks ripe with corruption & self-abuse. At the next table some roughish characters were playing dominoes, a thick-set older man, a kind of foreman with his gang. S. was clearly somewhat preoccupied with one of them, eighteen or so, with grubby, sun-bleached hair & broad features: there was something both delicate & brutal about him, with dark stains spreading from the armpits of his shirt & preternaturally powerful, dirty hands that showed a surprising refinement when he pushed the dominoes out, or raised his beer-glass to his lips. When the glass was empty, S. reached over and half-filled it with champagne. The boy smiled candidly, revealing a broad gap in his front upper teeth which made me swallow & tingle with lust, & the ‘foreman’ looked across with pride and gratitude, as if we had somehow helped the boy with his education. When their game was over, S. told the youth that he wanted to draw him, & they arranged a time & shook hands on a price; I began to see how the mixed nature of the clientele worked to everyone’s advantage. After this Sandy rather basked in his own savoir-faire, & we ordered another bottle of champagne. I had noticed a solitary figure sitting across the room, also drinking freely, even heavily. He was slender, & beautifully dressed, of indeterminate age but clearly older than he wanted to be. He must in fact have been about 40, but his flushed appearance & what may well have been a discreet maquillage gave him an air of artifice & sadly made one feel that he must be older, not younger. He was not only by himself but in some heightened, almost dramatic way, alone. He squirmed & twitched as if a thousand eyes were on him, & then composed himself into a kind of harlequin melancholy, holding out his long ivory hands & admiring his polished nails. His gaze wd wander off & fix on some working-boy or freak until an appalling rasping cough, which seemed too vehement to come from within so frail & flowerlike a body, convulsed him, doubling him up into a hacking, flailing caricature. After these attacks he sat back exhausted & quelled the tears in the corners of his eyes with the back of his trembling hands. Otto took notice of this & said in his know-all familiar way: ‘Old Firbank seems to be in a bad condition.’ I asked him more, & he told me that the man was a writer. ‘He writes the most wonderful novels,’ said Otto, ‘all about clergymen, & strange old ladies, &—& darkies: you really ought to read him.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘You’re looking very big, Stan,’ I said, smiling at him teasingly. He was a hard man to clothe and at night often went out as he was now, his torso draped in the tatters of some sweat-scorched singlet, a broad leather belt (which he assured me came in handy) needlessly supporting pale old jeans rubbed thin under his bum and along the thick bolt of his cock. He once showed me a picture of how he looked at fifteen—tall and uncertain, and indifferently built. I think some sort of crisis about being gay had got him to the gym, which gave him both lovers and a new body. An element of defiance had made him a now almost unconscious exhibitionist. A lot of sex went on in the lock-ups of the Shaft, but one evening I had stumbled in for a piss to find Stan fucking a boy just inside the door. He had him with one leg cocked up on a washbasin and as he laid into his ass the bracket of the basin was breaking free of the wall, and the kid, who looked the younger and slighter in his giant grasp, rode up and down against his own breath-smeared reflection in the mirror. An ever-growing group of admirers deserted the dance floor and stood around feeling themselves and muttering encouragement. Phil was back with the much-jogged pints of beer. I craved liquid, and as I drank my dry palate seemed to admit the alcohol straight to my brain. ‘See you, sweetheart,’ said Stan, realising we would be no good to him—the endearment, as always when spoken by a real man, a virtual stranger, moving me for a few seconds intensely. Phil watched him amble off. ‘Some bloke grabbed my cock, at the bar,’ he said, in a tone which strove to combine pleasure and resentment and came out, neutrally, as a statement of fact. I drank and then kissed him, squirting cold lager into his mouth, though much of it, in his surprise, ran back down his chin. As I held him I could squeeze the sweat from his shirt where it clung down the channel of his back—so I took his drink from him, and helped him tug the wet garment off. The atmosphere was more and more liquid. Everyone was stripping off, and those who touched each other could cream off the sweat with a finger.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "You're absolutely right," I sighed, as though reluctantly admitting to some long-held secret. And I sensed further questions coming, the boy must be a bit drunk, but still he held back at the edge of this new terrain. I felt that for once I had aroused his curiosity: he was about to be interested in me and my friends. I glanced sideways across low tables where men were gossiping, some with their arms round each other, or snogging in the shadows. How was Luc with all this? A qualm of propriety came and went. They must be sick with envy seeing me with him, my face lit up by his aureole of young heat. "Let's get back to solving your problems," I said, so pleased to be invited in that I ignored how those problems might tangle with my own. I saw the pain alter his face, saw him weigh the difficulty of telling against the relief of it. He gazed at me abstractedly. Was I his buddy or his moral tutor? "I think maybe you won't know what I'm talking about," he said. "You're a very sensible, correct-minded kind of person. I think you are always