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.

Page 14 of 344 · 20 per page

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Young dislikes saying one “has sex” because of the obscure and evasive meaning of “have.” To have something is to possess it, and a sexual relationship is a kind of possession. It means possessing moments in time that are unique, irreducible, unrepeatable. It means having had a share of another’s surrender. But I dislike the phrase in the same way, because the sex act is so undeniably an act. It needs a verb. To “have” something is a passive state, static, an experience of being rather than doing. To fuck is to do. Fucking doesn’t imply the gender of the participants or the number or the method or the duration or the quality, it just is fucking, and what happens in sex is often as active as an athletic feat; action in the purest sense of the word, requiring bodies and motion in sync. When sex is over, something has changed. I’ve heard the word used in simple descriptive ways so much now that “fuck” seems to be the most value-free of the possibilities, often more accurate and undemanding than the mush-mouthed “lovemaking” or the meaningless “sleeping together.” (A friend startled me the other day by telling me she and her husband had “had carnal knowledge” that morning. I’d almost forgotten the phrase.) I suspect “fuck” will continue to lose its shock value, becoming, as it once was, an ordinary descriptive word. But always a verb of aggressive desire. When I say I want to fuck someone, there’s no doubt what I mean. Words for sex are either soft or hard, implying differences in motive and appetite. “Make love to me” is not the same request as “Fuck me, baby,” and never will be. Does anyone ever say, “Let’s have sex now?” No. We say, “Do it to me,” or “Come on,” or similarly demanding things, depending on the degree of urgency involved. The word that is missing, the word that interests me because it feels so intense and deeply private and so rarely used, is penetration. “Penetration” is both soft and hard; penetration can mean vagina, mouth, or ass; it can ask for penis, tongue, finger, dildo, hand. Cucumber. Nipple. Heart. Soul. This word has range. And to say “I want to be penetrated” seems a much nastier and more alluring thing to say—to be willing to say—than any of the other options. Vaginal penetration is the essential marker of heterosexual relations—even when it may be the least important element in heterosexual sex. Photo of a military wedding: the laughing bride, all in white, her skirts yanked high, sits in the midst of a circle of two dozen young men dressed identically in white dress uniforms. They watch intently, laughing like the groom as he kneels in front of the bride and takes off her garter. One woman in a crowd of men, enacting a symbolic penetration. A man’s home is his castle, which means his wife is land for the plowing. Noblesse oblige. Everyone knows what happens next.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Could you please put him in now?” urged Sylvie. “He’s going to push it in now,” Marian said, giving his dick a few last jerks. “Push that cock in her, baby,” She held his shaft for as long as she could until it disappeared into Sylvie’s cunt; Sylvie was very tight but equally wet, and the dick’s length slid in without bending. “Oh, fuck, that’s good,” said Sylvie, sighing with relief. Immediately she and Kevin started slapping fast against each other. “Oh yeah! I like to see that boy-dick slapping in there!” said Marian, turning the showerhead on her clit. “I can feel it in my cunt just looking at it! Yeah! My cunt is so empty and yours is so full of that sweet hot dickmeat!” As they fucked, Sylvie focused on the dildos, which lay tumbled on the grass. The girl turned so that her face was close to Marian’s. Her hair was in her eyes. In an uneven whisper, she said, “I need one of those. Pick one and put it in my ass, will you? Please?” Marian brushed the tulips down Sylvie’s back and tapped them against her asshole. Then she replaced the flowers with her middle finger, resting it lightly on the opening. “Is that where you want something? Right in there?” “Oh,” moaned Sylvie, “I want what’s in your ass.” “Honey, I’ve got something much better than that for you,” said Marian. “Kevin, look where my finger is. Isn’t that a pretty little asshole? Has your cock ever been in there?” Kevin shook his head no. His hands were on Sylvie’s hips, and he was pushing with a circling motion of his hips, making gravelly grunts. “I want to see that dick up that gorgeous little butt. That okay with you, Sylvie? You want your honey’s big burning dick up your ass? Believe me, it’ll feel good. You know you want it, don’t you.” “Yeah I want it, I want it,” said Sylvie. “You want it straight up your ass, don’t you,” Marian repeated. “I need it up my ass,” Sylvie pleaded. “Kev, I need it up my ass!” Marian grabbed the four-foot-long Welsh Fusilier and turned it on. She whispered to Sylvie, “Slide this up my cunt.” Sylvie fumblingly obliged. “That’s good. I want our slutty cunts to be connected while you get fucked up the ass for the first time,” Marian said. She handed her end of it to Kevin. “Pull out of her, baby. Push this in instead.” Kevin’s long glossy dick emerged from behind the horizon of Sylvie’s ass-curve and with evident reluctance he fed the end of the double-vibe where he had just been. Sylvie made a surprised shout and arched her back and started fucking against it.