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 From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Here is the novels’ most authentic level of repre sen ta tion, and the greatest opportunity they aff ord to explore the relationship between erotic ideologies and social structure in the late classical period. Th ey pre- serve for us something of the vitality, complexity, and chaos of sexual life in the second- century empire. Because Leucippe and Clitophon deliberately off ers a panoramic vision of eros and its place in the world, we follow Achil- les Tatius and consider the sexual experience of the high empire from various angles—same- sex eroticism, the expectations placed on women, the sexual life- course of men, the dynamics of marriage, the attitudes of the phi los o- phers. Th roughout, our goal is to fi nd the interface between sexual energy and prevailing morality, the points of contact between the circulation of pleasures and the regulatory force of sexual norms. In the age of the romance, eros fl ourished unawares, serenely confi dent in its eternal powers, and if we did not know that Christianity was stirring in the hills, we might never  FROM SHAME TO SIN have believed that the fi rst icy gusts of denial could be felt sweeping across the ancient valleys. THE CURRENT FASHION: SAME- SEX EROS IN THE HIGH EMPIRE Around the age of nineteen, Clitophon’s cousin Leucippe came to live with him and his family in Tyre. He fell in love with her at fi rst sight. Paralyzed by his infatuation, he took his troubles to his cousin Clinias, only two years his elder but already “an initiate of eros.” Clinias quickly became his trusty counselor. Th e passions of Clinias were for a meirakion, a boy somewhere in his later teens, and his coaching is meant to be understood in terms of ped- erastic norms. Th e ancient novels are, both superfi cially and in their deep structure, stories of heterosexual love, but same- sex amours still fi nd an important place. In fact, the fi rst two books of Leucippe and Clitophon are framed by the traditional assumptions of classical Greek pederasty, trans- posed onto a heterosexual plot.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And from that in a few minutes to Dostoevski, then the world stopped dead, and then, like a great rosebush opening in the night, his sister Rita’s warm, velvety flesh. Now this is what is rather strange. . . . A few minutes after I thought of Rita, her private and extraordinary quim, I was in the train, bound for New York and dozing off with a marvelous languid erection. And stranger still, when I got out of the train, when I had walked but a block or two from the station, whom should I bump into rounding a corner but Rita herself. And as though she had been informed telepathically of what was going on in my brain, Rita too was hot under the whiskers. Soon we were sitting in a chop suey joint, seated side by side in a little booth, behaving exactly like a pair of rabbits in rut. On the dance floor we hardly moved. We were wedged in tightly and we stayed that way, letting them jog and jostle us about as they might. I could have taken her home to my place, as I was alone at the time, but no, I had a notion to bring her back to her own home, stand her up in the vestibule and give her a fuck right under Maxie’s nose—which I did. In the midst of it I thought again of the mannikin in the show window and of the way he had laughed that afternoon when I let drop the word quim. I was on the point of laughing aloud when suddenly I felt she was coming, one of those long drawn out orgasms such as you get now and then in a Jewish cunt. I had my hands under her buttocks, the tips of my fingers just inside her cunt, in the lining, as it were; as she began to shudder I lifted her from the ground and raised her gently up and down on the end of my cock. I thought she would go off her nut completely, the way she began to carry on. She must have had four or five orgasms like that in the air, before I put her feet down on the ground. I took it out without spilling a drop and made her lie down in the vestibule. Her hat had rolled off into a corner and her handbag had spilled open and a few coins had tumbled out. I note this because just before I gave it to her good and proper I made a mental note to pocket a few coins for my carfare home. Anyway, it was only a few hours since I had said to Maxie in the bathhouse that I would like to take a look at his sister’s quim, and here it was now smack up against me, sopping wet and throwing out one squirt after another. If she had been fucked before she had never been fucked properly, that’s a cinch.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a thick paste of dark blood; I watched them open and close with the utmost fascination, whether they hissed a viper’s hate or cooed like a turtle dove. They were always close up, as in the movie stills, so that I knew every crevice, every pore, and when the hysterical slavering began I watched the spittle fume and foam as though I were sitting in a rocking chair under Niagara Falls. I learned what to do just as though I were a part of her organism; I was better than a ventriloquist’s dummy because I could act without being violently jerked by strings. Now and then I did things impromptu like, which sometimes pleased her enormously; she would pretend, of course, not to notice these irruptions, but I could always tell when she was pleased by the way she preened herself. She had the gift for transformation; almost as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to the panther and the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the flamingo, the swan in rut. She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the tidbits—the heart, the liver, or the ovaries—and making off again in the twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her eyes not quite closed but immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk. Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering. It was amazing how marvelously I learned to take my cue; no matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to tip, feather to feather, the yoke in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and cantharides. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et cetera; love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, clutch this, clutch that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. Come food time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep , blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast. And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring her young. What a blissful night of love! Saliva, sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She stepped into a flower store. The store was clean and white, except for a few smudges on the linoleum floor. Homosexuals with low voices stood behind the counter. Arranged stalks bearing absurd blossoms protruded from sedate round vases and bristled in the aisles. She had a paroxysm of fantasy. He held her, helpless and swooning, in his arms. They were supported by a soft ball of puffy blue stuff. Thornless roses surrounded their heads. His gaze penetrated her so thoroughly, it was as though he had thrust his hand into her chest and begun feeling her ribs one by one. This was all right with her. “I have never met anyone I felt this way about,” he said. “I love you.” He made her do things she’d never done before, and then they went for a walk and looked at the new tulips that were bound to have grown up somewhere. None of this felt stupid or corny, but she knew that it was. Miserably, she tried to gain a sense of proportion. She stared at the flowers. They were an agony of bright, organized beauty. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to give him flowers. She wanted to be with him in a room full of flowers. She visualized herself standing in front of him, bearing a handful of blameless flowers trapped in the ugly pastel paper the florist would staple around them. The vision was brutally embarrassing, too much so to stay in her mind for more than seconds. She stepped out of the flower store. He was not there. Her anxiety approached despair. They were supposed to spend the weekend together. He stood in a cheap pizza stand across the street, eating a greasy slice and watching her as she stood on the corner. Her anxiety was visible to him. It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. Her appearance otherwise was not pleasing. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was open to a picture of a masked woman dressed in a red rubber suit that a man was inflating with a pump. On the next page, a naked girl was tied with belts in a kneeling position on a bathroom floor. An ornery-looking young fellow approached her from behind with a rubber hose; she looked over her shoulder, her lips parted in a look of coy fear. He was surprised at how pretty she was. Her cheekbones and shoulders were like Daisy’s. — Daisy and Joey emerged from the movie theater holding hands. “We have no place to go,” said Daisy. “It’s been a month since we’ve been alone in a room. And David won’t leave.” They walked, still holding hands. “I feel so terrible about David,” she said. “He’s such a lovely, innocent person. He’s the purest person I know.” “There are no pure people.” “You haven’t seen David. He has such naked eyes. When you touch him, it’s like there’s nothing between you and him.” She looked at him quizzically. “You’re not like that. When I touch you, I don’t feel you at all.” “There’s nothing to feel.” “Don’t say that about yourself.” She dropped his hand and rubbed his back with her mittened hand. “Anyway, it’s good you’re not like David. Even as you are, I worry about you being too nice to me.” He put his hand around her neck. “I don’t know what makes you think I have any intention of being nice to you.” She turned and kissed him. He took a handful of her hair in his fist and pulled her head tautly back while he kissed her. They sat on the cold stone steps of an apartment building. They unbuttoned their jackets and huddled together, his hands on either side of her softly sweatered body. “You’re so strange,” she said. “It’s hard to talk to you.” “How so?” “You’re always talking at me. You don’t listen to what I say.” “I seem strange because I’m special.” “I think it’s because you take so many pills.” “You should start taking them. Did you know the government gives them to soldiers who are about to go into combat? They sharpen the reflexes, senses, everything.” “I’m not going into combat.” There was a sound from above. They turned and saw a handsome, well-dressed middle-aged couple at the head of the steps. Joey saw a flicker of admiration in Daisy’s face as she looked at the tall blond lady in her evening dress. The couple began to descend. Daisy and Joey stood and squeezed into a stony corner to let them pass. The man’s shoulder scratched against Joey.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her. He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.” He went home with her that night. He lay with her on her sagging, lumpy single mattress, tipping his head to blow smoke into the room. She butted her forehead against his chest. The mattress squeaked with every movement. He told her about Sharon. “I had a relationship like that when I was in college,” she said. “Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.” The room was pathetically decorated with postcards, pictures of huge-eyed Japanese cartoon characters, and tiny, maddening toys that she had obviously gone out of her way to find, displayed in a tightly arranged tumble on her dresser. A frail model airplane dangled from the light above the dresser. Next to it was a pasted-up cartoon of a pink-haired girl cringing open-mouthed before a spire-haired boy-villain in shorts and glasses. Her short skirt was blown up by the force of his threatening expression, and her panties showed. What kind of person would put crap like this up on her wall? “I’m afraid of you,” she murmured. “Why?” “Because I just am.” “Don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.” She curled against him and squeezed her feet together like a stretching cat. Her socks were thick and ugly, and her feet were large for her size. Details like this could repel him, but he felt tenderly toward the long, grubby, squeezed-together feet. He said, “I want a slave.” She said, “I don’t know. We’ll see.” He asked her to spend the weekend with him three days later.