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 142 of 344 · 20 per page

• From Shunned (2018)

  I considered telling him my Witness story but thought better of it. “Well, if you want my advice,” he said, “don’t ever get any. You’re a natural salesperson, very articulate and trustworthy. Formal training would spoil you.” He was eighteen years my senior. His experience and opinions meant something to me. He looked at me with limpid eyes, and I knew I could trust him. I learned he’d been divorced for several years and had two children. He told me fascinating stories about his time in the military, with two-year rotations in Moscow, Paris, and Vienna, working on “secret stuff.” This made me laugh, but he was quite serious. Our sales efforts required regular strategy meetings back in Portland. Gradually, meetings that could be handled by phone were taking place in person, followed by lunch or a quick drink after work. We became a resource for each other, sharing news from the grapevine about the potential reorganization and adding our own interpretations to what we heard. I could feel myself being drawn to Geoff, flirting with him, looking forward to our meetings, paying extra attention to what I wore on those days. He walked into the office with a leonine grace that exuded confidence but fell short of the arrogance and aloofness common among successful executives. One day, an after-work drink turned into a spontaneous dinner. Neither of us had anyone waiting at home, and we weren’t ready for the conversation to end. We had given each other unspoken permission to make even more personal inquiries, and so we started sharing what had failed about our marriages. That was the day it first occurred to me that maybe my marriage had been a success. Ross and I had grown up together and learned a lot along the way. “Can’t success be knowing when it’s time to move on, taking the best of what you learned?” I asked. “That’s a very enlightened view, especially for someone still going through the process,” Geoff said. “And what does your family think about it? Are they supportive?” There was no way to answer that question fully without telling him the scope of my situation, that I’d left not only an unhappy marriage but also a religion where divorce is rare and looked upon as a sign of spiritual weakness. I explained how devout my family was, how I’d disappointed them all, how my brother wasn’t talking to me. I’d wanted to share this with Geoff for some time. I could see by the way his eyes darkened that something protective was rising in him. “I’ve lost my appetite,” he said, and stopped eating, setting his fork down. He removed his wire-frame glasses and rubbed his eyes. He reached out and placed his hand on mine. “I had no idea all this was going on. You always seem so happy, so positive.” His warm touch resonated through my whole being.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  Before I took up my new profession I was known as a poet, as a woman who was independent and wrote only for her own pleasure. Many young writers, poets, came to me. We often collaborated, discussed and shared the work in progress. Varied as they were in character, inclinations, habits and vices, all the writers had one trait in common; they were poor. Desperately poor. Very often my “maison” was turned into a cafeteria where they dropped in, hungry, saying nothing, and we ate Quaker Oats because that was the cheapest thing to make, and it was said to give strength. Most of the erotica was written on empty stomachs. Now, hunger is very good for stimulating the imagination; it does not produce sexual power, and sexual power does not produce unusual adventures. The more hunger, the greater the desires, like those of men in prison, wild and haunting. So we had here a perfect world in which to grow the flower of eroticism. Of course, if you get too hungry, too continuously, you become a bum, a tramp. Those men who sleep along the East River, in doorways, on the Bowery, they have no sexual life at all, it is said. My writers—some of them lived in the Bowery—had not reached that stage yet. As for me, my real writing was put aside when I set out in search of the erotic. These are my adventures in that world of prostitution. To bring them into the light was at first difficult. The sexual life is usually enveloped in many layers, for all of us—poets, writers, artists. It is a veiled woman, half-dreamed. Little BirdsManuel and his wife were poor, and when they first looked for an apartment in Paris, they found only two dark rooms below the street level, giving onto a small stifling courtyard. Manuel was sad. He was an artist, and there was no light in which he could work. His wife did not care. She would go off each day to do her trapeze act for the circus. In that dark under-the-earth place, his whole life assumed the character of an imprisonment. The concierges were extremely old, and the tenants who lived in the house seemed to have agreed to make it an old people’s home. So Manuel wandered through the streets until he came to a sign: FOR RENT. He was led to two attic rooms that looked like a hovel, but one of the rooms led to a terrace, and as Manuel stepped out onto this terrace he was greeted with the shouts of schoolgirls on recess. There was a school across the way, and the girls were playing in the yard under the terrace.