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  And just what would other people think of the Fermata? What would they do if they were me? Although I have up to now been able to keep my powers a strict secret, I have gone through periods when I have been eager to get some idea of what others would do in my place. I am superstitious, though, about describing what actually goes on—fearing, even when I put it hypothetically, that if I conjure up the possibility in too complete detail for someone else it will no longer be my secret and hence my temporal competence will leave me forever—so superstitious in fact that I often instead ask about ideas in the neighborhood of my secret, such as what a person would do if he had X-ray vision. What would he look at if he had X-ray vision? I had an interesting talk with a man named Bill Asplundh about this. Bill is one of the few truly fast-typing non-gay temps I have run across—he types much faster than I do. He drifted into temping while working on a master’s in something or other, as I did, and now he genuinely likes it. We were at a Chinese restaurant one time when I asked him what he would look at if he had X-ray vision. He was eating a yellow curry chicken dish. He said that the first thing he would do would be to look through the walls while the cooks were making up their curry powder, since it was extraordinarily good curry powder and he wanted to be able to duplicate it at home. Then he admitted that he would probably use it to look at women. “But what people don’t think about when they talk about X-ray vision,” he then said, suddenly animated, “is two things. First, what you’re talking about is not a blanket sort of X-ray vision, where your sight penetrates through any substance, but a very specific sort of X-ray vision that only goes through clothes. Textile X-ray vision is what we’re talking about. That’s pretty obvious, but perhaps less obviously, think about what you’re going to see when you see a woman who is wearing clothes but you can’t see the clothes she’s wearing. You have this idea that you’re going to see her with no clothes on, that her breasts are going to be there looking the way they would look without a bra on, but remember, she has a bra on, you just can’t see it, so you’re going to see indentations where the seams are, and if it’s a push-up bra, her breasts are going to look all squished out of shape, not the way you imagine them at all. And think if she’s wearing some kind of support pantyhose, and it’s tight—you’re going to see all this squeezing around her rear end and stuff like that. You’re going to see the panty lines there, red lines, but without the panties actually being there.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  But rather than holding it immediately, I deprived myself of the sight of it for a little while and instead gently placed my hand on her braid, which was cool and thick and smooth and dense, a totally different idea of hair, so different that it is strange to think of the two orders of hair as sharing the same word, but which follows the curve of her head in the same way that her pubic hair follows the curve over her mound-bone, and when I felt the French-braid sensation sinking into the hollow of my palm, which craves sexual shapes and textures, I then went ahead and curled the fingers of my other hand through her devil’s food fur, connecting the two kinky handfuls of home-grown protein with my arms, and it felt as if I were hot-wiring a car; my heart’s twin carburetors roared into life. That’s all I did, then I started typing this before I forgot the feeling. Maybe that’s all I will do. That sexy, sexy pubic hair! I’m noticing now that its contours are similar to those of a black bicycle seat: a black leather seat on a racing bicycle. Maybe this is why those sad sniffers of comic legend sniff girls’ bicycle seats? No, for them it isn’t the shape, it’s the fact that the seat has been between a girl’s legs. They are truly pathetic. I have no sympathy to spare for compulsions other than my own. I would, though, like to rescue the correspondence between pubic hair and narrow black-leather bicycle seats from them.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The three of us took an empty black-leather booth, higher than the tables and facing the black stage with its silver showerheads. We waited like schoolchildren, hands clasped. The blond woman I’d seen bathing earlier leaned over the booth. She was cherubic, her creamy skin damp and a ringlet of hair still wet, and her smile was soft and a little goofy. I couldn’t stop staring at her feet, her bare feet solidly planted and soft and pink, leaving damp footprints on the tile floor. She set a vinyl handbag filled with sex toys on the table in front of me and asked, “Hi, I’m Georgia. Would you like a show?” The negotiations fell to me, and I laid a few bills on the table, and then a few more, and more, until Georgia suddenly swept it all up and nodded and called to her partner. “Penny.” Penny was a slim, boyish brunette standing a few feet back. At her name she drained the Pepsi in her hand and set the can aside, and climbed up on the table. Her face was plain and intelligent and relaxed. She lay back on a white towel and stretched her white arms above her head to touch the wall, her face inches from Jeannie’s, and then slowly she pulled her legs up and rolled her bottom out, and her shaved genitals appeared in the center of the table like a dish. And Georgia caressed her with her tongue while we watched, and when I looked again at Jeannie I could see her pupils were dilated so that her brown eyes were big and dark. Catharine MacKinnon believes that these structures around us, around Georgia and Penny and Jeannie and me, are necessarily misogynistic, and that any woman’s involvement in these structures will hurt the woman before it changes the structure. MacKinnon is a lawyer. I wonder why she chose to enter a profession marked by its support for patriarchal institutions, and its lack of reason when it comes to the many concerns of women. She argues the fine points of constitutional interpretation within a strictly defined social construct written by men, and I think she hopes that her presence will gradually force those social constructs to evolve, loosen. She has said it is uncomfortable, sometimes frightening, often lonely to be in her position, a woman in a man’s world. I know that my presence at this table has to change the boundaries within which these things exist. Women guiding the sexual drive of men change them, gentle the institutions men have made to cope with their feelings toward women. The near silence of the men around me makes me think that Jeannie and I, like Georgia and Penny, have taken charge somehow. Women literally emasculate male institutions, change them into something more androgynous, by nothing more than their presence.