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 Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But it wasn’t the same for him without them, and I felt unbelievably stupid appearing to respond to them. ‘Okay,’ he said brightly, as I abandoned the job. ‘You like to fuck with me?’ ‘Of course.’ There was after all some charm in his childlike openness. ‘But in silence …’ ‘Wait a minute,’ he said and kicking off shoes and tugging off trousers and pants, ambled into the bathroom, his dick bouncing with a kind of mock-majesty before him. I slipped off my own shoes and jeans and lay playing with myself on the bed. Gabriel took his time getting ready and after a couple of minutes I called through to ask if he was all right. He came in almost at once, now completely naked except for his cock-ring, the pale gold wafer of his watch and—which I should somehow I suppose have expected—a black leather mask which completely covered his head. There were two neat little holes beneath the nostrils, and zipped slits for the eyes and mouth. He knelt on the bed beside me and was perhaps looking to me for approval or amusement—it was impossible to tell. Close to I could see only his large brown pupils and the whites of his eyes, blurred for a split second if he blinked, like the lens of a camera. It was hard and disturbing the way the eyes could not vary their expression isolated from the rest of the frowning or smiling face. I felt that childhood fear of rubber party masks, and of the idiot amiability of clowns who you knew, as they bent down to pinch your cheeks, were fearful old drunks. Gabriel held my head to look at me closely, and I unzipped his mouth and breathed in his hot breath and the expensive smell of leather. His body was supple though slightly gone to seed—but I liked it and bit it. There wasn’t much he could do in his mask, and when I had nosed around him for a while he hoiked me over and pushed my legs apart. I was anxious not to take all that raw, and had begun to complain, when I felt something cold and wet, like a dog’s nose, trailing up my thigh. I looked over my shoulder to find that from somewhere this madman had produced a gigantic pink dildo, slippery with Crisco. I heard him giggle tensely inside the mask. ‘Do you want to smell some poppers?’ he asked.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I’m into you, darling.’ ‘Yeah, but …’ ‘You know it’s illegal, our affair. Officially, I can’t touch you for another three years.’ ‘Christ,’ he said, as if that altered everything, and paced around the room. ‘No, I think kids can be quite something. After fourteen or so. I mean I wouldn’t touch them when they were really small …’ ‘No—but a little chap who’s already got a big donger on him gets a hard-on all the time, doesn’t know what to do with this thing that’s taking over his life—that’s quite something, as you say.’ Phil grinned and blushed. One of the reasons he loved me was that I put these things into words, legitimised them just as I was most risqué. He was encouraged by this franc-parler to explore the new possibilities of talk, sometimes in so reckless a way that I thought he must be making things up. The men at the Corry came in for particular attention. ‘I really dig that Pete/Alan/Nigel/Guy’, he would quietly celebrate as we dressed after a shower, or emerged onto the evening streets again. The wonderfully handsome, virile and heterosexual Maurice seemed to excite him in particular. ‘What a pity he’s straight, man,’ Phil would say, with charming and earnest shakings of the head. It was a touching advertisement for free speech. But at the same time it caused me a twist of jealousy. If he was getting into this kind of mood about Alan, Nigel and the rest, who knows what might not happen when I wasn’t there to receive his confidences but Pete or Guy in person was, with queeny smile, easy tumescence and buttock-appraising eye? In the pool one evening I’d introduced him to James, who had clearly fallen parasitically for him at once; but I saw no danger there. There were more reckless propositioners, like the laid-back Ecuadorian Carlos with his foot-long Negroni sausage of a dick; his (successful) opener to me had been: ‘Boy, you got the nicest dick I ever see’—a gambit only really useful to those who are pretty well set up themselves. And a few days ago, as we were all drying, I had heard him, forgetful or careless of this, say to Phil: ‘Hey, you got a really hot ass, boy,’ and watched Phil redden and ignore him—and say nothing of it to me. I probably needn’t have worried. We were having such a good time ourselves. Most of the days I spent at the hotel, where I got to know Pino and Benito and Celso and the others. Late evenings and nights were passed in sleep and sex in that transitory little attic room with its picture of Ludlow from the air. Phil would sleep until eleven or so each morning, but the fabulous weather went on and for the heat of the day until we hit the Corry at six, we were up on the roof in the sun.