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “She was the queen of the whores, Bijou. Yes, Bijou. Only a few years ago she could still be seen sitting at some little café in Montmartre, like an Oriental Fatima, but still pale, the eyes still burning. She was like a womb turned inside out. Her mouth, not a mouth that made you think of a kiss, or of food; not a mouth to speak with, to form words, to greet you—no, it was like the mouth of woman’s sex itself, the shape of it, the way it moved—to draw you in, to rouse you—always moistened, red and alive like the lips of a caressed sex . . . Each motion of this mouth had the power to awaken the same motion, the same undulation in the sex of a man, as if transmitted by contagion, directly, immediately. As it undulated, like a wave about to curl and engulf one, it ordained the undulation of the penis, the undulation of the blood. As it grew moist, it drew out my erotic secretion. “Somehow, Bijou’s whole body was guided only by eroticism, guided by a genius for exposing every expression of desire. It was indecent, I tell you. It was like making love with her in public, in a café, in the street, before everyone. “She kept nothing for night, for the bed. It was all in the open, on view. She was indeed the queen of the whores, enacting possession at every instant of her life, even while she ate; and when she played cards, she did not sit impassive, her body deprived of sensuality, as other women would sit with their attention on the game. One felt from the pose of her body, the way her ass spread on the seat, that everything was still set for possession. Her breasts almost touched the table with their fullness. If she laughed, then it was the sexual laugh of a satisfied woman, the laugh of a body enjoying itself through every pore and cell, being caressed by the whole world. “In the street, walking behind her sometimes when she did not know that I was there, I could see even urchins following her. Before they had seen her face, men followed her. It was as if she left an animal scent behind her. Strange what it can do to a man to see a truly sexual animal before him. The animal nature of woman has been so carefully disguised—the lips and ass and legs made to serve other purposes, made, like some colored plumage, to distract man from his desire rather than accentuate it.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “No,” said the young girl, very seriously. “But I always wanted to. That is why I ran away. I knew my mother would continue to hide me. Meanwhile she was receiving men all the time. I heard them. My mother is quite beautiful, and men often came and locked themselves in with her. But she would never let me see them, or even let me go out alone. And I wanted to have a few men to myself.” “A few men,” said Jean laughing. “One is not enough?” “I don’t know yet,” she said with the same seriousness. “I will have to see.” Then Jean turned his whole attention to Jeanette’s firm and pointed little breasts. He kissed them and fondled them. Jeannette was watching him with great interest. Then when he stopped to rest himself, she suddenly unbuttoned his shirt, and laid her fresh breasts against his chest and rubbed herself against it exactly like a languorous, voluptuous cat. Jean was amazed at her talent for lovemaking. She was progressing fast. Her nipples had known just how to touch his own, just how to rub against his chest and excite him. So now he uncovered her and began to unfasten the cord of her pajamas. But at this point she asked him to turn out the light. Pierre came home about midnight, and as he walked past the room he heard the moaning sounds of a woman, which he recognized as sounds of pleasure. He stopped. He could imagine the scene behind the door. The moans were rhythmic, then at times like the cooing of doves. Pierre could not help listening. Then the next day Jean told him about Jeanette. He said, “You know, I thought she was just a young girl, and she was . . . she was a virgin, but you have never seen such an aptitude for love. She is insatiable. She has already worn me out.” Then he went out to work, and was gone the whole day. Pierre remained in the apartment. At noon Jeanette appeared quite timidly and asked if she was going to have lunch. So they had lunch together. Then after lunch she disappeared until Jean came home. The same thing happened the next day. And the next. She was as quiet as a mouse. But every night Pierre heard the moaning and crooning, the dove-cooing behind the door. After eight days, he noticed that Jean was growing tired. Jean was twice Jeanette’s age to begin with, and then Jeanette, keeping her mother in mind, must have been seeking to outdo her. On the ninth day Jean stayed out all night. Jeanette came to wake Pierre. She was alarmed. She thought Jean had met with an accident. But Pierre had guessed the truth. Indeed, Jean was already tired of her and wanted to inform her mother of her whereabouts. But he had not been able to extract the address from Jeanette. So he merely stayed away.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  She gratified this man because she loved him. She learned to seek out his penis and touch it until he was aroused, to seek his mouth and stir his tongue, to press her body against his, to incite him. Sometimes they would be lying down and talking. She would place her hand over his penis and find it hard. Yet he made no move towards her. Slowly then, she became used to expressing her own desire, her own moods. She lost all her reserve, her timidity. One night at a party in Montparnasse, she met a Mexican painter, a huge dark man with heavy charcoal eyes, eyebrows and hair. He was drunk. She was to discover that he was almost always drunk. But the sight of her gave him a profound shock. He pulled himself up from his faltering, tottering posture and faced her as if he were a big lion facing a tamer. Something about her made him stand still and try to become sober again, to rise from the fog and fumes in which he lived continuously. Something about her face made him stand ashamed of his unkempt clothes, the paint under his nails, the uncombed black hair. She, on the other hand, was struck by this image of a demon, the demon she had imagined to exist behind the work of the American writer. He was huge, restless, destructive, loved no one, was attached to nothing, a tramp and an adventurer. He would paint at the studios of friends, borrowing oils and canvas, then leave his work there and go off. Most of the time he lived with the gypsies on the outskirts of Paris. With them he shared their life in the gypsy carts, traveling all through France. He respected their laws, never made love to the gypsy women, played the guitar with them at night clubs when they needed money, ate their meals—very often made of stolen chicken. When he met Hilda he had his own gypsy cart just outside one of the gates of Paris, near the ancient barricades, which were now crumbling. The cart had belonged to a Portuguese who had covered its walls with painted leather. The bed was hung at the back of the cart, suspended like a ship’s bunk. The windows were arched. The ceiling was so low it was difficult for one to stand up. At the party that evening, Rango did not invite Hilda to dance, although friends of his were providing the music for the night. The lights in the studio had been put out because enough light came from the street, and couples stood on the balcony with their arms around each other. The music was languid and dissolving.