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 Folding Star (1994)

  I heaved a big sigh and Luc started working on his backlog ofdrinks. "So," I said, resuming a conversation that he seemed quite prepared to let drop, "do you still want to leave the country?" It was mad of me to persist, I was grasping for evidence that could only upset me, but to be in his confidence was itself like love and I was thirsty for more. "Well, of course, I still do want to go to Dorset. But not maybe so far as LA! It would be nice not to be always in this town, where I have lived all my life and where my family have lived since the thirteenth century—but—" There was bragging in his complaint, and I felt the crisis was probably over. "You know how it is, sometimes, things get worse and worse, and then you attain a point when you think, I just want to get out of here and start all over again from scratch bottom." I laughed and puzzled him for a second. "I do know what you mean. Maybe that's why I'm here and not in England." He raised his eyebrows and leant forward as if this was especially astonishing, but in fact he was indicating someone hovering behind me, as the hand of another farcical interruption landed firmly on my shoulder. "So we meet again." The wrong-note matiness of Ronald Strong—it grated on Luc as well, I was glad to see. I turned and smiled at him for five seconds, then said quietly, "Piss off." He pushed against me, grinning. You'd think I'd just offered him a drink. He nodded at Luc and rocked up and down on the balls of his feet as if warming up for one of his famous work-outs. "My name's Rodney, by the way," he said. But Luc, firm, a little frightened by my reaction, glanced away. "Well, catch you both later," said Rodney, slapping me on the shoulder again and moving confidently off. I saw someone eye him up. Luc swallowed the rest of his beer, and put down the glass with a hesitation that disguised a tremble. "It's impossible to talk in here", he said, adding, "where you seem to know everybody." "I'm sorry, darling, we'll talk another time." My god, I'd called him darling. I pressed on, "Actually, I was going to suggest we might go out for a drive to some nice old place one day—you could show me some of your country." "Instead of a lesson?" "If you like." I put some detail on it. "Matt's got a sort of jeep, we could go in that." "Will Matt be coming with us?" "Oh no, I don't think so." "Oh." Then, "Yes, that would be lovely"—and he gave me a smile that had me gasping and gripping the bar. Luc's zip had snagged on a fold of the lining. He tugged the toggle up and down, but it was jammed. "What a bloody thing!" he nattered.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  To wear the overall Chanel look was to make a statement about youth and modernity. Once this took hold, it was hard for young women to resist the call. Finally, from the beginning she made sure her clothes were seen everywhere. Observing other women wearing such clothes stimulated competitive desires to have the same and not be left out. Coco remembered how deeply she had desired men who were already taken. They were desirable because someone else desired them. Such competitive impulses are powerful in all of us, and certainly among women. In truth, the boater hats she originally designed were nothing more than common objects anyone could buy in a department store. The clothes she first designed were made out of the cheapest materials. The perfume was a mix of ordinary flowers, such as jasmine, and chemicals, nothing exotic or special. It was pure psychological magic that transformed them into objects that stimulated such intense desires to possess them. Understand: Just like Chanel, you need to reverse your perspective. Instead of focusing on what you want and covet in the world, you must train yourself to focus on others, on their repressed desires and unmet fantasies. You must train yourself to see how they perceive you and the objects you make, as if you were looking at yourself and your work from the outside. This will give you the almost limitless power to shape people’s perceptions about these objects and excite them. People do not want truth and honesty, no matter how much we hear such nonsense endlessly repeated. They want their imaginations to be stimulated and to be taken beyond their banal circumstances. They want fantasy and objects of desire to covet and grope after. Create an air of mystery around you and your work. Associate it with something new, unfamiliar, exotic, progressive, and taboo. Do not define your message but leave it vague. Create an illusion of ubiquity—your object is seen everywhere and desired by others. Then let the covetousness so latent in all humans do the rest, setting off a chain reaction of desire. At last I have what I wanted. Am I happy? Not really. But what’s missing? My soul no longer has that piquant activity conferred by desire. . . . Oh, we shouldn’t delude ourselves—pleasure isn’t in the fulfillment, but in the pursuit. —Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais Keys to Human Nature By nature, we humans are not easily contented with our circumstances. By some perverse force within us, the moment we possess something or get what we want, our minds begin to drift toward something new and different, to imagine we can have better. The more distant and unattainable this new object, the greater is our desire to have it. We can call this the grass-is-always-greener syndrome , the psychological equivalent of an optical illusion—if we get too close to the grass, to that new object, we see that is not really so green after all.