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Live round ’ere, do you?’ he said, squinting up at me provocatively and sarcastically. I smiled again and shook my head. ‘Thought not,’ he said, looking away and snapping the stick up now in his hands. My uneasy imagination saw in this some covert allusion to ‘faggot’. Still, I was determined to have him. It was partly the insolent way he sat and spoke, his overvaluing of his own charms itself making him more sexy. But it was also his youth, and the boredom and randiness of the mid-teens, that got me going. It brought back to me the time, like the erotomaniac nights and days that Charles evoked in his diary, when life was all hanging about and fantasy. It was the mood of long car journeys through France with my mother map-reading for my father, whilst Philippa and I fought or slept in the back seat and I dreamt of men. Then we would arrive at some cathedral town and I would climb out of the car attempting to master an overwhelming erection. During the trip I was drawn compulsively to public lavatories where the drawings and graffiti confirmed my sex-obsessed but impractical view of things, their mystery heightened by repeated but incomprehensible words of argot. As our family group strolled through the square in the evening, dressed in beautiful light clothes, I would drag behind, my gaze searching out the bulging flies of the lads gathered round the war memorial, the clenching buttocks of the boys who slammed the pinball machines just inside the doorways of bars. I didn’t have much time. ‘Do you?’ I said. He stood up and began to wander off. ‘Eh?’ ‘Live round here …’ ‘What d’you think?’ he said. He had this tight, mean, logical talk, highly defensive and dull. I followed him, feeling more and more at a disadvantage—old, too, as people over twenty are to their juniors. He reached the low wall by the road, and turned round, stroking the outline of his quite big dick. Just along the street people were waiting at a bus-stop. It was no place for a scene. I came up close to him and put my hand on his shoulder, and he smiled in a way that for the first time revealed his nervousness. ‘Come on,’ I said, seizing this advantage. But immediately he closed down again; it was with studied shrewdness that he said: ‘How much money ’ave you got, then?’ I nodded my head and chuckled ironically—the only way was to behave like him. ‘Just enough for myself,’ I said. ‘ ’sthat so? Well you’ll need a lot more than that if you want a nice bit of bum round ’ere’—almost in a whisper, as if trying to keep the great bargain he was offering me a secret from the group at the bus-stop.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was following a line of the music—a sort of Mahler-and-French which came as close as sexless music could to being explicitly homosexual—when there was a nudge, and Aldo himself was standing beside me. He didn’t say anything, but announced himself in this physical way as some people do in clubs and bars, or as boys do abroad, when there is a language problem. I smirked at him and carried on reading, and he seemed happy to stand by. ‘Ronnie didn’t think you’d come,’ he said after a minute. ‘I’m a bit of a martyr myself,’ I said. ‘One day one of Ronnie’s little jeux d’esprit will finish me off altogether.’ ‘You don’t like the pictures?’ Aldo looked cast down. ‘Oh they’re all right. I like these ones here.’ We turned and ran our eyes over the plated athletes. ‘They aren’t martyrs, are they? I don’t like the martyrs so much—they’re just soft porn. You look very pretty in them … but I honestly prefer to have hard porn—or no porn at all. It’s all pretending, that stuff.’ ‘Still, you didn’t stay long at Ronnie’s house the other day,’ he objected. ‘It was very good fun. We made this great scene and then at the end everyone joined in.’ ‘That was just what I was afraid of.’ ‘Even Lord Charlie had a feel.’ ‘Please!’ ‘Those boys Raymond and Derek were so tired,’ he had to go on. ‘Not Abdul, though. He could have kept at it all night.’ ‘They should be showing the film here,’ I suggested, and Aldo was full of giggly shock. I looked him over candidly. In his tight white jeans and red-and-white checked shirt he reminded one vaguely of an Italian restaurant. ‘Is that all you?’ I asked, my question loitering around his groin. He seemed not to get it, and chuckled vacantly rather than asking me to repeat or explain. I pressed past him, squeezing his heavy bulge as I did so—it seemed real enough—a situation which my brother-in-law Gavin’s expression, as he suddenly reached out to me over several people’s heads, seemed to suggest he found tolerably typical. ‘Gavin! Wonderful to see you.’ We shook hands warmly and he said, ‘Good to see you, my dear,’ in that agreeable, almost nostalgic way that straight men sometimes flirt with gays. ‘How are things?’ ‘Things are rather sort of emotional and peculiar … fortunately one is in good shape and can cope.’ ‘Sounds fascinating!’ He looked quickly aside to Aldo, wondering perhaps if he could be the source of this peculiarity, and I hastened to introduce them. ‘Gavin, this is Aldo, he’s in some of the pictures upstairs, he impersonates John the Baptist—Aldo, this is Gavin, who’s married to my sister.’ The two of them shook hands, and Gavin bumbled on about how in that case he must know Ronnie. What puzzled me was how Gavin himself knew Ronnie, and I asked him.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There were gods—demi-gods, at least—but a place which gathered the fantasies of so many, young and old, was bound to have its own sorry network of unspoken loyalties, stolen and resented glances, ungainly gambits and humiliating crushes. This naked mingling, which formed a ritualistic heart to the life of the club, produced its own improper incitements to ideal liaisons, and polyandrous happenings which could not survive into the world of jackets and ties, cycleclips and duffel-coats. And how difficult social distinctions are in the shower. How could I now smile at my enormous African neighbour, who was responding in elephantine manner to my own erection, and yet scowl at the disastrous nearly-boy smirking under the next jet along? I first met James at Oxford, where he had heard of me but I knew nothing of him: it was at one of the little parties organised by my tutor at Saturday lunchtimes, with red and white wine, and nuts—genially queeny occasions where gay chaplains (chaplains, that is to say) and the more enlightened dons mingled with undergraduates chosen for their charm or connections, while one or two very old and distinguished people sat among the standing guests, holding audience and spilling their drinks on the carpet. I was feeling particularly full of myself: I had been fucking a French boy from Brasenose, it was a hot early summer in my second year, and I had the strange experience, on arriving in the crowded college room, of standing just behind my tutor and one of his graduate students who said to him, ‘I hope you’ve asked young Beckwith; I must say I should think he’s just in his prime this year …’ before I watched the graduate’s pleasure seep away in blushing discomfiture. James, in a crumpled linen jacket, open Aertex shirt, and baggy russet cords, was standing by the window. He looked very young, innocent, and yet mature, as he was already losing his fair, fine hair. His eyes, in contrast to his general colouring, were deep brown, and as my tutor introduced us James said ‘Oh, how do you do?’, indicating pleasure and surprise, and I said, in the rude way that I then thought brilliant, ‘He has very beautiful eyes.’ I colour to remember how at first I assumed that James fancied me, so infatuated was I with myself. A few days later we met again at a cricket match in the Parks (my French boy having turned moody and hostile), drank beer together all afternoon, sat up late listening to Wagner, and I realised that what he liked was my company, and the fact that we felt the same about boys and music. We reached the stage of drunkenness where Brünnhilde’s Immolation seems to last only thirty seconds or so, though each bar is still a miraculous revelation.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I opened with. "Yes, that's right, my father. We don't see him for ages, and then, bouf!, he just goes and turns up." He blew out a puff of air and nodded illusionlessly. "Then my mother gets very worried and we have to clean up the house." "I'd have thought it was immaculate already." "Yes, of course. But I would not suggest that you tell her that. She is not listening to things too much today." I couldn't tell if he was really got down by all this. "I can't remember how long you said they'd been . . . apart." He almost jeered the answer: "Four years," and stood up. "I don't see any reason why we can't have our coffee," he said. "Do you want some?" "Urn . . . thank you. But . . . Shall I come down?" "All right," he said, but then turned back and looked at me as if I might be a liability, or as if he wanted to save me from the ludicrous trouble he was about to stir up. "Perhaps it will be better if you don't come"—and he was out of the door, leaving me, already, alone. 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)