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  The room was full of his paintings. His palette was covered with paint that was still wet. He had asked Laura to pose for him, and began the work with great eagerness, not seeing her as a person, but observing the shape of her head, the way it seemed to rest on a neck too small for its weight, which gave her an air of almost frightening fragility. She had thrown herself on the bed. As she posed she looked up at the ceiling. The house was a very old one, with chipped paint and uneven plastering. As she had looked, the roughness of the plaster and its many cracks began to assume shapes. She smiled. There in the jumbled lines and cracks and churned surface she could see all kinds of forms. She had said to Jan: “When you are finished with your work, I want you to make a drawing for me on the ceiling, of something that is already there, if you can see what I see . . .” Jan had become curious, and he did not want to work much longer anyway. He had reached the baffling and difficult stage of feet and hands, which he disliked; they perpetually eluded him, so he often wrapped them up in a cloud of formless swathing, like the feet and hands of a cripple, and left the drawing as it was, all body, a body without feet to run away on or hands to caress anyone with. He turned to the study of the ceiling. To do this he lay back on the bed next to Laura and looked up with keen interest, seeking the forms she had distinguished and following the outlines she indicated with her forefinger. “See, see, there . . . do you see the woman lying back . . . ?” Jan rose halfway in the bed—the ceiling was very low in that corner, being an attic room—and with his charcoal began to draw on the plaster. First he sketched the woman’s head and her shoulders, but then he found the outline of the legs, which he completed, pointing the toes. “The skirt, the skirt, I see the skirt,” said Laura. “I see it here,” said Jan, drawing a skirt that was quite evidently thrown upwards, leaving her legs and thighs bare. Then Jan darkened the hair around the sex, carefully, as if he were painting grass blade by blade, and added detail to the converging lines of the legs. And there was the woman, reclining on the ceiling without shame, where Jan could look at her with a tiny flame of erotic response, which Laura caught in his intensely blue eyes, and which made her jealous. To irritate him as he looked at the woman she said, “I see a little piglike animal very near her.”

• From Shunned (2018)

  I knew if my mother saw me, she’d freak out. I was walking dangerously close to the line of adultery. My divorce was in process, and I hadn’t seen my soon-to-be-ex-husband in weeks. But in Jehovah’s eyes, we were still married. I was playing with fire and enjoying it. Geoff and I had an unspoken understanding that our relationship was shifting. In the days and moments leading up to our first date, I felt excitement, desire, and longing. I knew there might be an opportunity for sex. If it didn’t happen that night, it was coming soon. “If it feels good, do it. That’s my motto.” Our conversation over dinner delved further into the past. We shared stories about how we’d been raised, poignant memories of how life had disappointed us, books we’d read, and places we’d seen. There was no talk of the office, no mention of the present or the future. Strolling hand in hand from the restaurant toward Geoff’s car, my silk dress swaying over my bare legs, I felt sensual and content, filled up by the meal and the company. “Where to now, Linda?” Geoff asked, as he opened my car door. “Back to my place.” “Your wish is my command.” He drove back to my apartment complex and parked. We rode the elevator up to the fourth floor, holding hands in silence. As I turned the key to open my door, Geoff spoke. “Are you sure you want me to come in?” he whispered. “ I won’t be offended if you shoo me away.” “I’m sure.” I couldn’t bear the thought of his leaving. “Let’s say good night inside.” I pushed the door open. “Would you like tea, or another glass of wine?” I was aware of an abiding calm and lusty anticipation. We took our wine out to the balcony overlooking the fountain and illuminated flower garden. I shivered in the spring night, and Geoff took off his leather jacket and draped it over my shoulders. His body heat was still in the lining as it touched my neck and arms. As he squeezed my shoulders with both hands, I felt the potency of his body. I leaned over and kissed him. It was a long, provocative kiss. A feeling like champagne bubbles traveled through my body. His jacket fell to the floor. I didn’t need it anymore anyway; I could feel heat swirling up my chest. His hand pressed on the small of my back as he kissed my neck. We stopped just long enough to put down our wineglasses. I slid open the glass door to my bedroom and walked inside. Geoff followed and watched as I lit a candle on the nightstand. We sat down on the bed and came together again. Everything moved faster then—our hands, our hearts, our breathing.