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  He was looking up, visualizing the game, the field, his blue-and-grey Patriots. My eyes dilated, I took him in deeper, the pale sweep of his jaw, his throat, the thin adolescent cords rising along its length. His shirt was off because it was summer. Because it didn’t matter. There were two fingers of dirt on his collarbone from earlier that afternoon, when we planted the baby apple tree in Buford’s backyard. “Are we close?” I asked, not knowing what I meant. The voices roared, straining through the crackle. “Yeah. I think we got this.” He lay back, beside me, the dirt crunching under his weight. “Okay, so fourth down basically means this is our last chance—are you with me?” “Uh-huh.” “Then why you staring at the ceiling?” “I’m with you.” I propped my head up with my palm and faced him—his torso a faint blaze in the half-dark. “I’m with you, Trev. Fourth down.” “Don’t call me that. It’s Trevor. Full and long, alright?” “Sorry.” “It’s fine. Fourth down means it’s all or bust.” On our backs, shoulders almost touching, the thin film of heat formed between our skins as the air thickened with the men’s voices, the crowd’s corrosive cheers. “We got this. We got this,” his voice said. His lips moved, I imagined, the way they do in prayer. It seemed he could see through the roof, to the starless sky—the moon that night a gnawed bone above the field. I don’t know if it was him or me who shifted. But the space between us grew thinner and thinner as the game roared on, and our upper arms grew moist, touched so lightly neither of us noticed it happening. And maybe it was there in the barn that I first saw what I would always see when flesh is pressed against the dark. How the sharper edges of his body—shoulders, elbows, chin, and nose—poked through the blackness, a body halfway in, or out of, a river’s surface. The Patriots soared through their winning touchdown. The crickets ignited across the low shifting grass around the barn. Turning to him, I felt their serrated legs through the floor beneath us as I said his name, full and long; I said it so quiet the syllables never survived my mouth. I drew closer, toward the wet salted heat of his cheek. He made a sound almost like pleasure—or maybe I just imagined that. I went on, licking his chest, his ribs, the flare of hair on his pale belly. And then the heavy clank as the helmet tipped backward, the crowd roaring. — In the bathroom with the pea-soup walls, the grandma rolls a freshly boiled egg over the boy’s face where, a few minutes ago, his mother had flung an empty ceramic teapot that exploded on the boy’s cheek.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  He put his arm around me. “I made a mistake, too. I’ve thought a lot about it. You remember when you were bidding on the same job as Leroy?” I nodded. “Well,” Duffy continued, “you were willing to step aside to make sure Leroy got that job. And you told me the butches weren’t welcome at the union meeting. I asked you to wait till after the strike to deal with it. It wasn’t that I thought your grievance wasn’t as important. I only had so much energy to deal with everything, But maybe that’s how it seemed to you. I’m sorry, Jess. If I could do it again, ’'d bring Leroy and all of the butches to that next meeting and say to the guys, ‘Here we all are, we’re the union!’ I think I made a mistake too.” Tommy and Duffy were the only two men who had ever apologized to me. “I gotta go,” I told him. “You're gonna be late.” “Wait!” he held up a gloved hand. “T have something for you.” He unlocked his car door and handed me a wrapped present. “After I found out we won the strike, I got this for you.” Duffy looked embarrassed as he handed it to me. He took off his glove and shook my hand. “Goodbye, Jess. Thanks.” “Thanks for what?” He smiled. “Thanks for teaching me so much.” He turned and walked away. Stone Butch Blues 109 I walked home in the snow, trying not to think about anything. When I got home I realized I was still carrying the package. It was wrapped up in an AFL-CIO newsletter and it had a gold bow that looked left over from Christmas. It was a book, an autobiography of a woman labor organizer named Mother Jones. Inside the front cover, Duffy had written: To Jess, with great expectations. I went to the window and looked out over the mounds of snow, wishing I could do everything in my life once as practice and then go back and do it again. I sat at the bar and smoked nervously, waiting for Edna to arrive. Justine raised one eyebrow. “She’s not here yet?” “Who?” I asked innocently. Justine smiled and raised her glass in a toast. ““To love,” she said, “or is it lust?” My defenses crumbled. “TI just know that I wait all week to see her and when Ido ...” “Uh-oh,” Justine laughed. “Does she feel the same way?” I shrugged. “I think she likes me.” Justine leaned forward. “So what’s the problem, darlin’?”’ 