  But what did I know? 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. At dinner we had the restaurant almost to ourselves. Marcel drank a glass of wine and chatted about the day's excitements, how he thought he'd seen Luc several times but in the end it was always another "funny-looking" boy. The months he had spent playing video games in the sanatorium had paid off magnificently this afternoon—he'd emerged as a kind of champion in the amusements arcade: it was altogether one of the best days he'd had for years. But soon my lack of attention made him fall quiet; he looked at me with his head on one side and made sweet little attempts to jolly me along, but I was sinking fast into incommunicable gloom—the first bottle was already empty.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He was interestingly white, as if he couldn't be bothered with the vanity of tanning or had spent the hot late summer in some more worthwhile way than most of us. I was sorry to have passed up the chance of soaping his back. The showers were functional and fierce, a yellow-tiled room with six fixed nozzles and high up in one wall a narrow strip of meshed window that could be tugged open at the top by a chain. I was amazed to pick up, through the crash of the water and the suck and wheeze of the drain, the putter of a boat's engine and a brief reek of burnt fuel. A canal must lie just outside, perhaps lapping against the very walls of the bath. "Have a good swim?" said a shampooing dad opposite, with the nice unintrusive openness of the people here. "I haven't got the right clothes," I said and hurried to get out of my shorts. "You want some proper swimming-trunks," he said. The conversation was unlikely to soar, but we chattered on for a minute or two while I washed, about indoor as against sea bathing and about the Belgian beaches. He was very enthusiastic about Blankenberge, though what he praised in it, the crowds, the cheap food, set me against it. I stayed on for a while when he'd left, the hot water thrumming on my shoulders, then went to the doorway and screwed up my eyes to read the changing-room's electric classroom clock. It was already ten past eight: seriously time for a drink. I towelled myself down at the rubber-matted threshold of the showers, and I was largely dry when I heard a whoop and a couple of lads came splashing in through the foot bath, a nicely curvy dark one and a skinny one with long fair hair twisted up in a knot like a girl. They ran straight into the showers and fell against opposite walls, panting and laughing at each other. Without hesitation I flung my towel aside and went back in, unstoppering my conditioner bottle and preparing to wash my hair all over again. I hadn't seen them since that first evening at the Bar Biff, the hot little loudmouth and his friend, his lover, who now unknotted his hair and shook it over his shoulders as if he were Jane Byron herself; and it did give a scatter of glamour to his hollow-eyed face, still blurred by spots around the forehead and jaw.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  seat belt stretched over the arc of her stomach, a chamomile tea steaming in her travel mug. But then there is the girl on the other side. So wonderful. Her legs and skin. The way, the skill with which she touched. The idea of her is so enticing it pushes him past control. Allen lets go and lets the shame rush in and fill the emptiness, so that even his hollow legs feel solid and full. Immediately there is plotting. Already the deceit grows. What to do with his boxer briefs? And to ride the bus to Par- sippany this way, to face Claire, soiled. She could drop him at the gym. The gym before dinner, that is the plan. But his erec tion endures. Allen is neither so old that it should disappear in an instant nor so young that it should remain, and in such a pronounced and steadfast state. Then again, he thinks, why should it fade when that angel of a girl is so near and there are four more tokens and he has already crossed the threshold and made his way inside? The erection builds strength and, Allen fears, may never go away. He cannot walk out in this state. And he admits to himself that if he didn’t ever have to leave, if it meant irretrievably losing the outside world, he would sacrifice it all if only that siren would stand up from her chair, take his hands, and guide them over her body once more. But he won’t allow himself such an indulgence. He will put in the token, but he will not touch. He will look at his shoes and the scuff mark that damned him. This is how he will occupy himself, without a whit more enjoyment. He will use up what he paid for, but the penance begins right now. GINU KAMANI Waxing the Thing hen I first came to Bombay to work in a beauty salon, I didn’t understand anything. They told me to wax, so I waxed: legs, arms, underarms, stomachs, foreheads, fingers, toes. It’s like a game for me. I cover the skin of the ladies with hot wax, then quickly-quickly take it all off with a cloth, al most before they notice that it’s there. It reminds me of my vil lage school, where I used to draw on the wall with chalk, then quickly wipe it off before the teacher found out. For me it’s all very strange, what goes on with these rich-rich city ladies, but I mind my own business. I’m just a simple village girl. Every thing about the city is strange to me, so what’s one thing more? There I was, minding my own business, when one day this Mrs. Yusuf, whose legs I was waxing in the private room, asked me if I would come to her house to wax her thing. I was