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  She moved against him, inside of the new dress, which made him keenly aware of her aliveness. And when finally they got home, she wanted to be locked in his room with him, to have him appropriate the dress as much as he had her body, not satisfied until by friction, rubbing, undulations, Pierre felt the urge to tear the dress off her. When this was done, she did not remain in his arms, but went all over the room in her underwear, brushing her hair, powdering her face and acting as if that was all she intended to remove, and Pierre would have to be content with her as she was. She still wore her high-heeled shoes, her stockings, her garters, and the flesh showed between the garters and the beginning of her panties, and again between her waist and the little brassiere. After a moment Pierre tried to hold her. He wanted to undress her. He managed only to unfasten the brassiere when she slipped out of his arms again to perform a little dance for him. All the steps she knew she wanted to do for him. Pierre admired her lightness. He caught her as she passed, but she refused to let him touch her panties. She let him take off only her stockings and shoes. But at this moment she heard Jean enter. As she was, she leaped out of Pierre’s room and rushed to meet him. Jean saw her flinging herself into his arms, naked but for the panties. Then he saw Pierre, who had followed her, angry to be deprived of his satisfaction, angry that she should have preferred Jean to him. Jean understood. But he had no desire for Jeanette. He wanted to be free of her. So he rebuffed her, and left them. Then Jeanette turned on Pierre. Pierre tried to calm her. She remained angry. She began to pack, to dress, to leave. Pierre barred her way, carried her to his room and flung her on the bed. He would have her this time, at all cost. The struggle was pleasant, his rough suit against her skin, his buttons against her tender breasts, his shoes against her naked feet. In all this mixture of hardness and softness, coldness and warmth, rigidity and yielding, Jeanette felt for the first time Pierre as master. He sensed this. He tore off her panties, discovered her moisture. And then he was taken with a diabolical desire to hurt her. He inserted only his finger. When he had moved this finger until Jeanette pleaded to be satisfied and rolled with excitement, he stopped.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  My lover, Marcel, had to go home that night; he lived quite far away. I was free. I left him at eleven o’clock and went to see Mary. I was wearing my flounced Spanish cretonne dress and a flower in my hair, and I was all bronzed by the sun and feeling beautiful. When I arrived, Mary was lying on her bed cold-creaming her face, her legs and her shoulders because she had been lying on the beach. She was rubbing cream into her neck, her throat—she was covered with cream. This disappointed me. I sat at the foot of her bed and we talked. I lost my desire to kiss her. She was running away from her husband. She had married him only to be protected. She had never really loved men but women. At the beginning of her marriage, she had told him all sorts of stories about herself that she should not have told him—how she had been a dancer on Broadway and slept with men when she was short of money; how she even went to a whorehouse and earned money there; how she met a man who fell in love with her and kept her for a few years. Her husband never recovered from these stories. They awakened his jealousy and doubts, and their life together had become intolerable. The day after we met, she left Saint-Tropez, and I was filled with regrets for not having kissed her. Now I was about to see her again. In New York I unfold my wings of vanity and coquetry. Mary is as lovely as ever and seems much moved by me. She is all curves, softness. Her eyes are wide and liquid; her cheeks, luminous. Her mouth is full; her hair blond, and luxuriant. She is slow, passive, lethargic. We go to the movies together. In the dark she takes my hand. She is being analyzed and has discovered what I sensed long ago: that she has never known a real orgasm, at thirty-four, after a sexual life that only an expert accountant could keep track of. I am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her. Mary says, “It is very hard to talk about sex, I am so ashamed.” She is not ashamed of doing anything at all, but she cannot talk about it. She can talk to me. We sit for hours in perfumed places where there is music. She likes places where actors go. There is a current of attraction between us, purely physical. We are always on the verge of getting into bed together. But she is never free in the evenings. She will not let me meet her husband. She is afraid I will seduce him.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Khomeini was now seventy years old. He must have thought it very unlikely that he would become the ruling faqih. In both Islamic Government and “The Greater Jihad,” Khomeini was trying to see how the mythology and mysticism of the Shiah could be adapted to break centuries of sacred tradition and allow a cleric to rule Iran. He had yet to see how this mythos would work out in practice. IN ISRAEL, a new form of Jewish fundamentalism had already started to translate myth into hard political fact. It had its roots in the religious Zionism which had grown up in the shadow of secular Zionism in the pre-state days in Palestine. These religious Zionists were modern Orthodox, and from an early date, they had started to found their own observant settlements alongside the socialist kibbutzim. Unlike the Haredim, this small group of religious Jews did not see Zionism as incompatible with Orthodoxy. They interpreted the Bible literally: in the Torah, God promised the Land to the descendants of Abraham, and thus gave Jews a legal title to Palestine. Moreover, in Eretz Israel, Jews would be able to observe the Law more fully than had been possible in the Diaspora. In the ghetto, it was obviously not feasible to observe many commandments relating to the farming and settlement of the Land, or the laws regarding politics and government. As a result, Diaspora Judaism had perforce been fragmented and compartmentalized. Now at last in their own land, Jews would be able to observe the whole of the Torah once again. As Pinchas Rosenbluth, one of the pioneers of Zionist Orthodoxy, explained: We accept upon ourselves the entire Torah, its commandments and ideas. The [old] Orthodoxy made do in fact with a small part of the Torah ... observed in synagogue or the family ... or certain areas of life. We want to carry out the Torah all the time and in every area, to grant [Torah] and its laws sovereignty in the life of the individual and the public. 