10 = Leslie Feinberg “T don’t know. She’s single, ’'m single. There’s no law against it, right?” Justine didn’t answer. “T don’t know, Justine, it just doesn’t feel right. I mean, Jan’s my friend. She’s told me stuff, confided in me. It would never be right again with me and Jan. But then when I see Edna, I want her so much it hurts.” Justine didn’t say a word. “Say something,” I pleaded.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  knocked from me, my orchids were tossed to the ground as “Leather Pants” marched on. “I think she likes you,” the farmer remarked, gathering my orchids and wrapping them for me. “I don’t think so. She practically knocked me over, ” I an swered, attempting to regain my coolness because my body was vibrating with both pain and pleasure while I watched her escape. “Well, she asked me to give this to you.” In his hand was the fateful molested rose. Lingering behind her at a safe but interested distance, I watched as she browsed through a few veggie stands before darting across the street and into the Coffee Shop, a trendy restaurant on the Square. Once inside, I didn’t see her. Where could she have disap peared to that quickly? With flower in hand, I followed my feminine instincts and went directly to the ladies’ room. The door of one stall was open. I could hear a steady tinkle penetrating the ice cold water in the bowl of the toilet. She stood facing the tank as I peeked in, the toilet seat up, her magnificent naked ass exposed like an epiphany. Her leather pants were down around her knees as she straddled the toilet bowl. Ms. Thing was peeing standing up as if using a men’s urinal—a woman after my heart. As she finished, without turning around she said, “Don’t just stand there, come in here and lock the door behind you.” Standing directly behind this insanely beautiful woman with her pants down around her legs, I slammed the door shut, dropping my shoulder pack and flowers on the floor. Seizing her from behind, I wrapped myself around her like a depraved fiend. One of my hands fondled a breast quite warm to the touch. Arousal swept over me like a wildfire threatening

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  soaked pussy, you ground against me with an agonized sound and I tried to lick faster, wishing my mouth into a blur of spit and muscle to please you. You made the noise, and my clit throbbed in sympathy. The noise, not just any noise, not to be mistaken for any lesser sex cry. In the nineteenth century it was believed that the Bird of Paradise had no legs and thus could never land, that it had to fly the heavens forever in its shockingly extravagant robe of feathers. Is that why your cry sounds like some fantastic bird, because of your desperation to land and your inability to do so quite yet, from the sudden realization that the plumes of sen sation are not enough when you begin to writhe from having flown so hard for so long? Your breath came in gasps, your muscles taut as harp strings, shuddering, and I rammed into you hard, dropping gears suddenly into the kind of all-out fuck I’d wanted to give you all along. You made the noise a second time and groaned, hoarsely begging me please, please. Your throat went rigid with a soundless scream, an out raged howl tearing through you as I fucked you hard and harder, eating your clit with toothscrapes now, knuckles mashing against the entrance of your clasping hole with each stroke. Somehow you caught one enormous gulp of air, but I wasn’t ready to let you come down yet. I nudged that infa mous spot inside you with my fingertips, Morse code telling you to come for me again, again, again, tongue lashing at you as insanely as I could. You had to come again, my fingers in sisted, one more time, for me. Your fingers left my head and I knew, as surely as I knew you would only come for me again if I forced you, that you were twisting your own nipples far more cruelly than I ever would have, enchanted past the point of pain by merciless need.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was astonished. I was gesturing for a drink with one hand, not wanting to miss a moment, a single muscular movement of his face. When he smiled there was a fleck of spinach above a tooth at the side and I hungered to suck it away. "What are you sorry about, and why are you glad? I was going to say sorry for barging in on your drink." "No, no." He sighed and looked down. "We've all been, you know, arguing. Sibylle and Patrick are my dear friends but this is the first time we have been together all week. We went out for our dinner, and it was terrible, and then we had to have a drink, to show we didn't just want to go home, though I think we all did!" "Oh. What were you arguing about?" I was looking at his down-turned head, but also at the veins standing out on his long hands loosely cupped between his thighs; I didn't care what they'd been arguing about, I felt a ridiculous contentment at having him to myself, amazement that we hadn't done this long before. "It's very difficult to explain, I feel very embarrassed." He took a slurp from his fresh drink. "Well, it's, of course, all to do with love." "Mmm." "And as we all know by now, the course of true love never did run straight." "Exactly." "You're much older than me, maybe you can tell me what to do," he said. I studied my thumbs responsibly, wounded, honoured, and when I looked up he was smiling, not quite at me but over my shoulder. "Hi," he said. There was a quick bloom of scented body-lotion, a hand squeezing the back of my neck. Matt was