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was my first fuck, by Jesus, and it had to be that a train would come along and shower hot sparks over us. Lola was terrified. It was her first fuck too, I guess, and she probably needed it more than I, but when she felt the sparks she wanted to tear loose. It was like trying to hold down a wild mare. I couldn’t keep her down, no matter how I wrestled with her. She got up, shook her clothes down, and adjusted the bun at the nape of her neck. “You must go home,” she says. “I’m not going home,” I said, and with that I took her by the arm and started walking. We walked along in dead silence for quite a distance. Neither of us seemed to be noticing where we were going. Finally we were out on the highway and up above us were the reservoirs and near the reservoirs was a pond. Instinctively I headed toward the pond. We had to pass under some low-hanging trees as we neared the pond. I was helping Lola to stoop down when suddenly she slipped, dragging me with her. She made no effort to get up; instead she caught hold of me and pressed me to her, and to my complete amazement I also felt her slip her hand in my fly. She caressed me so wonderfully that in a jiffy I came in her hand. Then she took my hand and put it between her legs. She lay back completely relaxed and opened her legs wide. I bent over and kissed every hair on her cunt; I put my tongue in her navel and licked it clean. Then I lay with my head between her legs and lapped up the drool that was pouring from her. She was moaning now and clutching wildly with her hands; her hair had come completely undone and was lying over her bare abdomen. To make it short, I got it in again, and I held it a long time, for which she must have been damned grateful because she came I don’t know how many times—it was like a pack of firecrackers going off, and with it all she sunk her teeth into me, bruised my lips, clawed me, ripped my shirt and what the hell not. I was branded like a steer when I got home and took a look at myself in the mirror. It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. A month later the Niessens moved to another city, and I never saw Lola again. But I hung her sporran over the bed and I prayed to it every night. And whenever I began the Czerny stuff I would get an erection, thinking of Lola lying in the grass, thinking of her long black hair, the bun at the nape of her neck, the groans she vented and the juice that poured out of her.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The girl upstairs, for instance . . . she used to come down now and then, when the wife was giving a recital, to look after the kid. She was so obviously a simpleton that I didn’t give her any notice at first. But like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of impersonal personal cunt which she was unconsciously conscious of. The oftener she came down the more conscious she got, in her unconscious way. One night, when she was in the bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me to thinking of things. I decided to take a peep through the keyhole and see for myself what was what. Lo and behold, if she isn’t standing in front of the mirror stroking and petting her little pussy. Almost talking to it, she was. I was so excited I didn’t know what to do first. I went back into the big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her to come out. As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt of hers and the fingers strumming it like. I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in the cool of the dark. I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I tried letting my pecker mesmerize her. “Come here, you bitch,” I kept saying to myself, “come in here and spread that cunt over me.” She must have caught the message immediately, for in a jiffy she had opened the door and was groping about in the dark to find the couch. I didn’t say a word, I didn’t make a move. I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the dark like a crab. Finally she was standing beside the couch. She didn’t say a word either. She just stood there quietly and as I slid my hand up her legs she moved one foot a little to open her crotch a bit more. I don’t think I ever put my hand into such a juicy crotch in all my life. It was like paste running down her legs, and if there had been any billboards handy I could have plastered up a dozen or more. After a few moments, just as naturally as a cow lowering its head to graze, she bent over and put it in her mouth. I had my whole four fingers inside her, whipping it up to a froth. Her mouth was stuffed full and the juice pouring down her legs. Not a word out of us, as I say. Just a couple of quiet maniacs working away in the dark like gravediggers. It was a fucking Paradise and I knew it, and I was ready and willing to fuck my brains away if necessary. She was probably the best fuck I ever had.