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “Well, I told you—I’ve never met a girl like you before, either.” But he wondered what kind of men she had known. Gently, he forced her thighs open; she allowed him to place her hand on his sex. He felt that, for the first time, his body presented itself to her as a mystery and that, immediately, therefore, he, Vivaldo, became totally mysterious in her eyes. She touched him for the first time with wonder and terror, realizing that she did not know how to caress him. It was being borne in on her that he wanted her: this meant that she no longer knew what he wanted. “You’ve slept with lots of girls like me before, haven’t you? With colored girls.” “I’ve slept with lots of all kinds of girls.” There was no laughter between them now; they whispered, and the heat between them rose. Her odor rose to meet him, it mingled with his own, sharper sweat. He was between her thighs and in her hands, her eyes stared fearfully into his. “But with colored girls, too?” “Yes.” There was a long pause, she sighed a long, shuddering sigh. She arched her head upward, away from him. “Were they friends of my brother’s?” “No. No. I paid them.” “Oh.” Her head dropped, she closed her eyes, she brought her thighs together, then opened them. The covers were in his way and he threw them off and then for a moment, half-kneeling, he stared at the honey and the copper and the gold and the black of her. Her breath came in short, sharp, trembling gasps. He wanted her to turn her face to him and open her eyes. “Ida. Look at me.” She made a sound, a kind of moan, and turned her face toward him but kept her eyes closed. He took her hand again. “Come on. Help me.” Her eyes opened for a second, veiled, but she smiled. He lowered himself down upon her, slowly, allowing her hands to guide him, and kissed her on the mouth. They locked together, shaking, her hands fluttered upward and settled on his back. I paid them. She sighed again, a different sigh, long and surrendering, and the struggle began.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I asked her.‘Because it’s true.’ She sounded all at once rather sullen. ‘I wouldn’t have bought you such a fine dress, if I’d known you were only going to wear it to go flirting in.’‘Oh!’ I stamped my foot, unsteadily - I was as drunk, I suppose, as she was. ‘Oh!’ I put my fingers to the neck of my gown, and began to fumble with its fastenings. ‘I shall take the dam’ dress off right here and you shall have it back,’ I said, ‘if that’s how you feel about it!’At that she took another step towards me and seized my arm. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said in a slightly chastened tone. I shook her off and continued to work - quite fruitlessly, since the wine, together with my anger and surprise, had made me terribly clumsy - at the buttons of my frock. Kitty took hold of me again; soon we were almost tussling.‘I won’t have you call me a flirt!’ I said as she tugged at me. ‘How could you call me one? How could you? Oh! If you just knew -’ I put my hand to the back of my collar; her fingers followed my own, her face came close. Seeing it, I felt all at once quite dazed. I thought I had become her sister, as she wanted. I thought I had my queer desires cribbed and chilled and chastened. Now I knew only that her arm was about me, her hand on mine, her breath hot upon my cheek. I grasped her - not the better to push her away, but in order to hold her nearer. Gradually we ceased our wrestling and grew still, our breaths ragged, our hearts thudding. Her eyes were round and dark as jet; I felt her fingers leave my hand and move against my neck.Then all at once there came a blast of noise from the passageway beyond, and the sound of footsteps. Kitty started in my arms as if a pistol had been fired, and took a half-dozen steps, very rapidly, away. A woman - Esther, the conjuror’s assistant - appeared on the other side of the open doorway. She was pale, and looked terribly grave. She said: ‘Kitty, Nan, you won’t believe it.’ She reached for her handkerchief, and put it to her mouth. ‘There’s some boys just come, from the Charing Cross Hospital. They are saying Gully Sutherland is there’ - this was the comic singer who had appeared with Kitty at the Canterbury Palace - ‘they are saying Gully is there - that he has got drunk, and shot himself dead!’It was true - we all heard, next day, how horribly true it was. I should never have suspected it, but had learned since coming to London that Gully was known in the business as something of a lush.