back. He ducked vaguely for a kiss and his gelled hair was cold on my cheek. "Hi," he said quietly, nodding slyly at Luc. "I didn't know I'd see you two in here." "Well, here we are," I said, with a self-satisfaction that made Matt smile. "As it happens, we were just having a terrifically private talk." "Oh, it's not important—" said Luc, who was gazing happily at Matt as if he were his special hero. And he did look glamorous, in his crook's suit and cashmere overcoat, and with his sapphire stud. "No problem. I'll see you soon," he said, moving on down the bar, patting Luc on the shoulder as he went, as though he were a promising pupil of his, not mine. I followed him with my eyes and he turned smiling and made a fisting gesture—I shook my head slightly to say it was not alas like that. He started talking to one of the leather-men. As far as I could see he had something for him in his pocket. "I think that guy Matt must be gay," said Luc.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  One or two youngsters were squatting on the basin's damp surround: they had the ghetto-blaster, tuned in to some night-time station high on nostalgia—Herman's Hermits, then Village People, zapped from time to time by meteorite bleeps and whines and the continental jabber of adjacent wavelengths. I loafed out with all the smothered expectation of a teen date, hands in pockets. One of the boys called out, "Hallo, how are You!" and when I got to them we shook hands and inspected each other in the shadowed flame of a Bic lighter. Then darkness again. Someone said he'd seen me in the Cassette, someone else thought he had too. There was a mood of bland concurrence, as a large plastic bottle was nudged into my hand and Dusty Springfield mentioned smokily that she just didn't know what to do with herself. One of my companions sang along, anticipating the words and getting them wrong. Still, there was drink. I tilted the denting carboy to my lips and chewed incredulously on a mouthful of orange-juice. Each yew-niche was a place of available secrecy, and I loitered round the circle, finding out what was going on. From some came steady little rhythms, or muttered encouragements, or deep, delayed intakes of breath, as pleasure turned serious. From some came girlish giggles and whispering. Some seemed empty and silent; or a solitary cigarette glowed and dimmed. I came round again, with slightly put-on carelessness, aware that I must be more visible to whoever was waiting there than they were to me. I got the impression from a smoker's ember-light of a fair-skinned mask, an upturned leather collar. I wished I had my leather jacket on, that I had planned all this. Was Matt still here? Had he met his builder? Was that beautiful man fucking a few feet away? Or was he off in the wood, beyond the torch-light, dead leaves in his hair and damp earth pressed into his back, mastered by his bricklaying colossus? I passed the alcove again, in a dither of lust and reluctance, and heard something murmured—just a throat-clearing perhaps, a manly Gitane-burble of readiness, of mere presence . . . And where the hell was Cherif? A spasm of jealous annoyance carried me in.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He was a type I often liked, a stone or more over-weight: I guessed his backside looked like mine would have done in tight, sweat-darkened cycling-shorts—he made the whole idea of me by implication rather sexy. He also wore a zipped-up tracksuit top and the stacked rubber running-shoes which since my night with Luc exercised a confusing appeal. His calves were hairy and I thought his arse might be too if I got to lick the thick buried cord behind his balls and stab my tongue a little way into his muscly hole. My fantasy flowed out and caressed him—I felt light-headed with fatigue and with relief at having someone other than Luc in my sights; for a minute or more I was absorbed in this solid substitute, and when he turned to face me, twisting, bobbing, high-stepping like a horse, I carried on looking at him with what must have been an oddly simple expression of welcome. He loped back round towards me, his cock and balls compact but emphatic; I was making the best of his rather loose mouth, the coarse hair squashed under the alice-band of his personal stereo. He nodded vaguely, but I saw it was only to the thrust of the music—it seemed he hardly took me in as he thumped past. I turned with a snigger of regret, torn already between dispraising him and a spurt of envy for the runners' world that I had always loved but never entered.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘All right, Charlie?’ said the black man genially, amazingly. ‘You remember my young friend William.’ ‘How are you, William.’ He shook my hand too, in a casual fashion, and gave a drugged grin. ‘Come to see the show.’ He looked along to Aldo and Bobby, who clearly needed no introduction, and closing his eyes and biting his lower lip ground his hips around slowly, as if dancing to some very sexy music in his head. I was nearly shocked by this, and dazed and gulping like an innocent. Though he was twice my age I fancied Abdul crazily, was seriously moved by him. I remembered how I had watched those places where his black, black skin disappeared into his white chef’s uniform, the wrists and the long, thick neck, and the awareness I had of his body. As he turned away I followed him with what was probably a look of stricken devotion. It was the high, haunted African brow, and the high, rolling African ass, and the long, dangling, fishing, musical hands. Staines came rattling back in at this point, carrying a camera on a tripod, its legs unsplayed making it tall and unwieldy. I suppose it was inevitable that it would be a film, that this swaying, powerful chef, with all his virile elegance, would be doing something with these common little waiters. I was surprised to remember that Charles had told me there was no dining at Wicks’s on a Sunday evening. But I was staggered to think that he—and Staines—could actually lure the staff elsewhere and make them act out those fantasies which they must have fathered in sly glances over their fatty beef, soapy veg and boiled school puddings. What bizarre transactions and transitions must have taken place. The whole thing had that achieved bizarrerie which made it normal to the participants, demonic to the outsider. Staines’s hand was on my shoulder. ‘It’s the very last bit, dear,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be the most wonderful film ever. We’ve been doing it for months now—a cast of tens … I thought you’d like to see us polish it off in this sensationally sensational scene.’ ‘I don’t know,’ I hesitated. The backdrop, cracked in places where it had been rolled up, took on an air of redundant charm as the lights were switched on, isolating an area of tawdry small-ness in which the action was clearly to unfold.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  For a moment, to my surprise, I was frozen with sympathy for his poor mother, provoked by her son when he ought to have been at school and she was at her most vulnerable. Then I thawed under the hot blast of illicit opportunity: perhaps Luc didn't mistrust me after all, it was only a guilty projection of the love he had never even suspected. He was so unknown, he was still all possibility, unopened cupboards and drawers and hastily straightened single bed . . . I took a step or two and the boards cracked loud enough to be heard in the street. I looked down on the bed I had dreamt about. The crimson bedspread was worked elaborately in twining gold thread, long art-nouveau filaments that blossomed at the head into crumpled white lilies; I thought it might have been a dry-run for one of his mother's altar-cloths. I pulled it back and stared at the bolster in its loose sleeve, pummelled and askew, shoved round, perhaps, in a spasm of dreaming or in the clumsy fight of waking up; and the white duvet with blue piping, rucked and bunched and bursting at its buttons. I stooped to breathe it in, laundry and cotton and the merest hint of manscent, a lost trace of sleep and dull boy's breath. I pulled the cover back to where it had been, and sat on it for a moment to recreate the hollow he had made.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  They were not to Cherif’s taste, however. He was mooching about, shaking his head and scratching his balls, in front of a hellish-paradisal Bosch. Later he told me he had cruised men there before: he didn't know much about painting, but he knew the deeper drift of museum days, the art compulsion of the single man, reflections in the glass that screens some dark old martyrdom, the licence to loiter and appraise, the tempo of pursuit from room to room . . . I came alongside and we pointed in turn at the viler mutations in the Garden of Delights: the pig-bottomed lady, the slug gentleman, the whore with lobster claws. My friend pushed back the staid tweed cap which gave his brown features and dull black curls a touching air of displacement and grinned at me in a manner unclouded by questions of art history. We wandered on past the sour sermons of still-lifes (the fly on the lemon, the perishable plenty) and across the hall into the deserted galleries where later pictures hung: waxen historical tableaux, brown cottage scenes, dusks of phosphor and violet, the Sphinxes and Athenas of the local Symbolists. And one of these did extend a troubled greeting—a woman with disordered red hair, ruby earrings, one breast uncovered: I stooped to read the printed title: "Edgard Orst: 'Jadis Herodias, quoi encore?' " To the badged butch lady-guard, who stepped from one room to the next to keep us in view, we must have seemed a couple tired of each other's company, killing time, hoping that art might help us through a rainy Sunday, but finding ourselves as bored by the pictures as she was. Cherif caught my eye and I swallowed at the secret certainty of our plan. Even at the Mykonos, I thought, Cherif, in his brown leather jerkin and working-man's boots, might appear too rough and set on mischief to be admitted. But that was only British class pudeur—the receptionist nodded to him equably as the key was handed over. (And then I thought, perhaps Cherif had brought his custom here before; and wasn't there something shrewd and cold-blooded about the desk-clerk himself, doubling and trebling as barman and hooverer of the TV lounge?) The moment I had locked the door he was on to me, chewing and stuffing my mouth and knocking my glasses up skew-whiff over the top of my head. He was an animal, that great thing for someone else to be. A second or two later he was grinding one hand up and down on my bum and with the other guiding me down to rub his cock where it stood out hard and at an angle in his loose old jeans.