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “No, it’s okay, that’s good enough.” She sat on the bed and stared at him, her small face gone suddenly grave. Her eyes were round and dark. Her muddy black makeup looked as if it had been finger-painted on. He sat down next to her and put his hand on her thigh. She ignored it. He felt as though he was bothering a girl sitting next to him on a bus. His hand sweated on her leg and he took it away. What was wrong? Why wasn’t she pulling her dress off over her head, the way they usually did? “Do you come to places like this often?” she asked. “Not too much. Every month or so. I’m married, so it’s hard to get away.” She looked worried. She reached out with nervous quickness and picked up his hand. “What do people do now, mostly?” she asked. “What do you mean?” “I mean I’m new here. You’re only my second customer and I don’t know what I should do. Well, I know what to do, basically, but there’s all these little things, like when to take off the dress.” He felt a foolish smile running over his face. Her second customer! “But you’ve worked before.” “You mean done this before? No, I haven’t.” He looked at her, beaming greedily. “What do you do for a living?” she asked. “I’m an attorney,” he said. “Corporate law.” He was lying. He felt cut loose from himself, unmarried, un-old, because of the lie. “How old are you?” “How old do you think I am?” She smiled, and her black eye paint coiled like a snake in the corners of her eyes. “Fifty?” “You’re exactly right.” He was fifty-nine. “How about you?” “Twenty-two.” She looked as though she could be that age, but he had a strong feeling that she was lying too. “Why do you come to places like this?” She lay across the bed, her head on her hand, her legs folded restfully. “Do you not get along with your wife?” He leaned against the headboard, his naked legs open. “Oh, I love my wife. It’s a very successful marriage. And we have sex, good sex. But it’s not everything I want. She’s willing to experiment, a little, but she’s really not all that interested. It can make you feel foolish to be doing something when you know your partner isn’t an equal participant. Besides, this is an adventure for me. Something nice.” “Is it something nice?” “With you it’s going to be very nice.” “How do you know?” “What a strange question.” She crossed the bed to adjust her body against his, to put her head on his shoulder. She stroked his chest hair. “It’s not so strange.” “Well, I just know, that’s all.” They kissed. She had a harsh, stubborn kiss.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  To begin with, it was largely Lola’s fault. Lola was my first piano teacher. Lola Niessen. It was a ridiculous name and typical of the neighborhood we were living in then. It sounded like a stinking bloater, or a wormy cunt. To tell the truth, Lola was not exactly a beauty. She looked somewhat like a Kalmuck or a Chinook, with sallow complexion and bilious-looking eyes. She had a few warts and wens, not to speak of the mustache. What excited me, however, was her hairiness; she had wonderful long fine black hair which she arranged in ascending and descending buns on her Mongolian skull. At the nape of the neck she curled it up in a serpentine knot. She was always late in coming, being a conscientious idiot, and by the time she arrived I was always a bit enervated from masturbating. As soon as she took the stool beside me, however, I became excited again, what with the stinking perfume she soused her armpits with. In the summer she wore loose sleeves and I could see the tufts of hair under her arms. The sight of it drove me wild. I imagined her as having hair all over, even in her navel. And what I wanted to do was to roll in it, bury my teeth in it. I could have eaten Lola’s hair as a delicacy, if there had been a bit of flesh attached to it. Anyway she was hairy, that’s what I want to say, and being hairy as a gorilla she got my mind off the music and on to her cunt. I was so damned eager to see that cunt of hers that finally one day I bribed her little brother to let me have a peep at her while she was in the bath. It was even more wonderful than I had imagined: she had a shag that reached from the navel to the crotch, an enormous thick tuft, a sporran, rich as a hand-woven rug. When she went over it with the powder puff I thought I would faint. The next time she came for the lesson I left a couple of buttons open on my fly. She didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. The following time I left my whole fly open. This time she caught on. She said, “I think you’ve forgotten something, Henry.” I looked at her, red as a beet, and I asked her blandly what? She pretended to look away while pointing to it with her left hand. Her hand came so close that I couldn’t resist grabbing it and pushing it in my fly. She got up quickly, looking pale and frightened. By this time my prick was out of my fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and I reached up under her dress to get at that hand-woven rug I had seen through the keyhole.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  “Yes, let’s get back to the shore,” I said, and I start to pull away from her. “Oh don’t leave me,” she says, clutching me tighter. “Don’t leave me, I’ll drown.” Just then Francie comes running down to the water. “Hurry,” says Agnes, “hurry . . . I’ll drown.” Francie was a good sort, I must say. She certainly wasn’t a Catholic and if she had any morals they were of the reptilian order. She was one of those girls who are born to fuck. She had no aims, no great desires, showed no jealousy, held no grievances, was constantly cheerful and not at all unintelligent. At nights when we were sitting on the porch in the dark talking to the guests she would come over and sit on my lap with nothing on underneath her dress and I would slip it into her as she laughed and talked to the others. I think she would have brazened it out before the Pope if she had been given a chance. Back in the city, when I called on her at her home, she pulled the same stunt off in front of her mother whose sight, fortunately, was growing dim. If we went dancing and she got too hot in the pants she would drag me to a telephone booth and, queer girl