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  At the same time I felt a blip of self-irritable disgust at the astonishing potency of these car-crushes and at how much mental air-time they consumed when I drove. It was insane to think that someone was more wonderful and mysterious just because she was passing me in her car. What could be more common than two people driving nearly side by side on a highway, one drawing abreast of the other? Why couldn’t I just relax and let her pass me without falling in total temp-love with her? And yet that was what was going on—and maybe it was going on for her, too: maybe she was listening to Terry Gross on National Public Radio and barely registering that some car (me) was off to her right, but maybe her hopes were rising and crashing addictively each time she passed a lone man at the wheel—maybe she was trying just as I had done to piece together a sense of the lovability and marriageability of each person based on the ludicrously inadequate information available—that is, on the driver’s head, on the state of origin of the license plate, on the general personality of the car (all cars are classifiable as cute/perky or elegante/mysterioso or Camaro/vulgaro), on whether one hand or two was visible on the steering wheel, and on the condition of the sheet metal. As her door-handle came in line with mine I tried to fight the desire to turn toward her but I couldn’t; I looked blankly at her just as she was turning to look blankly at me; then we both turned back and looked straight ahead at our lanes. At that moment, we were driving at almost exactly the same speed. We were close. It seemed miraculous to me that we could be in such states of seated repose, and yet could be separated by the surface of the highway, which was moving between us so fast that if I opened my door and tried to walk over to her and get in her car, my feet and shin-bones would be sanded down to nothing. With tormenting leisureliness she finally pulled ahead and put on her blinker and smoothed her blue car-butt over in front of me. (It turned out to be a Ford Escort, which always makes me think of escort services when I’m driving long distance.) Then I saw something riveting—a Smith College sticker on her rear window, with a University of Chicago sticker above it. I didn’t have to drive all the way to Northampton; Smith College was right here with me on the road! But I hesitated before I pushed up on my glasses, having never been through a full-blown chronvulsion in a moving car before. Would it be safe? Would my high rate of speed relative to the highway cause some unforeseen danger? Stopping the universe while driving at sixty miles an hour seemed an extremely rash and kinky thing to do.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  When I had finished a fair copy of the story, I put it in a plastic food-storage bag and closed the bag with a twist-tie. I excavated the sand below her right hand, where she had been digging, and I buried the bagged story there, packing the sand as tightly as I could and restoring the hole she had dug to the smooth contours that her idleness had given it. Her arm was warm. Her hair, by the way, was bobby-pinned up, blond with dark roots. I positioned myself behind a nearby sand dune and took hold of my glasses at the bridge and pulled them down, restarting the present for the first time since I had rediscovered my powers. Through the binoculars, I watched her imperturbably dig, as if nothing had happened. It is always a kick to see a woman come alive again after I’ve paused her for an extended period: she has no way of knowing that an instant of time has just passed that was hugely richer in content than any of the instants that immediately preceded it. An immense pale-blue Norwegian cruise ship of a millisecond has just docked and stout tourists have disembarked from it and bought straw hats and trinkets and they have all reboarded and the ship has backed its tonnage away, its propeller doming the water—and yet she thinks that all the milliseconds of her recent past are equivalently in scale, little skiffs and junks floating here and there in the harbor. And I, who have lived consciously through, even piloted, that enormous single millisecond, have forgotten to some extent how much better a woman is when she is not motionless, when her shoulder blades, for instance, can move subtly around in her back; her aliveness is always something of a revelation to me as well. This woman’s sand-thinned fingertips felt the unexpected slidey movement of the plastic bag after a minute or so. She raised her head to look over at what she had found, trying not to lift her upper body off her towel and expose too much Jamaica. She pulled my bagged story out of the sand and brushed it off and undid the twist-tie. And then she began reading it. I am not kidding—she actually began reading what I’d written. When I saw her slide the first page of my double-spaced typescript to the back of the pile, still lying on her stomach but with her elbows out, her chin on her hands, I wormed my fist into my swimsuit and took hold of my stain-stick. (I had of course put my suit back on, since the world was with me now.) Here follows what I had given her to unearth and read, slightly edited (as op-ed pages say) for space and clarity:

• From The Fermata (1994)

  As soon as Marian saw Kevin’s cock reappear, she knew she had to suck it. This was her one chance. “Oh, God, that’s a pretty cock,” she said. “I need a real dick in my mouth for a second, just for a second. Come over here for a second, baby. Sylvie, he needs to be super stiff for your tight little butt. You don’t mind if I get his dick good and stiff for you with my tongue, do you? I’m sorry, but I just have to suck on this dick.” “Suck him!” said Sylvie. “Ooh, God, suck him stiff for me. Just hurry and get something big up my ass. I’m so hot for it.” She circled Marian’s clit with her end of the Fusilier, gazing at the base of the Klockhammer buried in the older woman’s ass. Marian, her mouth stuffed with purple cock, groaned and opened her legs for the pleasure. As Sylvie felt Kevin jabbing the other Welsh-head in and out of her own buzzing cunt-lips, she reached back and spread her asscheeks open and said, “That’s enough. Stop sucking my boyfriend’s dick and get it in my ass!” Marian pulled her mouth off of Kevin’s dick. “Okay,sweetie, it’s ready for you.” She squirted lube on Sylvie’s asshole. The squirt bottle made rude noises, but nobody cared. She pulled Kevin into position by his cock