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  again and call me Sir and Sir and Sir please Sir please ow otv otv Sir please Sir please Sir please may I come and I say word by word as I bring him all the way out of my mouth, On the count of three you may come, yes, you may come, yes, one, two, three, and he shouts and cries and screams and my face and throat are wet-hot and spunky and poor Jason shivers and shakes like a dying old jalopy and comes some more and finally starts calming down and bends himself into a little ball and com mences sobbing in my arms. When he’s fully quiet and start ing to doze I turn him softly on his belly and use his own gism and my own spit as lube, settle myself deep in his ass and pull up gently on his hair. He raises his ass to meet me as I move and starts to move himself up and down for me while I ride on his hipbones and watch his hole darken as he takes me in, then pink up as he lets me out, darken and pink, darken and pink. I remember the first time that I fucked Jason and how I will fuck him again and again just as long as forever, knowing I will never stop until I have done the impossible and satisfied myself with the grace of his cock in every sense. I ride and I ride and I ride, holding myself in check until he’s rasping and shoving himself back on me, clawing at the sheets and I can feel his asshole twitch, and then at last at last I let myself go. From Lip Service bat do you want your name to be?’’ Candy asked. We were sitting in her office. She was sipping espresso, and I was holding my hands together so she wouldn’t see them shaking. “Does every phone therapist have a pseudonym?” I asked. Candy said they did. “First for protection, but also because for some of us it’s easier to separate and become someone else on the phone.” “Alice,” I responded, surprised at how easily I had chosen the name. Alice. I could see her. Alice was my graduate stu dent. Able to see the wonder in this new world. Alice, who was bright, brave, and just bad enough to enjoy all this. For the next twenty minutes, Candy briefed me on my first caller. “Bill and his wife were patients here for several years,” she explained. “He’s an extremely large man and his wife found it painful to have intercourse with him. After many years of rejection, he developed performance problems and

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  With my first kick from the edge the pockets of my shorts filled heavily with water. After two or three more captious strokes they were dragging at my hips and I had to dart a hand down to tug them back . . . I felt with my feet and could just stand tiptoe. Not daring to hallo myself out in a rash denuding surge at the side, I hopped and then toilingly strolled towards the shallow end, startled by the shout of a strong swimmer swimming laps, a wordless bark was all he had time for as his head plunged in again and I sprawled backwards to get out of his way, knocking into a stout woman with a stately, slow-moving head held high and a kick under-water like a mule. I stayed crouching and randomly splashing in the shallows, exaggerating the bruise the woman's kick had inflicted, and whining inwardly like a child who wants an excuse to go home. I moved around enough to bring any of the other men who were waiting or resting between laps into the welcoming circle of my close vision, but there was no one I knew, there was no one special, until at last I saw Matt and waved and gave a derisive, laddish shout. He stared for a moment, then turned his back on me as I roamed towards him and I had almost put my hand on his shoulder before I realized it wasn't him. Then some kids came threshing past in the fury of a race and a fight mixed up together, and mixed up in their wake a further shout and rush, an arm from behind throttling me, thighs locked piggyback round my hips as I stumbled forward and under in a horrified welter. When I struggled up, gasping and mad, the grip relaxed, he slipped off my back and turned me in his arms quite lover-like. "Matt, you stupid fucking cunt!" He was dazzling with his hair flattened, the cheap flash of a sapphire ear-stud and his unapologetic sideways grin. I wanted to slap his face, but just held back as he said, "Did I frighten you?" and splashed some snot off my upper lip. We were standing a few feet in from the end almost in an embrace; the pool was navel-high.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I've known about it for two or three years now: it's an astonishingly beautiful seascape, nearly abstract, just three zones, sea, sky and shore, very brooding and intense." We hummed appreciatively. "I wonder what the connection is between that and the woman at the mirror," I said. "Ah well . . ." rumbled Maurice. "It is rather one of his things," said Echevin, smiling to cover the implication that I might have been expected to know. "You probably noticed several pieces next door where he frames apparently unconnected subjects together. Sometimes there is a clear symbolic relation between them, sometimes the poetry I suppose lies in their mysterious difference, like images in a dream. He speaks of them as being shrines of a mood or a memory—he hoped for an attitude of mystic contemplation in the viewer." I