that she was, she’d actually talk to some one, some one like Agnes, for example while pulling off the trick. She seemed to get a special pleasure out of doing it under people’s noses; she said there was more fun in it if you didn’t think about it too hard. In the crowded subway, coming home from the beach, say, she’d slip her dress around so that the slit was in the middle and take my hand and put it right on her cunt. If the train was tightly packed and we were safely wedged in a corner she’d take my cock out of my fly and hold it in her two hands, as though it were a bird. Sometimes she’d get playful and hang her bag on it, as though to prove that there wasn’t the least danger. Another thing about her was that she didn’t pretend that I was the only guy she had on the string. Whether she told me everything I don’t know, but she certainly told me plenty. She told me about her affairs laughingly, while she was climbing over me or when I had it in her, or just when I was about to come. She would tell me how they went about it, how big they were or how small, what they said when they got excited and so on and so forth, giving me every possible detail, just as though I were going to write a textbook on the subject. She didn’t seem to have the least feeling of sacredness about her own body or her feelings or anything connected with herself.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Playing the piano was just one long vicarious fuck for me. I had to wait another two years before I would get my end in again, as they say, and then it wasn’t so good because I got a beautiful dose with it, and besides it wasn’t in the grass and it wasn’t summer, and there was no heat in it but just a cold mechanical fuck for a buck in a dirty little hotel room, the bastard trying to pretend she was coming and not coming any more than Christmas was coming. And maybe it wasn’t her that gave me the clap, but her pal in the next room who was laying up with my friend Simmons. It was like this—I had finished so quick with my mechanical fuck that I thought I’d go in and see how it was going with my friend Simmons. Lo and behold, they were still at it, and they were going strong. She was a Czech, his girl, and a bit sappy; she hadn’t been at it very long, apparently, and she used to forget herself and enjoy the act. Watching her hand it out, I decided to wait and have a go at her myself. And so I did. And before the week was out I had a discharge, and after that I figured it would be blueballs or rocks in the groin. Another year or so and I was giving lessons myself, and as luck would have it, the mother of the girl I’m teaching is a slut, a tramp and a trollop if ever there was one. She was living with a nigger, as I later found out. Seems she couldn’t get a prick big enough to satisfy her. Anyway, every time I started to go home she’d hold me up at the door and rub it up against me. I was afraid of starting in with her because rumor had it that she was full of syph, but what the hell are you going to do when a hot bitch like that plasters her cunt up against you and slips her tongue halfway down your throat. I used to fuck her standing up in the vestibule, which wasn’t so difficult because she was light and I could hold her in my hands like a doll. And like that I’m holding her one night when suddenly I hear a key being fitted into the lock, and she hears it too and she’s frightened stiff. There’s nowhere to go. Fortunately there’s a portiere hanging at the doorway and I hide behind that. Then I hear her black buck kissing her and saying how are yer, honey? and she’s saying how she had been waiting up for him and better come right upstairs because she can’t wait and so on.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I never think of myself as being endangered should the train jump the track. We’re wedged in like sardines and all the hot flesh pressed against me diverts my thoughts. I become conscious of a pair of legs wrapped around mine. I look down at the girl sitting in front of me, I look her right in the eye, and I press my knees still further into her crotch. She grows uneasy, fidgets about in her seat, and finally she turns to the girl next to her and complains that I am molesting her. The people about look at me hostilely. I look out of the window blandly and pretend I have heard nothing. Even if I wished to I can’t remove my legs. Little by little though, the girl, by a violent pushing and squiggling, manages to unwrap her legs from mine. I find myself almost in the same situation with the girl next to her, the one she was addressing her complaints to. Almost at once I feel a sympathetic touch and then, to my surprise, I hear her tell the other girl that one can’t help these things, that it is really not the man’s fault but the fault of the company for packing us in like sheep. And again I feel the quiver of her legs against mine, a warm, human pressure, like squeezing one’s hand. With my one free hand I manage to open my book. My object is twofold: first I want her to see the kind of book I read, second, I want to be able to carry on the leg language without attracting attention. It works beautifully. By the time the train empties a bit I am able to take a seat beside her and converse with her—about the book, naturally. She’s a voluptuous Jewess with enormous liquid eyes and the frankness which comes from sensuality. When it comes time to get off we walk arm in arm through the streets, toward her home. I am almost on the confines of the old neighborhood. Everything is familiar to me and yet repulsively strange. I have not walked these streets for years and now I am walking with a Jew girl from the ghetto, a beautiful girl with a strong Jewish accent. I look incongruous walking beside her. I can sense that people are staring at us behind our backs. I am the intruder, the goy who has come down into the neighborhood to pick off a nice ripe cunt. She on the other hand seems to be proud of her conquest; she’s showing me off to her friends. This is what I picked up in the train; an educated goy, a refined goy! I can almost hear her think it. Walking slowly I’m getting the lay of the land, all the practical details which will decide whether I call for her after dinner or not. There’s no thought of asking her to dinner.