and tapped the head of his dick on Sylvie’s now-sloppy asscrack, circling it over the opening. Then she pointed it and held it still. “Okay, push in slow, Kevin. Open up for him, Sylvie. He’s going in.” “Push it in me! Fuck this ass!” cried Sylvie. Marian held Kevin’s cockshaft while it began to drive slowly in. It bent a little as he put his weight behind it; then, as Sylvie relaxed for him, it straightened out and filled her. “There he goes,” said Marian. “Fuck me with that dick, oooooooo!” said Sylvie. Kevin began making very slow long strokes. “That’s it, Kevin—fuck straight into her perfect ass—you’re getting it.” Marian took hold of the end of the vibrator in her cunt and started pulling it in and out in rhythm with Kevin’s steady dick-thrusts. Its length curved up and disappeared into Sylvie’s clim. She kissed Sylvie on the shoulder. “God, I like being connected to your sexy pussy, sweetie!” she said. Sylvie was looking straight ahead, taking little breaths as she pushed back on Kevin’s thickness. “You like him in your ass, don’t you?” Marian asked her. “I like him to fuck me hard!” said Sylvie. “Fuck my hot ass, Kev. I’m getting closer to the smiley face!” She looked at Marian. “That’s what we say when we’re going to come soon,” she breathlessly explained.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Would that be classed as an act of revenge, or an act resulting from sexual attraction?” I asked her. “Both. Mark is sex on wheels, in a way. His wife is sex on wheels, too.” She looked at me significantly. “Yes?” I said, stretching the word out. “Yes. I don’t really like Mark, I like Mark’s wife. Well—I like them both. She has the best mouth. It’s sort of like Leslie Caron’s mouth. No—here’s what I would do if I had a remote that freezes the world. I’d be in a florist’s shop, and Kari Thalmeiser would come in to get some cut flowers. She dresses beautifully, in an expensive loungey way—yellow pants and that kind of thing—but she pulls it off. She would lean into the flower-cooler to smell a bunch of flowers, cold flowers, and I would pause her as she’s smiling, with her eyes closed, breathing in the scent of some really filthy-looking flower. Or no, better yet, some bunch of nice simple pretty flowers, like carnations. Whatever the flower is, I move it aside after hitting the remote, because it’s my turn, Kari Thalmeiser, and I adjust the wire shelf on the cooler so that it’s just below her chin, and I like climb up on it, get up on my heels, and spread my big solid mega-thighs wide open for her, so she’s half an inch from this giant, sopping, sloppy, juicy, dripping flowerbox of mine. I can feel that I’m dripping all over the blossoms that are in the vases on the floor of the cooler. The metal is cold on my ass. I see her mouth, that Leslie Caron mouth, smiling at the smell of the flowers, her eyes closed, and that makes me jill at myself really fast. When I’m just about to flip and I can’t stop myself, I hold the back of her head and I jam her face into my juice-box and I hit the remote so that time flashes on for her for just a half a second. Too quick for her to know. As I start coming I’m merciful and I pause her again and I just come and come and come against her beautiful lips—and even against her nose, her nose would be just right for my clit. Yeah, I’d hold her earlobes and pull her face into me until I’d humped every little come-kick out of my hips, and then I’d climb out of the cooler and put everything back where it was, all the nice pretty carnations and baby’s breath and shit, and I’d carefully dab at her pretty face with some floral tissue, because we wouldn’t want pretty Kari to look like she’d been eating a watermelon. I’d spend a couple of minutes fixing her lipstick. Then I’d start things up again and I’d go, ‘Wull, Kari Thalmeiser, how are you!’ ” “Interesting!” I said, enjoying Arlette’s filth. “Couldn’t you spread those thighmasters for me? Show me that big fat Georgia O’Keeffe?”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The truth was, I think, that she was squeamish of mentioning Kitty now - and by that alone I knew that it was she, more than any of them, who was uneasy. I had said nothing more to her about my passion. I had said nothing of my new, strange, hot desire to anyone. But she saw me, of course, as I lay in my bed; and, as anyone will tell you who has been secretly in love, it is in bed that you do your dreaming - in bed, in the darkness, where you cannot see your own cheeks pink, that you ease back the mantle of restraint that keeps your passion dimmed throughout the day, and let it glow a little.How Kitty would have blushed, to know the part she played in my fierce dreamings - to know how shamelessly I took my memories of her, and turned them to my own improper advantage ! Each night at the Palace she kissed me farewell; in my dreams her lips stayed at my cheek - were hot, were tender - moved to my brow, my ear, my throat, my mouth .. I was used to standing close to her, to fasten her collar-studs or brush her lapels; now, in my reveries, I did what I longed to do then - I leaned to place my lips upon the edges of her hair; I slid my hands beneath her coat, to where her breasts pressed warm against her stiff gent’s shirt and rose to meet my strokings ...And all this - which left me thick with bafflement and pleasure - with my sister at my side! All this with Alice’s breath upon my cheek, or her hot limbs pressed against mine; or with her eyes shining cold and dull, with starlight and suspicion.But she said nothing; she asked me nothing; and to the rest of the family, at least, my continuing friendship with Kitty became in time a source not of wonder, but of pride. ‘Have you been to the Palace at Canterbury?’ I would hear Father say to customers as he took their plates. ‘Our youngest girl is very thick with Kitty Butler, the star of the show ...’