nodded. I sort of did know that; and was sorry to have forced the recital of the point. "I want to hear about the middle bit, then," I said. "Now, the middle bit," said Echevin again with the sweet glow of discovery, a warm crinkling about his large pale eyes, "is what I found almost by accident when I went to Munich in the summer for the big Symbolist show. I met a man at a party one night and when he heard of my Orst connections he said would I go to his flat and look at a painting he had bought in a sale in Czechoslovakia which had the EO monogram on it. I must admit I hesitated. The owner himself clearly wasn't an expert, he was a perfectly nice dentist, but the odd provenance made me wonder, and the idea of treasures in Eastern Europe suddenly rising to the surface and becoming available was attractive too." It was clear how the story was going to end and we sat with expressions of placid encouragement and poked politely at the thick, off-white fish on our plates, a fish that must figure somewhere in Luc's catalogue, though I couldn't put a name to it myself. And that had me sunk for a heart-gripping ten seconds in the sensation of Luc: abruptly in his presence, I was starting to unbutton his shirt. . . "It wasn't quite so easy," our host was saying. "He took me off from the party in a taxi, he wanted to know straight away, it seemed. We drove and drove, and then we were on a sort of motorway and it turned out he lived in what was virtually another town; I was getting a bit restive, and I could see how anxious he was that I shouldn't get anxious, so there was a rather difficult kind of constraint.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  But that was okay here, unlike at home; it was the classical, commonplace good sense of Europe. I thought I'd never wanted anyone so much. I upset myself by being obvious about him, so that his mates noticed me staring at him and he turned and made a gesture with his tongue behind his upper teeth. I couldn't quite tell if it was mocking or provocative, it might have been the sort of insult mentioned bafflingly in Shakespeare. I was absorbed in my own excitement and unaware of the routine spectacle it presented to others: I followed him when he went to the lavatory, but he peed in the lock-up stall and I heard him hawking expressively as he did so. I hung back and looked in the mirror at Edward Manners, the pudging, bespectacled English teacher twice his age. Back in the bar and with another beer I had a man of flawless, dead good looks shift up to me and start talking with the banal singsong that in the outside world would indicate a long and comfortable acquaintance and here was used as a short cut to a short one. There was something fascinating about his blond blandness, skin stretched over wide high cheekbones, long hair starting forward and then swept back in a layered and possibly lacquered wave. It was hard to guess how old he was: his skin was perfect, but when he smiled it crinkled into a hundred lines around his grey eyes. Otherwise he was oddly classless and unmarked by normal wear and tear. His clothing was casual and yet dressy: over the V of a T-shirt a pink chemise with buttons, pockets and epaulettes, and pleated bumhugging slacks that appeared to shelter, down front, something of remarkable, even tedious length. When he told me he was a model, it all made sense. A man who is always smiling prompts a kind of mistrust. I wished Ty (as he absurdly claimed to be called) would allow himself more of the expressionlessness to which his features were suited, of which they were in fact the ideal expression. But he was orthodontically perfect as well, and perhaps he had calculated that that mattered more. Just how fastidious can you get? I asked myself and we danced together for a bit, though I broke off for a drink when a slow number was gloatingly announced by the DJ. I asked him what Ty was short for, and he looked at me as if I was being very silly, and said, "Just Ty!" We hung about together: though Ty was game for running through our earlier conversation a second time, and I pretended I couldn't hear him through the noise of the music. He was obsessed by his career and seemed to feel destined for success in London, and that I would somehow be able to bring this about.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Every former clerk raves about the experience, and private-sector employers often shell out tens of thousands in signing bonuses for recent clerks. That’s what I knew about clerkships, and it was completely true. It was also very superficial: The clerkship process is infinitely more complex. First you have to decide what kind of court you want to work for: a court that does a lot of trials or a court that hears appeals from lower courts. Then you have to decide which regions of the country to apply to. If you want to clerk for the Supreme Court, certain “feeder” judges give you a greater chance of doing so. Predictably, those judges hire more competitively, so holding out for a feeder judge carries certain risks—if you win the game, you’re halfway to the chambers of the nation’s highest court; if you lose, you’re stuck without a clerkship. Sprinkled on top of these factors is the reality that you work closely with these judges. And no one wants to waste a year getting berated by an asshole in black robes. There’s no