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And I myself was never in such a fine cool collected scientific frame of mind as now lying on the floor of the vestibule right under Maxie’s nose, pumping it into the private, sacred, and extraordinary quim of his sister Rita. I could have held it in indefinitely—it was incredible how detached I was and yet thoroughly aware of every quiver and jolt she made. But somebody had to pay for making me walk around in the rain grubbing a dime. Somebody had to pay for the ecstasy produced by the germination of all those unwritten books inside me. Somebody had to verify the authenticity of this private, concealed cunt which had been plaguing me for weeks and months. Who better qualified than I? I thought so hard and fast between orgasms that my cock must have grown another inch or two. Finally I decided to make an end of it by turning her over and back-scuttling her. She balked a bit at first, but when she felt the thing slipping out of her she nearly went crazy. “Oh yes, oh yes, do it, do it!” she gibbered, and with that I really got excited, I had hardly slipped it into her when I felt it coming, one of those long agonizing spurts from the tip of the spinal column. I shoved it in so deep that I felt as if something had given way. We fell over, exhausted, the both of us, and panted like dogs. At the same time, however, I had the presence of mind to feel around for a few coins. Not that it was necessary, because she had already loaned me a few dollars, but to make up for the carfare which I was lacking in Far Rockaway. Even then, by Jesus, it wasn’t finished. Soon I felt her groping about, first with her hands, then with her mouth. I had still a sort of semi hard on. She got it into her mouth and she began to caress it with her tongue. I saw stars. The next thing I knew her feet were around my neck and my tongue up her twat. And then I had to get over her again and shove it in, up to the hilt. She squirmed around like an eel, so help me God. And then she began to come again, long, drawn out, agonizing orgasms, with a whimpering and gibbering that was hallucinating. Finally I had to pull it out and tell her to stop. What a quim! And I had only asked to take a look at it! Maxie with his talk of Odessa revived something which I had lost as a child. Though I had never a very clear picture of Odessa the aura of it was like the little neighborhood in Brooklyn which meant so much to me and from which I had been torn away too soon.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Enter very calmly, Henry, and keep your eyes peeled! And I enter as per instructions on velvet toes, checking my hat and urinating a little as a matter of course, then slowly redescending the stairs and sizing up the taxi girls all diaphanously gowned, powdered, perfumed, looking fresh and alert but probably bored as hell and leg weary. Into each and every one of them, as I shuffle about, I throw an imaginary fuck. The place is just plastered with cunt and fuck and that’s why I’m reasonably sure to find my old friend MacGregor here. The way I no longer think about the condition of the world is marvelous. I mention it because for a moment, just while I was studying a juicy ass, I had a relapse. I almost went into a trance again. I was thinking, Christ help me, that maybe I ought to beat it and go home and begin the book. A terrifying thought! Once I spent a whole evening sitting in a chair and saw nothing and heard nothing. I must have written a good-sized book before I woke up. Better not to sit down. Better to keep circulating. Henry, what you ought to do is to come here some time with a lot of dough and just see how far it’ll take you. I mean a hundred or two hundred bucks, and spend it like water and say yes to everything. The haughty looking one with the statuesque figure, I bet she’d squirm like an eel if her palm were well greased. Supposing she said—twenty bucks! and you could say Sure! Supposing you could say—Listen, I’ve got a car downstairs . . . let’s run down to Atlantic City for a few days. Henry, there ain’t no car and there ain’t no twenty bucks. Don’t sit down . . . keep moving . At the rail which fences off the floor I stand and watch them sailing around. This is no harmless recreation . . . this is serious business. At each end of the floor there is a sign reading “No Improper Dancing Allowed.” Well and good. No harm in placing a sign at each end of the floor. In Pompeii they probably hung a phallus up. This is the American way. It means the same thing. I mustn’t think about Pompeii or I’ll be sitting down and writing a book again. Keep moving, Henry. Keep your mind on the music . I keep struggling to imagine what a lovely time I would have if I had the price of a string of tickets, but the more I struggle the more I slip back. Finally I’m standing knee deep in the lava beds and the gas is choking me. It wasn’t the lava that killed the Pompeians, it was the poison gas that precipitated the eruption. That’s how the lava caught them in such queer poses, with their pants down, as it were.