77 Far from being incompatible with modernity, the Law would complete it. The world would see that Jews could create a new social order that was truly progressive because it had been planned by God. 78 There was a desire for wholeness that would always characterize religious Zionism; it was a way of finding healing and a more holistic vision after the trauma and constrictions of exile. But it was also a rebellion against the rationalist vision of the secular Zionists, who did not take these religious settlers seriously and who saw their ambition to create a Torah state in Eretz Israel as not only anachronistic but repellent.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Great crowds of them always. The shadows are divided into strips by the slats of the shutters. The clatter of wooden clogs is earsplitting, the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign. Outside it’s the end of the day, you can tell by the sound of the voices, the sound of more and more passers-by, more and more miscellaneous. It’s a city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night. And night is beginning now, with the setting sun. The bed is separated from the city by those slatted shutters, that cotton blind. There’s nothing solid separating us from other people. They don’t know of our existence. We glimpse something of theirs, the sum of their voices, of their movements, like the intermittent hoot of a siren, mournful, dim. Whiffs of burnt sugar drift into the room, the smell of roasted peanuts, Chinese soups, roast meat, herbs, jasmine, dust, incense, charcoal fires, they carry fire about in baskets here, it’s sold in the street, the smell of the city is the smell of the villages upcountry, of the forest. I suddenly saw him in a black bathrobe. He was sitting drinking a whisky, smoking. He said I’d been asleep, he’d taken a shower. I’d fallen asleep almost unawares. He’d switched on a lamp on a low table. He’s a man of habit—I suddenly think of him—he must come to this room quite often, he’s a man who must make love a lot, a man who’s afraid, he must make love a lot to fight against fear. I tell him I like the idea of his having many women, the idea of my being one of them, indistinguishable. We look at each other. He understands what I’ve just said. Our expressions are suddenly changed, false, caught in evil and death. I tell him to come over to me, tell him he must possess me again. He comes over. He smells pleasantly of English cigarettes, expensive perfume, honey, his skin has taken on the scent of silk, the fruity smell of silk tussore, the smell of gold, he’s desirable. I tell him of this desire. He tells me to wait awhile. Talks to me, says he knew right away, when we were crossing the river, that I’d be like this after my first lover, that I’d love love, he says he knows now I’ll deceive him and deceive all the men I’m ever with. He says as for him he’s been the cause of his own unhappiness. I’m pleased with all he’s foretold, and say so. He becomes rough, desperate, he throws himself on me, devours the childish breasts, shouts, insults. I close my eyes on the intense pleasure. I think, He’s used to it, this is his occupation in life, love, nothing else.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Just as the space existed in me for desire. At the age of fifteen I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face. Even my mother must have seen it. My brothers did. That was how everything started for me—with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings around the eyes, in advance of time and experience. I’m fifteen and a half. Crossing the river. Going back to Saigon I feel I’m going on a journey, especially when I take the bus, and this morning I’ve taken the bus from Sadec, where my mother is the headmistress of the girls’ school. It’s the end of some school vacation, I forget which. I’ve spent it in the little house provided with my mother’s job. And today I’m going back to Saigon, to the boarding school. The native bus left from the marketplace in Sadec. As usual my mother came to see me off, and put me in the care of the driver. She always puts me in the care of the Saigon bus drivers, in case there’s an accident, or a fire, or a rape, or an attack by pirates, or a fatal mishap on the ferry. As usual the driver had me sit near him in the front, in the section reserved for white passengers. • • • I think it was during this journey that the image became detached, removed from all the rest. It might have existed, a photograph might have been taken, just like any other, somewhere else, in other circumstances. But it wasn’t. The subject was too slight. Who would have thought of such a thing? The photograph could only have been taken if someone could have known in advance how important it was to be in my life, that event, that crossing of the river. But while it was happening, no one even knew of its existence. Except God. And that’s why—it couldn’t have been otherwise—the image doesn’t exist. It was omitted. Forgotten. It never was detached or removed from all the rest. And it’s to this, this failure to have been created, that the image owes its virtue: the virtue of representing, of being the creator of, an absolute. So it’s during the crossing of a branch of the Mekong, on the ferry that plies between Vinh Long and Sadec in the great plain of mud and rice in southern Cochin China. The Plain of the Birds. I get off the bus. I go over to the rails.