database that spits out this information, no central source that tells you which judges are nice, which judges send people to the Supreme Court, and which type of work—trial or appellate—you want to do. In fact, it’s considered almost unseemly to talk about these things. How do you ask a professor if the judge he’s recommending you to is a nice lady? It’s trickier than it might seem. So to get this information, you have to tap into your social network—student groups, friends who have clerked, and the few professors who are willing to give brutally honest advice. By this point in my law school experience, I had learned that the only way to take advantage of networking was to ask. So I did. Amy Chua told me that I shouldn’t worry about clerking for a prestigious feeder judge because the credential wouldn’t prove very useful, given my ambitions. But I pushed until she relented and agreed to recommend me to a high-powered federal judge with deep connections to multiple Supreme Court justices. I submitted all the materials—a résumé, a polished writing sample, and a desperate letter of interest. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Maybe, with my Southern drawl and lack of a family pedigree, I felt like I needed proof that I belonged at Yale Law. Or maybe I was just following the herd. Regardless of the reason, I needed to have this credential. A few days after I submitted my materials, Amy called me into her office to let me know that I had made the short list. My heart fluttered. I knew that all I needed was an interview and I’d get the job. And I knew that if she pushed my application hard enough, I’d get the interview. That was when I learned the value of real social capital.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  a man, a machine of muscle and speed. Maybe it was all about contact, the touching, the way Geno draped his thick arm around my neck, the way Ness wrapped my hands, then showed me how he fucked. Maybe what I wanted from Oscar was his touch, the pummeling he could offer—what touching him, even in violence, would mean for me. The water was hot, adding to the heat of my body as the blood stayed near the surface of the skin. I lathered my chest with soap, then foamed up my groin. I was hard, my balls as tight as the speed bag upstairs, which I imagined a Latino boy pumping with his fists. I started to jerk off, my rhythm copied from the boxers I had watched, one-two, one-two, finding a rhythm and letting my body take over. When the bell sounds, Oscar approaches me from across the ring, the EVERLAST of his red satin shorts all I can focus on. I can’t look at those eyes yet, but I can see his red gloves hover ing before me. I take a defensive stance, then begin circling him. He throws a left jab, which I block, and his lips protrude over his mouthpiece, like a child pouting. My hook catches him off guard, my glove grazing his chin. His hairy chest damp with sweat, he moves closer, and I back away. He fol lows me as I dodge his punches, trying to gauge how long I can last before he hits me again. Backed into the corner of the shower, all I hear is the slap of leather against muscle—hard, then gone. My fist curls around my shaft, one-two, one-two. I back away, but he’s there, lean ing into me, dancing me into the corner, where I’m all his, and I bite into my lips to draw blood to spit in his eyes. I can see his

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  © He was in his guest room. Gregg lay on his bed with his face in the pillow, his legs spread in a V-shape toward Pali. Gregg turned around and asked, “Would you like to smoke? I bet the Pastor decides to watch TV. He’s like that, exists from one mo ment to the next.” It was quiet in the house. Pali could hear a Vikings football pregame talk show on the TV from the living room. He sat on the bed next to Gregg. “I made sushi for ya,” said Gregg. “Ah?” said Pali, taking some rolls from the hors d’oeuvres plate. “Well, it’s really California roll made with lefsa.” “It’s good,” said Pali, eating another palmful. Gregg lit a joint and pulled a box of poppers and lube from the drawer. “We probably seem pushy to ya?” asked Gregg be fore holding his breath and then blowing smoke into Pali’s lungs. “It’s my dang dad, he acts like a kid sometimes.” “The chasing reminds me of kids,” said Pali. Gregg put aside the smoke and pushed Pali down, their tongues entangling like crazed flags. In reply, Pali pulled Gregg onto himself. He ran his palms down Gregg’s curved back into his pareo, caressing his asscheeks. Gregg swiveled and ground his chest into Pali’s; Pali pinched Gregg’s nipples between his thumbs and forefingers. From beneath, Pali humped Gregg’s groin with his own, and through their pareos their cocks tracked and slipped. Gregg’s tongue beat against Pali’s lips, nostrils, bridge, eyelids, into his ear, along his shoul der, into his armpit, inside his elbow, into his pareo, and fi nally, led by the veins, brought Pali’s dick into his mouth, and slicked the cock with his spit. Pali balanced on his elbow in the bed and turned Gregg’s

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I rested a hand on the side of his neck, whose shaft, thicker than his head, was buttressed by the gathered, sloping muscles of his shoulders. ‘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. I took his hand and led him away.