in control of your own feelings, and maybe you don't have all so strong feelings about other people." Try me. "It's that very bad thing, where you are in love with somebody and think about them all the time but they are also your dear friend and you see them all the time too. But they are not in love with you. And every time you see them you feel more in love." "That is a bad sort of situation." "Sometimes I wanted to tell you in the lesson, but it is better to talk about books and current affairs." "Is that why you were so keen to go to Los Angeles in our last session? Well, you had a cold too." He slapped his hand on the counter. "I had a cold because I was out all night, standing in the rain under a certain person's window like a bloody idiot." "Your mother said you got it from her." It was too touching to think of him—the romantic semaphore of young love, the old courtly gestures, dreading to bring things to the point. I pictured us backing into each other, like rival serenaders in a comic opera. "My mother's like that, she always takes the blame." He smiled at me steadily: he seemed to find comfort in me. And my eyes were revelling gently over him. "The thing is, Edward, I fear I must certainly go to the gentlemen's."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  In my fantasies it changed, sometimes modest and strong, sometimes lolloping and heavy-headed, its only constants an easy foreskin, a certain presence, and a heather-honey beauty to it. He stepped out from the house behind Patrick and stood for a moment with an arm round his shoulder. I recoiled from the window as if from the flash of an explosion, and then came timidly back. Surely I couldn't be seen, they would never notice the adjustment of the blind, it was the last thing on earth they would expect. I felt the need and the humiliation at once, and it took a while to learn the voyeur's confidence of being unseen. A hundred metres apart, Luc had told me the houses were, which only went to show how little he cared for accuracy, or how little he had ever noticed, or imagined that his pointless answer to a pointless question would ever be checked and charged as it was now, that it would be the distance between him and me. He was twenty, thirty yards away. He had vanished. When he came back it was with Sibylle, and a plate of white bread rolls and a pot of jam. The three sat barefoot side by side on the steps and I could hear their voices, though not what they said. Sibylle competently sliced the rolls in half, daubed them with jam, and passed them along to the boys, who hunkered forward to avoid the crumbs. I hadn't seen Luc eating before. When he had finished, Patrick looked him in the face and said something and Luc's tongue came out and licked up an apricot stain. Then there was a little spat, Luc nudged Patrick like a naughty child at table, and almost pushed him off the edge of the step into a japonica bush. Both boys stood up grinning and shielding their faces with their hands and Luc capered backwards down the lawn. I had the strongest sense of his just having got out of bed and pulled on that thin blue jersey with perhaps nothing beneath, and those old red calf-length ducks. I watched him ankle-rocking until he saw that the game was over and dawdled back to the house. They all went inside, leaving the plate and a coffee-mug on the steps. Oh, they were only kids, they were only camping out: if Patrick's parents had been there, they would have had a table, a tray, napkins, a cafetière. It touched me terribly the way they just roosted in the place and did without the adult protocols. Time passed. The sun climbed and cleared. Flies buzzed between the blinds and the glass. And still the window on our neighbours' porch stood open, the cup and plate sat on the steps, yesterday's towels swung slightly on the line.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  One entered from the street by pushing back the dirty red curtain in the doorway beside an unlettered shop window, painted over white but with a stencil of Michelangelo’s David stuck in the middle. This tussle with the curtain—one never knew whether to shoulder it aside to the right or the left, and often tangled with another punter coming out—seemed a symbolic act, done in the sight of passers-by, and always gave me a little jab of pride. Inside was a small front room, the walls bearing porn-mags on racks, and the glossy boxes of videos for sale; and there were advertisements for clubs and cures. In a locked case by the counter leather underwear was displayed, with cock-rings, face masks, chains and the whole gamut of dildoes from pubertal pink fingers to mighty black jobs, two feet long and as thick as a fist. As I entered, the spotty Glaswegian attendant was getting stuck into a helping of fish and chips, and the room stank of grease and vinegar. I idled for a minute and flicked through some mags. These were really dog-eared browsers, thumbed through time and again by those rent-boys who had the blessing of the management and waited there for pick-ups; curiously incredible stations of sexual intercourse, whose moving versions, or something similar, could be seen downstairs. I looked at the theatrical expressions of ecstasy without interest. The attendant had a small television behind the counter which was a monitor for the films being shown in the cinema; but as there was no one else in the shop he had broken the endless circuit of video sex and was watching a real TV programme instead. He sat there stuffing chips and oozing batter-covered sections of flaky white cod into his mouth, his short-sighted attention rapt by the screen, as if he had been a teenaged boy getting his first sight of a porn film. I sidled along and looked over his shoulder; it was a nature programme, and contained some virtuoso footage shot inside a termite colony. First we saw the long, questing snout of the ant-eater outside, and then its brutal, razor-sharp claws cutting their way in.