• From The Lover (1984)

  She came quite recently, right in the middle of the school year. She’s frightened, she comes up and sits beside you and stays there without speaking, crying sometimes. She has the pink-and-brown complexion of the mountains, you can always recognize it here where all the other children are pale green with anemia and the torrid heat. Hélène Lagonelle doesn’t go to high school. She’s not capable of it, Hélène L. She can’t learn, can’t remember things. She goes to the primary classes at the boarding school, but it’s no use. She weeps up against me, and I stroke her hair, her hands, tell her I’m going to stay here with her. She doesn’t know she’s very beautiful, Hélène Lagonelle. Her parents don’t know what to do with her, they want to marry her off as soon as possible. She could have all the fiancés she likes, Hélène Lagonelle, but she doesn’t like, she doesn’t want to get married, she wants to go back to her mother. She, Hélène L. Hélène Lagonelle. In the end she’ll do what her mother wants. She’s much more beautiful than I am, the girl in the clown’s hat and lamé shoes, infinitely more marriageable, she can be married off, set up in matrimony, you can frighten her, explain it to her, what frightens her and what she doesn’t understand, tell her to stay where she is, wait. Hélène Lagonelle is seventeen, seventeen, yet she still doesn’t know what I know. It’s as if I guessed she never will. Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers. I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle. I am worn out with desire. I want to take Hélène Lagonelle with me to where every evening, my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out. I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.

• From The Lover (1984)

  His hands are expert, marvelous, perfect. I’m very lucky, obviously, it’s as if it were his profession, as if unwittingly he knew exactly what to do and what to say. He calls me a whore, a slut, he says I’m his only love, and that’s what he ought to say, and what you do say when you just let things say themselves, when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes, and then everything is right, and nothing’s wasted, the waste is covered over and all is swept away in the torrent, in the force of desire. The sound of the city is so near, so close, you can hear it brushing against the wood of the shutters. It sounds as if they’re all going through the room. I caress his body amid the sound, the passers-by. The sea, the immensity, gathering, receding, returning. I asked him to do it again and again. Do it to me. And he did, did it in the unctuousness of blood. And it really was unto death. It has been unto death. He lit a cigarette and gave it to me. And very quietly, close to my lips, he talked to me. And I talked to him too, very quietly. Because he doesn’t know for himself, I say it for him, in his stead. Because he doesn’t know he carries within him a supreme elegance, I say it for him. Now evening comes. He tells me I’ll remember this afternoon all my life, even when I’ve forgotten his face and name. I wonder if I’ll remember the house. He says, Take a good look at it. I do. I say it’s like everywhere else. He says yes, yes, it’s always the same. I can still see the face, and I do remember the name. I see the whitewashed walls still, the canvas blind between us and the oven outside, the other door, arched, leading to the other room and to an open garden—the plants are dead from the heat—surrounded by blue balustrades like those at the big villa in Sadec with its tiers of terraces overlooking the Mekong. It’s a place of distress, shipwrecked. He asks me to tell him what I’m thinking about. I say I’m thinking about my mother, she’ll kill me if she finds out the truth. I see he’s making an effort, then he says it, says he understands what my mother means, this dishonor, he says. He says he himself couldn’t bear the thought if it were a question of marriage. I look at him. He looks back, apologizes, proudly. He says, I’m Chinese. We smile at each other. I ask him if it’s usual to be sad, as we are. He says it’s because we’ve made love in the daytime, with the heat at its height. He says it’s always terrible after. He smiles. Says, Whether people love one another or not, it’s always terrible.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Because of his ignorance she suddenly knows: she was attracted to him already on the ferry. She was attracted to him. It depended on her alone. She says, I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d like you to do as you usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, Is that what you want? She says it is. He’s started to suffer here in this room, for the first time, he’s no longer lying about it. He says he knows already she’ll never love him. She lets him say it. At first she says she doesn’t know. Then she lets him say it. He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why. He says, You’ve come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone. She says she can’t say, so far she’s never gone into a bedroom with anyone. She tells him she doesn’t want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually does with the women he brings to his flat. She begs him to do that. He’s torn off the dress, he throws it down. He’s torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed. And there he turns away and weeps. And she, slow, patient, draws him to her and starts to undress him. With her eyes shut. Slowly. He makes as if to help her. She tells him to keep still. Let me do it. She says she wants to do it. And she does. Undresses him. When she tells him to, he moves his body in the bed, but carefully, gently, as if not to wake her. The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle, he may have been ill, may be convalescent, he’s hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex, he’s weak, probably a helpless prey to insult, vulnerable. She doesn’t look him in the face. Doesn’t look at him at all. She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love. And, weeping, he makes love. At first, pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changed, slowly drawn away, borne toward pleasure, clasped to it. The sea, formless, simply beyond compare. • • • Already, on the ferry, in advance, the image owed something to this moment. The image of the woman in darned stockings has crossed the room, and at last she emerges as a child. The sons knew it already. But not the daughter, yet.