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I would not argue with this. I would say, “I accept that. An asshole is a very personal thing. I’d be perfectly happy just to see your ass. You could keep your cheeks together.” But she wouldn’t go for that either. “I think not,” she would say. “I don’t trust myself. If I turned around and showed you my ass, my cheeks might fly open, and we wouldn’t want that. What if I washed my breasts some more?” She would brush some of her hair over one of her nipples for emphasis. “Hmm?” I would say, “That would be fantastic, of course, but—here’s an idea. What if you took one of the washcloths and just placed it on your ass? Just placed it there. It would be a white square, a helicopter landing pad, but it would follow your shape.” “You mean like this?” She would wring out a washcloth and hold it as a loincloth over her bottom, and she would turn with her back to me. “Yes,” I would say, “in a way, but I guess I didn’t mean quite so free-hanging. I think it might need to be wetter, so that it really clings, just the way it clung to your breasts. The way you have it now it’s a little bit … centerfielderesque.” “Ah.” Adele would dip her hands in the water and hold them on her ass to wet it, and then she would apply the washcloth to her skin and turn to show me. “Perfect, perfect!” I would whisper-hiss. “Now I can see your sex-shape and yet your ass observes all the proprieties.” I would shuffle my way as close to the door-opening as possible and I would begin to jack frantically, my knuckles rapping smartly on the door. The lock’s chain would clank and rattle with every stroke of my fist. “Can you back up towards the door a little more?” I would ask. On her knees, Adele would back the white square on her ass towards me. It would follow the seam of her open peach faithfully; it would look oddly like an open book. “Just a little more!” I would say. I would tell her how close my cock was to her ass, and how fucking incredible her ass looked. Just below the edge of the washcloth, I would be able to see four of her fingers fretting against the flushed cowling of her clit. I would let go of my cock and extend my hand through the door-gap as far as it would go; I would almost be able to reach her with my middle finger. “Back up just a teensy bit more,” I would say. “I’m going to touch you.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  But though I was, am, extremely single, and though I had suffered a serious attack of loneliness involving a tape gun only hours before, and was probably giving off the same rads of availability and generalized longing as she was, I didn’t strike up a conversation with her, because I was smart enough to know by now to spare a woman like this my tentative but occasionally successful pickup technique, since even if we did go out to dinner a few times and have a few nights in bed, it would all be essentially sad, essentially wrong. I wasn’t the sort of man that she really wanted, and she wasn’t for me, either—there would be a temporary wonder and excitement in those loose neck-holes, and then the differences between us would doom us—and why do any of that, when all I really wanted to know was how, exactly, she was naked beneath her clothes? I could imagine some of the unseen her in advance, having undressed so many women on the sly in my life—I’m aware of certain connoisseurial correlations between the type of face a woman has and the type of back she has: in fact, I felt that I had a fairly well defined sense of how her back would look and feel, how high her hidden waist was. But breasts were always a wild card, and the ass, too (I mean the real-world ass, not the dirty-magazine ass), was a thing of a billion unique variations.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  So, just as she started walking again, I snapped my fingers. This is my latest method of entering the Fold, and one of the simpler I have been able to develop (much more straightforward than my earlier mathematical-formula technique, or the sewn calluses, for instance, both of which I will get into later). She didn’t hear the snap, only I did—the universe halts at some indeterminate point just before my middle finger swats against the base of my thumb. I got out my Casio typewriter and scooted over here to her on my chair. (I didn’t scoot backwards, I scooted frontwards, which isn’t easy to do over carpeting, because it is hard to get the proper traction. I wanted to keep my eyes on her.) She was in mid-stride. I reached forward and put my hands on her hipbones. It felt as if there were cashmere or something fancy in the wool, and it was good to feel her hipbones through that soft material, and to see my hands angling to follow the incurve of her waist, which the dress had to an extent hidden. Sometimes when I first touch a woman in the Fold I tense up my arms until they vibrate, so that the shape of whatever is under my palms keeps on being sent through my nerves as new information. I never know exactly what I will do during a Drop. To get her dress out of the way, I lifted its soft hem up over her hips and gathered it into two wingy bunches and tied a big soft knot with them. It had seemed as if she had a tiny potbelly with the dress on (this can be a sexy touch, I think, on some women), but if she had, it disappeared or lost definition as soon as I pulled her panty-hose and underpants down as far as I could get them, which wasn’t that far because her legs were walkingly apart. (Also, before I pulled down her pantyhose, which is a smoky-blue color, I touched an oval of her skin through a run in the darker part high on her thigh.) And then I was given this sight that I have before me now, of her pubic hair.