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I loved the idea of that, perhaps we both had these great vacancies—these grandes vacances —to fill. On the other hand what would we talk about . . . We hardly knew each other; he was already coloured in my mind by being in Drake, with their drab plum strip. He was handsome, he'd been a rather hopeless Orsino last term, but his strong physique and violet tights had given the role another kind of interest. He turned towards me and jutted his chest out, with a body-builder's deep breath, and hooked up his other arm. "Feel that," he said, nodding at it. The light was failing, there was a moment's uncertainty. "Go on." I ran my hand over the gathered biceps, then played down my approval—actually, I wasn't interested in muscles, except as part of the knot of manhood and the tightening hold it had on me. He rocked his bosom against mine, as if he had a girl's big tits. I could feel his hard nipples through our two layers of cotton. It was the sort of dumb sport you imagined them passing the time with in Drake. I was dying for him. He reached down quickly and grabbed at my stiff cock. "What do we have here?" he asked facetiously as I ducked backwards with a giggled gasp of protest. But his hand was still on my shoulder. "Oh, come on," he said in American, and pulled me slowly back towards him. "I saw you getting a root that time on the train." "When?" I said. "I had one, too." This was too much what I wanted. I thought, I am in a higher form than this person, I'm writing a lot of sonnets, I can speak Dutch, in fact I'm going to write a sonnet-sequence in Dutch. He took my hand gently and rubbed it against his tracksuit, where his cock was a hard ridge held sideways in tight underwear. Why was I ashamed to be seduced by him? "Let's do this," he whispered, right up against me, the first time I'd ever heard anyone breathe my own thoughts like that. There were voices close by, and I broke away. An oldish couple who might have been standing in the gloom for ages. I sort of recognised them. They admired the sublimity of the sky, some stratospheric wind just teasing the top of the cloud over into an anvil point, the lower parts darkening through lilac to powerless storm-grey. Oh, why didn't they just fuck off? The man, in a cap, half-stumbled on Dawn's prostrate bike. "That must be the Ashringford road," the wife said, gesturing at distant lights. I looked at Dawn, and found he was looking steadily at me. This was the real thing, we were going to do it. Our expectant silence must have been palpable to the others; as they disappeared down the steep path I heard the wife's crisp "I don't know", and wondered what the murmured question had been.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I suppose I should have foreseen such casual and incurious asking of the hardest questions. I had the sense again of being guided deep down by motives too tenuous to explain. It was something to do with growing up in a singer's household, to the daily accompaniment of art, and with this little old city being famous for its music and pictures; I couldn't quite admit to myself the uncertainty I felt already at its deadness, its air of a locked museum, the recognition that what had happened had all been centuries ago. I said, "Well, I wanted to use my Dutch—my mother's family was Dutch, I studied it at school. I think you learn these things, then you discover a use for them." Over the past month of muttered revision I had imagined conversations that ran more smoothly, where the cheery exempla of the grammar book gave way to passionate declarations. He started to refer to all the money I had, and I said, "But that's everything I've got, I'm terribly poor!" I patted the pad of notes zipped in my jacket pocket and he looked at me with a friendly scepticism, that said he knew about the traveler's cheques folded among my shirts in the hotel cupboard, and my reliable background, how I could never fall through the net. And it was with a little bourgeois shock that I finally read the message of his eyes, the pupils shrunk to black pinpoints. I didn't know whether to mention it or not, wasn't totally sure I was right. Drugs frightened me and moved me to an impotent desire to help. I bought both the following rounds—I couldn't pretend that they weren't within my means; he accepted them with a hint of irritation, as though to have thanked me would have been an admission of his dependency. I was the victim of a con, in a way, someone who didn't know him, a fresh fool, on the first night of my capricious little exile, drunk and hungry for contact. Sometimes he scratched at his chest with a thumbnail, and the tiny crackle of chest-hairs under the cotton of his polo-shirt filled me with a wondering sense of his whole body, as keen as if he'd been leaning by me naked. I offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head contemptuously. "I've got to get hold of some money," he said, looking away from me, pretending to accept my plea of poverty. I saw it was all over, I hadn't worked out for him; he hadn't even told me his name. I thought of him simply as Rose. Rose of the Rose Tattoo! I suspected it wasn't worth explaining the literary joke. I muttered, "What is it you're on?" He was silent, I'd have thought rather vain if I hadn't felt his desperation. "Bad stuff," he said at last, firmly, but he wouldn't reveal what. Then, with unconvincing interest, "So who are you going to be teaching English to?"