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  shadow-boxing an imaginary opponent, the gym outside the ring dark and moody, broken by shafts of skylight. In the next shot he wore a midnight-blue satin shirt, open to his flat belly, his face wet from a spritzing. Another shot displayed him shirtless, leaning back a bit, his face lifted toward a fan circulating the sweaty musk of the gym, his hands thrust into linen trousers. I imagined him suited up, cruising Ocean Drive in Miami, wearing sunglasses, his face inscrutable, until a sudden burst of light: his smile, a crescent of white above his unshaven chin. Transfixed by his stare, I was disappointed to find no real text to accompany the photographs, just designer names and prices. I didn’t even know then if he was really a boxer; maybe he was just a model. Surely this perfect face had never been punched, bloodied. Boxers were brutes: Rocky, Tyson, Spinks, huge, ugly mugs of sneers and sweat, streaked with cuts and swollen with bruises. But this boy was different. © Oscar. Not the most romantic of names. The Grouch. The Odd Couple. Oscar Mayer, aha, at last a pun, Oscar’s meat, a phallic lunch-punch. But de la Hoya is another ball game, and my mind plays with the music of all those syllables, my toya de la boya. Delicious de la Hoya. All Day de la Hoya. Once I began to look, Oscar was everywhere. His face was plastered all over town on posters advertising an upcoming bout. I’d come up out of the subway at Times Square to find an HBO billboard with DE LA hoya emblazoned six feet high in golden letters. His fight face—no smile, concentration defining his brow—was fierce but still stunning: the same

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was heightening the drama of the pick-up by making him follow me. This was impossible at Bond Street, where even more people got on. The seat I had taken was marked for the use of the elderly and handicapped, but had another claimant come, a figure like Charles, for instance, I would have been prepared to leave the train, when my stop came, with a lurching gait or limb held awry to designate my previously unguessed incapacity. As it was there were merely ordinary commuters and shoppers, though one of the strap-hangers, a man whom I spotted eyeing the erection which even the shortest journey on tube or bus always gives me, inclined to swing or jolt towards me as the train lost or gained speed, and the pressure of his knee on mine, and of his eyes in my lap, irritated me when what I wanted was the boy I could no longer see, and whom I dreaded getting off, unnoticed, at a stop before mine. It was not until we had passed through the desert of Lancaster Gate and Queensway that there was a major upheaval; at Notting Hill Gate the seat beside mine became empty and the remarkable and inevitable thing happened, as my older admirer, smirking and hesitating, seemed about to take the seat beside me, and the boy from the Corry, materialising suddenly in front of me, and appearing as it were in second place, managed to slip by, almost risking having the older man sit on his lap, and occupied the seat towards which his rival was already lowering his suited rump. Confusion and apology were inadmissible in so bold an action, and he wisely comported himself as if there had never been any question of anyone but him sitting beside me. I drummed my fingers on my knees, and turned to him with a slow, sly grin. The other man’s face grew clenched and red, and he barged away to another part of the car.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  down and mount, like the whole loved life that Jason reminds me is here before it’s too late and gone. No one else saw the stag, they were off chasing some other forest thing, and I was too young to know that killing it would haunt me and I didn’t run it down, I shot it blam between the eyes the first and only time I shot the rifle Dad had given me and it fell backward as if some atomic blast had knocked it over, not a little piece of lead that happened to find its way across a chasm of experience. By the time I reached its side its eyes were fluttering but it was still alive and looked at me. I had never been so hard in all my life and I forgot the other people in the woods, dropped my rifle, dropped my pants and sank myself into it while it died. The spirit of a god passed out from between its lips in a rushing gasp of flight, its eyes went empty and we were nothing else but flesh together except