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  That was months away, months and months and weeks and weeks; I saw them all spread out before me, each one full of nights in Kitty’s dressing-room, and good-night kisses, and dreams.I gave a cry, I think; and Tony took a swig of Bass, complacently. Then Alice appeared, demanding to know what it was that must be talked about in whispers, and shrieked over, on the stairs ... ? I didn’t wait for Tony’s answer, I thundered down to the door and into the street, and ran to the station like a hoyden, with my hat flapping about my ears -because I had forgotten, after all, to pin it properly.I had hardly expected Kitty to swagger to Whitstable in her suit and her topper and her lavender gloves; but even so, when she stepped from the train and I saw that she was clad as a girl, and walked like a girl, with her plait fastened to the back of her head and a parasol over her arm, I felt a little pang of disappointment. This swiftly turned, however - as always - to desire, and then to pride, for she looked terribly smart and handsome on that dusty Whitstable platform. She kissed my cheek when I went up to her, and took my arm, and let me lead her from the station to our house, across the sea-front. She said, ‘Well! And this is where you were born, and grew up?’‘Oh yes! Look there: that building, beside the church, is our old school. Over there - see that house with the bicycle by the gate? - that’s where my cousins live. Here, look, on this step, I once fell down and cut my chin, and my sister held her handkerchief to it, the whole way home ...’ So I talked and pointed, and Kitty nodded, biting her lip. ‘How lucky you are!’ she said at last; and as she said it, she seemed to sigh.I had feared that the afternoon would be dismal and hard; in fact, it was merry. Kitty shook hands with everyone, and had a word for them all, such as, ‘You must be Davy, who works in the smack’, and ‘You must be Alice, who Nancy talks about so often, and is so proud of.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Just type anything?” I asked. “Right,” said Dr. Orowitz-Rudman. “I can read you something if you would like, or you can make it up. It would be nice if it were similar to the typing you normally do, but that doesn’t matter all that much. It has to be in English, though.” “Why?” “So that the letter-frequencies are representative.” “I see. No problem,” I said. I began to type, in the self-conscious way people do when they’re testing typewriters and computers at a store, though in my case the words I was typing were not being recorded anywhere. It’s strange to be typing here in this magnet, I clicked out on the keys. But I kind of like it I’ve never typed supine before. I recommend it to all interested parties. This keyboard has a nice sloppy feel, probably because it’s been messed with inside and doesn’t work. Feels like some of the old Wang keyboards. Since it is dysfunctional, I suppose I can type anything I want. Doctor Susan could possibly follow my fingers on a video monitor to find out what I’m typing, or study the tape later, but I doubt very much she’ll bother. She’s cheerfully all business. She really attracts me. That’s not surprising—it is much more surprising to me when a woman fails to attract me than when she does attract me. Very occasionally I meet a woman and afterward I think, That’s incredible—nothing about that woman attracted me. It almost never happens. All women merit love and constancy. That’s true. All women should be loved by someone good and dependable and honest. I am good, I think, but I am not honest or dependable, so I have to pass lovingly through their lives without their knowing I have been there. Man I like Dr. Susan’s tits under that lab coat, with that name pinned on one. Short funny forty-year-old women with big tits should reign supreme. Or if I could just cycle between silky-voiced tall women with small tits and short happy women with big tits—plus medium-sized affectionately sexy women with medium-sized tits and short women with small tits and southern accents, and medium-sized women with small tits and Hispanic accents—now there would be a life. I like the fact that Dr. Susan doesn’t know that I’m typing how much I’d like her to squat over me and rip open the white cotton crotch of her black pantyhose and grind her salty puss into my face. I stopped pre tend-typing. “Is that enough?” I asked. Dr. Orowitz-Rudman said, “That’s plenty. We’ve got a good fix on your nerve now. Can you type the reference sentence again? You remember?” “Sorry,” I said, “I think I forgot it.” “ ‘The cure for the greatest … part of human … miseries is not radical …’ ”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  [image file=image_rsrc1BH.jpg] 8TO RETURN TO THE BLUE-AND-WHITE-STRIPED BEACH TOWEL of last year, however. I again tried to tell myself how self-sufficient I was stretched out in the Goldman Sachs sun, and therefore how totally unnecessary any sort of time-perversion, chronofugational or otherwise, was to me. I had a whole free real weekday to do whatever I wanted; I could, for instance, and should, read a book. I could go to a bookstore and select a new beautiful paperback and buy it and put my nose in it to smell the fine pukey smell that new books often have. If I had clutch powers I could browse in a bookstore until I saw a woman I liked … and here I came up with the aforementioned idea of writing a startling burst of filth in the top margin of a book that a woman was considering. With an effort of will, I erased that phantasm: there were wonderful non-gonadotropic topics everywhere and I wanted very much to do them the courtesy of thinking about them—it was my duty as a conscious creature to think about them. The plastic arts, for instance. At random I thought of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, how skilled he was at depicting clear water and wet tulle. It would be good to be lying on a towel on a beach while the Hispanic phlebotomist held flat the pages of a large-format edition of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings with her flatly sagging coconut-oiled breasts, so that the Caribbean breeze wouldn’t make me lose my place. My eyes were still closed, the towel was still clean-smelling, I was still lucid-feeling, but I knew that I was almost ready to turn over on my back, and I knew that if I turned over on my back my bathing suit would come off a minute later (and who cared if anyone saw me—I wanted people to see me!