• From The Lover (1984)

  They’d never talk about the mother among themselves, about the knowledge of her which they both shared and which separated them from her: the final, decisive knowledge that their mother was a child. Their mother never knew pleasure. I didn’t know you bled. He asks me if it hurt, I say no, he says he’s glad. He wipes the blood away, washes me. I watch him. Little by little he comes back, becomes desirable again. I wonder how I had the strength to go against my mother’s prohibition. So calmly, with such determination. How I managed to follow my ideas to their “logical conclusion.” We look at each other. He puts his arms around me. Asks me why I came here. I say I had to, it was a sort of obligation. It’s the first time we’ve talked. I tell him I have two brothers. That we haven’t any money. All gone. He knows my elder brother, has met him in the local opium dens. I say my brother steals from my mother to go there, steals from the servants, and that sometimes the keepers of the dens come and demand money from my mother. I tell him about the dikes. I tell him my mother will die, it can’t go on like this. That my mother’s approaching death, too, must be connected with what has happened to me today. I notice that I desire him. He feels sorry for me, but I say no, I’m not to be pitied, no one is, except my mother. He says, You only came because I’m rich. I say that’s how I desire him, with his money, that when I first saw him he was already in his car, in his money, so I can’t say what I’d have done if he’d been different. He says, I wish I could take you away, go away with you. I say I couldn’t leave my mother yet without dying of grief. He says he certainly hasn’t been lucky with me, but he’ll give me some money anyway, don’t worry. He’s lain down again. Again we’re silent. The noise of the city is very loud, in recollection it’s like the sound track of a film turned up too high, deafening. I remember clearly, the room is dark, we don’t speak, it’s surrounded by the continuous din of the city, caught up in the city, swept along with it. There are no panes in the windows, just shutters and blinds. On the blinds you can see the shadows of people going by in the sunlight on the sidewalks.

• From The Lover (1984)

  From the first moment she knows more or less, knows he’s at her mercy. And therefore that others besides him may be at her mercy too if the occasion arises. She knows something else too, that the time has now probably come when she can no longer escape certain duties toward herself. And that her mother will know nothing of this, nor her brothers. She knows this now too. As soon as she got into the black car she knew: she’s excluded from the family for the first time and forever. From now on they will no longer know what becomes of her. Whether she’s taken away from them, carried off, wounded, spoiled, they will no longer know. Neither her mother nor her brothers. That is their fate henceforth. It’s already enough to make you weep, here in the black limousine. Now the child will have to reckon only with this man, the first, the one who introduced himself on the ferry. • • • It happened very quickly that day, a Thursday. He’d come every day to pick her up at the high school and drive her back to the boarding school. Then one Thursday afternoon, the weekly half-holiday, he came to the boarding school and drove off with her in the black car. It’s in Cholon. Opposite the boulevards linking the Chinese part of the city to the center of Saigon, the great American-style streets full of streetcars, rickshaws, and buses. It’s early in the afternoon. She’s got out of the compulsory outing with the other girls. It’s a native housing estate to the south of the city. His place is modern, hastily furnished from the look of it, with furniture supposed to be ultra-modern. He says, I didn’t choose the furniture. It’s dark in the studio, but she doesn’t ask him to open the shutters. She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire. But she doesn’t know it. She agreed to come as soon as he asked her the previous evening. She’s where she has to be, placed here. She feels a tinge of fear. It’s as if this must be not only what she expects, but also what had to happen especially to her. She pays close attention to externals, to the light, to the noise of the city in which the room is immersed. He’s trembling. At first he looks at her as though he expects her to speak, but she doesn’t. So he doesn’t do anything either, doesn’t undress her, says he loves her madly, says it very softly. Then is silent. She doesn’t answer. She could say she doesn’t love him. She says nothing. Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her. It’s up to her to know. And she does.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  young girls had charged Errol Flynn with rape. Nora of course noticed Flynn, a tall, dashing man who occasionally bought cigarettes from her, but her thoughts were with her boyfriend, a young Marine. A few weeks later Flynn was acquitted, the trial ended, and the place settled down. A man she Satni, the son of Pharaoh Usimares, saw a very had met during the trial called her up one day: he was Flynn's right-hand beautiful woman on the man, and on Flynn's behalf, he wanted to invite her up to the actor's house plain-stones of the temple. on Mulholland Drive. Nora had no interest in Flynn, and in fact she was a He called his page, and said, "Go and tell her that little afraid of him, but a girlfriend who was dying to meet him talked her I, Pharaoh's son, shall give into going and bringing her along. What did she have to lose? Nora agreed her ten pieces of gold to to go. On the day, Flynn's friend showed up and drove them to a splendid spend an hour with me." "I am a Pure One, I am house on top of a hill. When they arrived, Flynn was standing shirtless by not a low person," answers his swimming pool. He came to greet her and her girlfriend, moving so the Lady Thubuit. "If you gracefully—like a lithe cat—and his manner so relaxed, she felt her jitters wish to have your pleasure melt away. He gave them a tour of the house, which was full of artifacts of with me, you will come to my house at Bubastis. his various sea voyages. He talked so delightfully of his love of adventure Everything will be ready that she wished she had had adventures of her own. He was the perfect there." Satni went to gentleman, and even let her talk about her boyfriend without the slightest Bubastis by boat. "By my life," said Thubuit, "come sign of jealousy. upstairs with me." On the Nora had a visit from her boyfriend the next day. Somehow he didn't upper floor, sanded with seem so interesting anymore; they had a fight and broke up on the spot. dust of lapis lazuli and turquoise, Satni saw That night, Flynn took her out on the town, to the famous Mocambo several beds covered with nightclub. He was drinking and joking, and she fell into the spirit, and hap-royal linen and many gold 400 • The Art of Seduction bowls on a table. "Please pily let him touch her hand. Then suddenly she panicked. "I'm a Catholic take your meal," said and a virgin," she blurted out, "and some day I'm going to walk down the Thubuit. "That is not church aisle wearing a veil—and if you think you're going to sleep with what I have come to do," answered Satni, while the me, you're mistaken." Totally calm and unruffled, Flynn said she had noth-slaves put aromatic wood