that I was still alive. I climbed off and pulled up my pants before I got too scared to stay and no one ever knew I killed the stag, they’d all shot another deer and that was all they cared about, soon we all went home and soon thereafter I threw away the gun. Jason is a little like a stag sometimes in his muscles and his brow but he is docile now because I have his balls wrapped up so tightly in my fist and I am looking murder in his eyes, I bare my teeth, he knows I want to kill him with my dick because I cannot stand how much I love him, I look at his penis pleading for release but he’s stopped bucking, he’s stopped moving he has stopped believing altogether I will let him have relief and only tears are rolling down his cheeks, which means I think the time has come. I pull his balls and punch him with the hand I hold them in until he yells so loudly that the woman whose skirt is gone is startled, and I take his whole cock down my throat and swallow it again and again until he starts to beg

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Pino found this even more amusing. ‘He very nice boy,’ he repeated. It was hard to tell if he was crazy about him himself or merely recommending him to me. He sounded like someone trying to sell his sister to a tourist. ‘You have drink?’ he said. I glanced hastily at Phil, and said ‘Oh, er—no thanks,’ while Phil himself said, ‘Yes, we’re going to have a drink upstairs.’ My heart sank at the prospect of sitting in some stuffy hotel bar with the boy I was in love with and an imbecile Spanish waiter; I thought for a second that Phil must have chickened out of our encounter, and grabbed at the Spaniard as a chaperon. But Pino was suddenly solemn, and extended his hand again. ‘Very nice to meet you, Weel,’ he proclaimed. We shook hands once more. ‘I go to watch Call my Bloff.’ As we left he resumed his persuasion on the television. ‘You fockin, fockin thing!’ he went on amiably. ‘That’s where we watch television,’ Phil said when we were outside. He led me onto a staircase and we climbed right to the top, perhaps eight floors up. We took the stairs two at a time, and all the while I had this wonderful ass in my face; I had a hard-on by the time we reached the first floor. The attic corridor was hot and low-ceilinged, with dormer windows wide open and the traffic noise from far below nostalgically audible. Phil persuaded a key from the tight front pocket of his cords, and let us into a small bedroom. ‘This is it,’ he said. The room was furnished with a single bed, a bedside cupboard with a lamp, and a low cheap dressing-table with a mirror in which, standing, one could see only the region of one’s crotch; there was also a chair and a curtained-off hanging cupboard. I closed the door behind me and we both put our bags on the floor, side by side. The tension was terrific, and I could hear the rapid shushing of my pulse in my ear. I knew everything was up to me. ‘Well …’ I began, but at the same moment he turned away towards the window; his face was stiff with embarrassment and fear. He stood there, looking out. The mood of delay snagged me temporarily. ‘Do you often entertain people here?’ I asked, the words coming out with a quite sarcastic edge.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Arthur was seventeen, and came from Stratford East. I had been out all that day, and when I was having dinner with my oldest friend James I nearly told him that I had this boy back home, but swallowed my words and glowed boozily with secret pleasure. James, besides, was a doctor, full of caution and common sense, and would have thought I was crazy to leave a virtual stranger in my home. In my stuffy, opinionated family, though, there was a stubborn tradition of trust, and I had perhaps absorbed from my mother the habit of testing servants and window-cleaners by exposing them to temptation. I took a slightly creepy pleasure in imagining Arthur in the flat alone, absorbing its alien richness, looking at the pictures, concentrating of course on Whitehaven’s photograph of me in my little swimming-trunks, the shadow across my eyes … I was unable to feel anxiety about those electrical goods which are the general currency of burglaries—and I doubted if the valuable discs (the Rattle Tristan among them) would be to Arthur’s taste. He liked dance-music that was hot and cool—the kind that whipped and crooned across the dance-floor of the Shaft, where I had met him the night before. He was watching television when I got in. The curtains were drawn, and he had dug out an old half-broken electric fire; it was extremely hot. He got up from his chair, smiling nervously. ‘I was just watching TV,’ he said. I took my jacket off, looking at him and surprised to find what he looked like. By remembering many times one or two of his details I had lost the overall hang of him. I wondered about