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And from that in a few minutes to Dostoevski, then the world stopped dead, and then, like a great rosebush opening in the night, his sister Rita’s warm, velvety flesh. Now this is what is rather strange. . . . A few minutes after I thought of Rita, her private and extraordinary quim, I was in the train, bound for New York and dozing off with a marvelous languid erection. And stranger still, when I got out of the train, when I had walked but a block or two from the station, whom should I bump into rounding a corner but Rita herself. And as though she had been informed telepathically of what was going on in my brain, Rita too was hot under the whiskers. Soon we were sitting in a chop suey joint, seated side by side in a little booth, behaving exactly like a pair of rabbits in rut. On the dance floor we hardly moved. We were wedged in tightly and we stayed that way, letting them jog and jostle us about as they might. I could have taken her home to my place, as I was alone at the time, but no, I had a notion to bring her back to her own home, stand her up in the vestibule and give her a fuck right under Maxie’s nose—which I did. In the midst of it I thought again of the mannikin in the show window and of the way he had laughed that afternoon when I let drop the word quim. I was on the point of laughing aloud when suddenly I felt she was coming, one of those long drawn out orgasms such as you get now and then in a Jewish cunt. I had my hands under her buttocks, the tips of my fingers just inside her cunt, in the lining, as it were; as she began to shudder I lifted her from the ground and raised her gently up and down on the end of my cock. I thought she would go off her nut completely, the way she began to carry on. She must have had four or five orgasms like that in the air, before I put her feet down on the ground. I took it out without spilling a drop and made her lie down in the vestibule. Her hat had rolled off into a corner and her handbag had spilled open and a few coins had tumbled out. I note this because just before I gave it to her good and proper I made a mental note to pocket a few coins for my carfare home. Anyway, it was only a few hours since I had said to Maxie in the bathhouse that I would like to take a look at his sister’s quim, and here it was now smack up against me, sopping wet and throwing out one squirt after another. If she had been fucked before she had never been fucked properly, that’s a cinch.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  For women, sōphrosynē meant chastity, the unbending criterion of corporal integrity before marriage and fi delity during marriage. For men, sōphrosynē meant self- control, the mind’s orderly management of the physical appe- tites. For women, sōphrosynē was absolute; for men, it was gradational. In between these shades of meaning lay a fi eld of extensible space for men to exercise their moderation.  In a society where “the work of Aphrodite” could always “be bought for a drachma,” self- control was no trivial virtue. Sōphrosynē was “the fi rst and most fi tting virtue of young men, harmonizing and choreographing all qualities of excellence.” “Nothing in excess” was the sacred inner code of Greek ethics. Moderation was for men what chastity was for women, in that it served, on a millennial time scale, as the unwavering fundament beneath mainstream sexual ethics. Th e classical ideal of moderation fl our- ished in a moral universe where it was ultimately the only force of re sis tance against the easy satiety of sexual desire. Th e material environment of the Greco- Roman city was unusually adapted for stimulating the appetites. Th e high empire was the Indian summer of classical nudity, when prosper- ity carried the culture of public baths and gymnasia further than ever be- fore and when frankly erotic art was ubiquitous in refi ned and pop u lar media. Th e slave trade and its unruly outgrowth, the fl esh trade, made plea- sure cheap and unceremonious. Th roughout the city, professionals cruised the streets in shoes that left behind the words “follow me” in the sand. Unsurprisingly, the second century generated a rich discussion on the phys- ics of vision— conceived as the fl ow of particles into the eye, so that Achil- les could unforgettably describe looking at a beautiful woman as a sort of “fondling from afar.” Th e inhabitant of the Roman Empire was constantly bombarded with visual allurements, so moderation was a virtue called upon, constantly, to perform heroic feats of restraint.  Th e need for internal regulation of impulses was felt with special keen- ness in a society that celebrated the pleasures of “wine, baths, and venus” and delivered them with unpre ce dented effi ciency to the male consumer. Most of what passes for “sexual morality” is, implicitly or explicitly, advice  FROM SHAME TO SIN for men. Th e “conjugalization of plea sure” and the intensely interior, self- regarding morality that have been identifi ed as Rome’s signal contributions to the history of sexuality weighed principally on men. For decent women, what licit plea sure might be found had always been confi ned to the mar- riage bed, and nearly all philosophical literature implicitly addresses a male sexual subject.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “Sit up, Jasmine,” snapped the stretch-pants woman through her smile. She held out her freckled hands toward the last girl, who sat with one leg tucked underneath her, looking out the window. “And this is Lisette.” The girl wore a short red-and-black-checked dress, white ankle socks and black pumps. Her bobbed brown hair was curly. When she turned to face him, her expression was mildly friendly and normal; she could’ve been looking at anybody or anything. The strangeness of it all delighted and fascinated him: the falsely gentle voice, the helpless contempt, the choosing of a bored, unknown girl sitting on her ankle, looking out the window. “Do you see a lady who you’d like to visit with?” “I’ll see Lisette.” The girl stood up and walked toward him as if he were a dentist, except she was smiling. The room was pale green. The air in it was bloated with sweat and canned air freshener. There was a bed table set with a plastic container sprouting damp Handi Wipes, a radio, an ashtray, a Kleenex box and a slimy bottle of oil. The bed was covered by a designer