—but I was pretty sure nobody was home downstairs anyway, because no cars were in the driveway), and once my bathing suit was off, my Juiceman would writhe and elongate against my thigh until, in attempting to rise and make a drunken statement, it would lose its balance and fall heavily back against my hipbone, where it would writhe some more. As a last resort, to remind myself that most of the world was asexual most of the time and well worth a close look even so, I opened my eye, the one that wasn’t lost in the turf of the towel, and I saw, with nearsighted monocular vividness, my huge sunlit watch and my glasses. Through one lens of my glasses I could see the Fieldcrest label, or rather its verso inside, which was nicer-looking than the outside because you could see all the spendthrift lushness of soft thread that had been necessary to sew the little familiar logo and its trademark sign—though the sight of this made my Fold-urges reawaken, since time too was lusher when turned inside out. Beyond the sharp-edged inner bourne of my myopia I saw the macrophage of my T-shirt draped over the telephone, which would only ring if Jenny, my coordinator, came up with a late assignment for me, and I imagined the quick upward arpeggio of metallic clicks produced by the telescoping chrome antenna as I pulled it out roughly to answer a call, one segment reaching the limit of its slide and engaging with the next, and the same clicks in reverse order after I’d hung up and was pushing the aspirin-shaped end-bauble down. Time telescoped in a similar way; it would be most helpful if I could instigate a Drop whenever I pulled on the antenna of my portable phone. All things that came to mind suggested mechanisms of pausation to me; so much so that I began to feel that I was on the verge of regaining my powers.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Just now I spun around once in my chair in order to surprise myself again with the sight of Joyce’s pubic hair. It really is amazing to me that I can do this, even after all these years. She was walking about thirty feet from my desk, across an empty stretch of space, carrying some papers, on her way to someone’s cube, and my gaze just launched toward her, diving cleanly, without ripples, through the glasses that she had complimented, taking heart from having to pass through the optical influence of something she had noticed and liked. It was as if I traveled along the arc of my sight and reached her visually. (There is definitely something to those medieval theories of sight that had the eye sending out rays.) And just as my sighted self reached her, she stopped walking for a second, to check something on one of the papers she held, and when she looked down I was struck by the simple fact that today her hair is braided. It is arranged in what I think is called a French braid. Each of the solid clumps of her hair feeds into the overall solidity of the braid, and the whole structure is plaited as part of her head, like a set of glossy external vertebrae. I’m impressed that women are able to arrange this sort of complicated figure, without too many stray strands, without help, in the morning, by feel. Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back. (“Panties” is a word to be avoided, I feel.) But French braids, in which three sporting dolphins dip smoothly under one another and surface in a continuous elegant entrainment, are the most beautiful and impressive results of this sense of dorsal space. As soon as I saw Joyce’s braid I knew that it was time to stop time. I needed to feel her solid braid, and her head beneath it, in my palm.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And her mind was filled again with that bright, blue field. She shook with the memory of his weight, her desire, her terror, and her cunning. Not here. Where? Oh, Richard. The cruel sun, and the indifferent air, and the two of them burning on a burning field. She knew that, yes, she must now surrender, now that she had him; she knew that she could not let him go; and, oh, his hands, his hands. But she was frightened, she realized that she knew nothing: Can’t we wait? Wait. No. No. And his lips burned her neck and her breasts. Then let’s go to the woods. Let’s go to the woods. And he grinned. The memory of that grin rushed up from its hiding place and splintered her heart now. You’d have to carry me, or I’d have to crawl, can’t you feel it? Then, Let me in Cass, take me, take me, I swear I won’t betray you, you know I won’t! “I love you, Cass,” he said, his lips twitching and his eyes stunned with grief. “Tell me where you’ve been, tell me why you’ve gone so far away from me.” “Why I,” she said, helplessly, “have gone away from you?” The smell of crushed flowers rose to her nostrils. She began to cry. She did not look down. She looked straight up at the sun; then she closed her eyes, and the sun roared inside her head. One hand had left her—where his hand had been, she was cold. I won’t hurt you. Please. Maybe just a little. Just at first. Oh. Richard. Please. Tell me you love me. Say it. Say it now. Oh, yes. I love you. I love you. Tell me you’ll love me forever. Yes. Forever. Forever. He was looking at her, leaning on the bar, looking at her from far away. She dried her eyes with the handkerchief he had thrown in her lap. “Give me a cigarette, please.” He threw her the pack, threw her some matches. She lit a cigarette. “When was the last time you saw Ida and Vivaldo? Tell me the truth.” “Tonight.” “And you’ve been spending all this time—every time you come in here in the early morning—with Ida and Vivaldo?” She was frightened again, and she knew that her tone betrayed her. “Yes.” “You’re lying. Ida hasn’t been with Vivaldo. She’s been with Ellis. And it’s been going on a long time.” He paused. “The question is—where have you been? Who’s been with Vivaldo while Ida’s been away—till two o’clock in the morning?” She looked at him, too stunned for an instant, to calculate. “You mean, Ida’s been having an affair with Steve Ellis? For how long? And how do you know that?” “How do you—not know it?” “Why—everytime I saw them, they seemed perfectly natural and happy together——” “But many of the times you say you’ve been with them. you couldn’t have been with them because Ida’s been with Steve!”