all the work that must go into combing his hair into the narrow ridges that ran back from his forehead to the nape of his neck, where they ended in young tight pigtails, perhaps eight of them, only an inch long. I kissed him, my left hand sliding between his high, plump buttocks while with the other I stroked the back of his head. Oh, the ever-open softness of black lips; and the strange dryness of the knots of his pigtails, which crackled as I rolled them between my fingers, and seemed both dead and half-erect. At about three I woke and needed a pee. Dull, half-conscious though I was, my heart thumped as I came back into the room and saw Arthur asleep in the gentle lamplight that fell across the pillows, one arm sticking out awkwardly from under the duvet, as if to shield his eyes.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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. "I've got to get out," I said. "My trunks keep coming down. Well, they're not trunks, really—that's the point . . . " Matt was running a finger inside the sagging waistband, rubbing the back of his fist against the water-logged crotch. "For god's sake, man. We're not in the Bar Biff now." I made off towards the little ladder the timid and the oldsters used. But Matt was with me, creamily kicking across on his back, lean and effortless. When I got out and the water streamed from my pockets and turn-ups on to the poolside he didn't laugh; he even hopped out too and walked with me to the exit: he had on weightless, silkily synthetic black shorts. "I'll buy you a drink later," he said. "I've got to do my 2,000 metres." "That sounds like quite a lot later. Okay, you know where I'll be." He squeezed my upper arm before he turned, jogged back and up-ended without a splash into the rippling blue.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  blow against the all-powerful spell that held men in the thrall of women. If you were sucking a woman’s cunt, you were sac rificing yourself for her, and yet she was in your power. As I matured, I naturally discovered that things weren’t quite so dramatic. Women weren’t all-knowing creatures after all, and they weren’t the enemy. They were subject to base de sires and cravings just like men. But like so many things that affect us strongly when we are young and malleable, my fixa tion remained long after the worldview that shaped it had shifted. I still craved the act of joining my mouth and tongue to a woman’s secret musky inner regions. It was submission and power combined, and it was my constant fantasy. But lying there alone in the dim bedroom, I was having sec ond thoughts. Some fantasies should remain just that, and I was almost relieved that no women were taking me up on the offer. A few more minutes and I could rip off the blindfold and claim a political victory. There was a thump outside the door, barely audible over the bass vibration from the big speakers downstairs. Two fe male voices, each trying to shush the other. The door opened, brightening the room, and I swallowed hard. Drunk female laughter, and then the door closed again. “He’s in there!” “I told you. Now go on . ..” The rest was muffled. This is humiliating, I thought. I’m out of here. The door opened again, and this time they came in and shut it behind them. I could hear their heavy breathing as they looked at me. “Hi,” I said. “Party Girl here wants to sit on your face,” said one. “I’m just her chaperone.” This struck them as funny, and they both broke into choked laughter.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The cats gathered round him discriminatingly, as if they knew him well or expected him to feed them. I was astonished, once I had sobered up, to find that I was Matt's lover: I thought it might have come about through something Cherif had said to him, an inadvertent testimonial. When I looked at myself in Matt's bathroom mirror I seemed to be greeting with new respect an acquaintance I had long thought unlikely to succeed. But then it was an odd sort of success: lover, perhaps, was hardly the word for my role. Matt was like someone beautiful I might have met on the common and counted myself lucky to have ten minutes with under the trees. There was no sentiment to it, beyond the minimal trust of two people pleasuring themselves together; when my instincts homed sleepily towards love I felt him hold me off, cold-eyed, as if my sheltering embrace had been a threat or lapse of form. For all his trickiness, there was no romantic con. I wasn't even sure he had much grasp of friendship. He seemed able to sustain that pure detachment of sex from feeling that normally crumbles with the loss of anonymity or the chance of a second meeting. It threw me back to my great sex-period, the days of saving up for Croy's. And half the time I saw it suited me; with Matt I did the dozen things I couldn't