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  before him. At times I was intrusive. If you are always in their face, always the aggressor, they will be-like a stranger to him; at come used to being passive, and the tension in your seduction will flag. Use times he surrendered letters to make them think about you all the time, to feed their imagina-completely. Then when I threw my arms around tion. Cultivate mystery—stop them from figuring you out. Baudelaire's let-him, everything changed, ters were delightfully ambiguous, mixing the physical and the spiritual, and I embraced a cloud. teasing Sabatier with their multiplicity of possible interpretations. — C O R D E L I A DESCRIBING Then, at the point when they are ripe with desire and interest, when JOHANNES, IN SØREN KIERKEGAARD, THE SEDUCER'S perhaps they are expecting you to make a move—as Madame Sabatier ex-DIARY, TRANSLATED BY H O W A R D pected that day in her apartment—take a step back. You are unexpectedly V. H O N G AND EDNA V. H O N G distant, friendly but no more than that—certainly not sexual. Let this sink in for a day or two. Your withdrawal will trigger anxiety; the only way to relieve this anxiety is to pursue and possess you. Step back now and you It is true that we could not make your targets fall into your arms like ripe fruit, blind to the force of love if there were not some gravity that is drawing them to you. The more they participate, the more memory in us— to the their willpower is engaged, the deeper the erotic effect. You have chal-greatest extent an unconscious memory— that lenged them to use their own seductive powers on you, and when they re-we were once loved. But spond, the tables will turn and they will pursue you with desperate energy. neither could we love if this feeling of being loved had / retreat and thereby teach her to be victorious as she pur-not at some time suffered doubt; if we had always sues me. I continually fall back, and in this backward been sure of it. In other movement I teach her to know through me all the powers of words, love would not be erotic love, its turbulent thoughts, its passion, what longing possible without having is, and hope, and impatient expectancy. been loved and then having missed the certainty of —SØREN KIERKEGAARD being loved. . . . • The need to be loved is not elementary. This need is certainly acquired by Keys to Seduction experience in later childhood. It would be better to say: by many experiences or by a Since humans are naturally obstinate and willful creatures, and prone to suspicions of people's motives, it is only natural, in the course of any se-repetition of similar ones. I duction, that in some ways your target will resist you. Seductions, then, are believe that these

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  debasing himself without him, they let him turn their lives upside down, even ruin them. They pre-affecting his social prestige. ferred that fate to the safe confines of marriage. Nothing can replace this In some ways, the situation of women in the early nineteenth century bizarre and powerful has become generalized in the early twenty-first. The outlets for male bad pleasure of being able to say everything, do behavior—war, dirty politics, the institution of mistresses and courtesans— everything, profane and have faded away; today, not just women but men are supposed to be emi-parody without any fear of nently civilized and reasonable. And many have a hard time living up to retribution, remorse, or responsibility. It is a this. As children we are able to vent the darker side of our characters, a side complete revolt against that all of us have. But under pressure from society (at first in the form organized society, his of our parents), we slowly repress the naughty, rebellious, perverse streaks organized, educated self and especially his in our characters. To get along, we learn to repress our dark sides, which religion." Monsieur become a kind of lost self, a part of our psyche buried beneath our polite Mauclair hears the call of appearance. the Devil in this dark As adults, we secretly want to recapture that lost self—the more adven-passion poetized by Baudelaire. "The turous, less respectful, childhood part of us. We are drawn to those who prostitute represents the live out their lost selves as adults, even if it involves some evil or destruc-unconscious which enables tion. Like Byron, you can become the lightning rod for such desires. You us to put aside our responsibilities." must learn, however, to keep this potential under control, and to use it — N I N A EPTON, strategically. As the aura of the forbidden around you is drawing targets into LOVE AND THE FRENCH your web, do not overplay your dangerousness, or they will be frightened away. Once you feel them falling under your spell, you have freer rein. If they begin to imitate you, as Lady Caroline imitated Byron, then take it further—mix in some cruelty, involve them in sin, crime, taboo activity, Hearts and eye go traveling along the paths that have whatever it takes. Unleash the lost self within them; the more they act it always brought them joy; out, the deeper your hold over them. Going halfway will break the spell and if anyone attempts to and create self-consciousness. Take it as far as you can. spoil their game, he only makes them the more passionate about it, God Baseness attracts everybody. knows. . . . so it was with —JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE Tristan and Isolde. As soon as they were forbidden their desires, and prevented from enjoying one another Keys to Seduction by spies and guards, they began to suffer intensely. Desire now seriously tormented them by its