sheet patterned with beige, brown and tan lions lazing happily on the branches of trees or swatting each other. There was an aluminum chair. There was a glass-covered poster for an art exhibit. There was a fish tank with a Day-Glo orange fish castle in it. He lay on the bed naked, waiting for her to join him. He turned on the radio. It was tuned to one of those awful disco stations. “I specialize in love,” sang a woman’s voice. “I’ll make you feel like new. I specialize in love—let me work on you.” He smiled as he listened to the music. It evoked the swirling lights of dance floors he’d never been on, the tossing hair and sweat-drenched underwear of girls who danced and drank all night, girls he never saw except in commercials for jeans. He anticipated Lisette as he imagined her, the grip of her blunt-fingered hands, her curly head on his shoulder. Did she dance in places like that, in her white socks and pumps? She came in with a white sheet under her arm. She clipped across the floor, sharp heels clacking. She turned off the radio. The silence was as disorienting as a sudden roomful of fluorescent light. “I hate that shit,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I have to put this sheet down.” She snapped the sheet open and floated it down over him. He scrambled out from under it, banging into the wastebasket as he stepped to the floor. “Here,” he said. He took a corner of the sheet and awkwardly stretched it over the bed.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She pulled the sticky, coffee-stained wastebasket out from under her desk and showered the mouse turds into it with a deft swish of cardboard. — Daisy had never been to an opera. “Will there be people in breastplates and headdresses with horns?” she asked. “Will there be a papier-mâché dragon and things flying through the air?” She looked hard at the curtained stage. “Probably not,” he said. “I think this production is coming from a German Impressionist influence, which means they’ll eschew costumes and scenery as much as possible. They’re coming from an emphasis on symbolism and minimal design. It was a reaction against the earlier period when—” “I want to see a dragon flying through the air.” She took a pink mint from the box of opera mints he’d bought, popped it into her mouth and audibly sucked it. She shifted it to her cheek and asked, “Why do you like the opera?” “I don’t know, I like the music sometimes, I like to see how they put productions together. I like to watch the people.” “So do I.” “Sometimes I have this fantasy that the opera house is suddenly taken over by psychos or terrorists or something, and that I save everybody.” She stopped sucking her mint and turned to look at him. “How?” “I jump from the balcony railing and scale down the curtain until I’m parallel with the cord. Then I jump for the cord, swing through the air—” “That’s impossible.” “Well, yes, I know. It’s a fantasy.” “Why would you have a fantasy like that?” She looked disturbed. “I don’t know. It’s not important.” She continued to stare at him, almost stricken. “I think it’s because you feel estranged from people. You want something extreme to happen so you can show that you love them, and that you deserve love from them.” He pulled her head against his shoulder and kissed it. He said, “Sometimes I just want to tear you apart.” She put her box of mints in her lap and grabbed him tightly around the waist. It was after midnight when they left the opera. They went to a neon-lit deli manned by aging waiters wearing red jackets, several of whom had violent tics in their jaws. Daisy persuaded him to order a salad and a milk shake; she was worried that he didn’t eat enough. He sipped his shake uncomfortably and watched her eat cream cheese and salmon. She talked about her unhappy relationship with her father, pausing to bend her head so she could nip up the fallen croissant flakes with her tongue. Waiters ran around the table, some of them bearing three food-loaded plates in each hairy hand. He tried to make her take some pills and stay out with him longer, but she said she felt too guilty about David.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The stunning finds of Pompeii are nonpareil, but in the more scattered and exiguous evidence of the second and third centuries we find that the representation of eros remained a standard element of domestic presentation across the Roman period. An upper-class house of the third century in Ostia presents lovemaking in the most direct and frank fashion, depicting men and women in a range of conjunctions. In the view of an authority on erotic art, this house is valuable proof that the same ideology and sensibility so well preserved under the ash at Pompeii remained alive in a period for which well-preserved domestic paintings are much rarer. Literary evidence also suggests the continuity—and geographic reach—of erotic art. Clement of Alexandria fumes against the erotic aesthetics of the culture surrounding him in late second- or early third-century Roman Egypt. If we look beyond the walls of the ancient house, too, there are other indications that Roman visual culture was vibrantly sensual. In the Antonine era, it became fashionable among the respectable classes for a married couple to have themselves depicted as Ares and Aphrodite, borrowing the bodies and accoutrements of the gods beneath the recognizable visages of the married pair. The images are ludicrously disconsonant. More profoundly, we wonder why a married pair would wish to present themselves as the world’s most discreditable adulterer and adulteress. Yes, the mythological veneer licensed the portrayal of decent women in the nude, but at a more symbolic level Ares and Aphrodite signified pure, ardent passion. In a society that believed in the mysterious, indwelling presence of the gods, there could hardly have been a more powerful evocation of the power of marital eroticism.88