do with Luc. I stayed at Matt's for most of that week, partly because of the Spanish girls—not so much their noise as my fear that they might make a noise, intrude some unwanted disturbance on the nervy, luxurious disquiet which was mine already and which kept me pacing about, drinking and after a while smoking, reading a paragraph a dozen absent times, gazing from the window when the day waned as if trying to decipher some truth, or rather some hope, from the trees and clouds and time-blackened brick. In the little lost garden below the first leaves were turning. At Matt's there were no such distractions. I would be there as a rule only after the Cassette had shut, drunk and demanding, and each visit described a slowing arc from fucky oblivion to parched and anxious waking, stumbling dressing and going home. It was the hours of half-sleep that were the longest, and through which the green figures of the alarm-clock, between tiny spasms of dreaming, kept their steadiest vigil.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  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. I stepped back, tugged off my shoes (shabby old suede laceups which were never unlaced, a lazy affectation which I believed to be overtly sexy), unbuttoned and flung off my white cotton shirt, and with a hint of suspense, undid my fly and yanked off my trousers. Phil’s eyes were mesmerised by mine, and seemed reluctant to go down on my nodding dick. Then he too suddenly got undressed, and stood away from the window, his head bowed under the sloping ceiling. His body looked fantastic, highly developed, everywhere convex, hard and innocent. His whiteness was broken only by the red blotch of an insect bite in the tender, creased skin at his waistband. I was much more gentle with him now, stroking, kissing and nibbling—smiling, too, and making small pleasurable noises. And he began to respond, imitating me at first, but then making it up himself. Several times, though, it simply came to a stop, we stood back for a moment, seeing each other as we most often had before, in the showers or the changing room, naked and restrained. Perhaps the fact that the restraints of the public space had been taken away made us feel unnatural, inept at using our freedom. The small bed was like being at school or university. It wouldn’t encourage changes of position, but was all right for any simple sex act.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  After some efficient sex, we had a glass of Pimm’s and sat on the window-seat in the evening sun. The air was streaming with seeds, to which Colin was sensitive, and after sneezing and screwing up his eyes for a few minutes, he announced that he had to go. I was not sorry; my mind was already running on to the prospect of opening the bag and getting a feel of what lay ahead. When I closed the door of the flat behind Colin, there the bag was, where I had propped it on a chair before making a grab at him. Retrieving it now, I saw how disrespectful I had been to cast it so hastily aside for the sake of that good but rather professional and chilly trick. I took the bag into the dining-room, tugged open its straps and pulled the contents on to the table. I closed the window to prevent papers from blowing round; since Arthur’s disappearance I had been a fiend for light and fresh air. The main part of the archive was a set of quarto notebooks, bound in brown boards, rubbed and worn at the edges—most of them with a clear ink inscription on the front cover; ‘Oxford, 1920’ and ‘1924: Khartoum’ were the first two I picked up. They were written in a fast, elegant and not especially legible hand, in black ink, and there were odd items tucked between the pages—postcards, letters, drawings, even hotel bills and visiting cards. There was also a fat five-year diary, of the kind which can be locked, with other letters and documents, and a large buff envelope bulky with photographs. I drew up a chair at once to look at these, as I believed they would be, although enigmatic, the keys or charms to open the whole case to me. There were snapshots, group photographs and studio portraits, all mixed up together. A mounted picture of a set of cocky young men was captioned ‘University Shooting VIII, 1921’ in the amateur Gothic script still favoured at Oxford for matriculation and team photos. After a bit I was sure that one of the standing figures, a big boy with swept-back glossy hair and an appealing smirk, must be Charles. The face was far leaner than now, and his whole person seemed well set-up; I had seen him less and less in control of his life, and was surprised for a moment to find a young man who would have known how to have a good time. He appeared again in a more studied portrait, where he was less handsome: the spontaneity and camaraderie, perhaps, of the shooting photo had animated him into beauty.