Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Our erotic imagination is an exuberant expression of our aliveness, and one of the most powerful tools we have for keeping desire alive. Giving voice to our fantasies can liberate us from the many personal and social obstacles that stand in the way of pleasure. Understanding what our fantasies do for us will help us understand what it is we’re seeking, sexually and emotionally. In our erotic daydreams, we find the energy that keeps us passionately awake to our own sexuality. 10 The Shadow of the ThirdRethinking Fidelity Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships? A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. —Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, sometimes three. —Alexandre Dumas THE TALMUD, THE GREAT COMPILATION of rabbinic tradition, tells the following parable. Every night, Rabbi Bar Ashi would prostrate himself before the merciful God and beg to be saved from the evil urge. His wife, overhearing him, would think, “It’s been a number of years since he has withdrawn from me. What makes him say that?” So one day, as he is studying in the garden, she dresses herself up as Haruta and meets him there. (Haruta was the name of the quintessential prostitute in ancient Babylon. The word also means “freedom” in Hebrew.) “Who are you?” he asks. “I am Haruta,” she answers. “I want you,” he commands. “Bring me the pomegranate on the uppermost branch,” she demands in turn. He brings her the pomegranate, and takes her. When he returns home his wife is tending the fire. He rises, and tries to throw himself in. She asks, “Why are you doing so?” “Because thus and thus happened,” he confesses. “But it was I,” she responds. “I, however, intended the forbidden.” Monolithic Monogamy

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  inner workings of the Senate—vote counting, how bills were actually passed—and insights into the various senators, their deepest insecurities and weaknesses. At some point, his deep understanding of the institution would translate into a commodity he could exchange for influence and favors. After several months of this campaign, he was able to alter the reputation he had had in the House. He no longer seemed a threat, and with the senators’ defenses down, Johnson could escalate his campaign. He turned his attention to winning over key allies. As he had always believed, having one key ally at or near the top of the hierarchy could move mountains. Early on he spotted Senator Russell as the perfect target—lonely, a believer in a cause without any real disciples, and very powerful. Johnson genuinely liked Russell, and he was always in search of father figures, but his attention and approach were highly strategic. He made sure he got appointed to the Armed Services Committee, where he would have the most access to Russell. Their constant encounters in the hallway or the cloakroom were rarely accidental. Without making it obvious, he slowly increased the hours they spent together. Johnson had never liked baseball and could care less about the Civil War, but he quickly learned to cultivate an interest in both. He mirrored back to Russell his own conservative values and work ethic and made the lonely senator feel like he had not only a friend but a worshipping son and disciple. Johnson was careful to never ask for favors. Instead he quietly did favors himself for Russell, helping him to modernize his staff. When Johnson finally wanted something, such as the chairmanship of the subcommittee, he would insinuate his desire rather than directly express it. Russell would come to see him as an extension of his own political ambitions, and at that point he would do almost anything for his acolyte. Within a few years, word got around that Johnson was a masterful vote counter and had inside knowledge on various senators, the kind of information that could be extremely useful when trying to get a bill passed. Now senators would come to him for this information, and he would share it with the understanding that at some point he would expect favors in return. Slowly his influence was spreading, but he realized that his desire to have the dominant position within his party and the Senate had one major obstacle—the northern liberals. Once again, Johnson chose the perfect target—Senator Humphrey. He read him as a man who was lonely, in need of validation, but who was also tremendously ambitious. The way to Humphrey’s heart was threefold: make him feel liked, confirm his belief that he was presidential material, and give him the practical tools to realize his ambitions. As he had done with Russell, Johnson gave Humphrey the impression that he was secretly on his side, mirroring Humphrey’s deepest values by sharing his adoration of

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  A short way off I made out a couple talking about us in a way meant to be noticed, heads together, with long glances and point-weighing smiles and nods. I raised an eyebrow, recognising the boy, Archie, whom I’d taken home a few months before. He had one slightly sleepy eye, which gave him a lewd and experienced air, though he was only a kid, sixteen or seventeen, illicit and the more queenly for it. He had trashed up his appearance since he’d gone with me: hair slick with a jarload of gel, black lips queerly glossed with lilac lipstick. He said something to his companion, then got up and came over to us, surrendering himself confidentially to the seat beside me. ‘Hello, dear!’ ‘Hello, Archie.’ We looked at each other for a moment with that strange disbanded intimacy of people who have once briefly been lovers. ‘This is Phil.’ ‘Mm. I’m with Roger. He says he’s seen you in the gym. He was well jeal when I told him about you and me.’ I glanced over to where Roger was affecting an interest in some men in the other direction. He was someone I was half-aware of, a morose middle-aged fellow who appeared at the Corry in a suit on weekday evenings but on Saturdays and Sundays was transformed by heavy boots, jeans and biking jacket, the ensemble looking just a trifle too much for him. ‘I’m not sure that I’m not jealous of him,’ I said with arch courtesy. ‘Are you seeing a lot of him?’ ‘Yeah, last couple of months I’ve been stopping over at his place, Fulham, quite posh it is. He’s got a video and that.’ ‘I can imagine.’ ‘No, he’s really sweet though.’ ‘I think he’s perfectly hideous, but I suppose it’s nothing to do with me.’ He might have been hurt by this remark, but he seemed to quite admire me for it. ‘Yeah—still it’s nice having someone to look after you, know what I mean?’ He slid his hand between my legs, and I felt Phil go tense on the other side of me. I said nothing, but stared at Archie in an existential sort of way, my cock quickly thickening under the light pressure of his fingers. ‘Not today, dear,’ I murmured, shifting away and slipping my own hand onto Phil’s thigh. ‘P’raps you’re right,’ he said, with his typical experimenté air, and looked round to find out what had happened to Roger. Roger was smoking a cigarette and gazing at the ceiling, a model of tense insouciance. ‘Your mate looking for a friend, is he?’ Archie asked, as if it were the 1930s. ‘Phil you mean? No, no: he has a mate.’ Archie looked at me, expecting me to say something else as it sank in.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  His tits now bulged out impressively; and as he raised his hands to his temples and pushed back his wet hair, his biceps doubled smoothly, sleek as coupling animals. He was the sort of boy who might be in the army, except that his weight-training suggested a labour towards some private image of himself, a solitary perfection. As often happens when I know someone else fancies a person I might otherwise have ignored, I realised that Bill’s taste for him had made me want the boy too, and I looked at him lustfully and competitively. It was getting late. I had deliberately taken my time in the gym, and spent a while joining in with some Malaysian boys, very supple and clever, who were training on the parallel bars. Old Andrews was coaching them—a man who still bore the stiffness of the drill square in his straight carriage and wiry limbs, and who, by a strange anomaly in the democratising ambience of the Corry, was always known simply as Andrews: Andrews himself wore this as the badge of an old-school sense of equality, though it sometimes sounded, in the mouths of the boys who, vaulting and balancing, literally passed through his hands, like an old-school formula of command. He was a difficult, demanding man, from whom those who used the gym a lot could win a tight-lipped affection. This evening his discipline was what I needed after the anxiety of home, and the oriental boys, with their intuitive sense of space and balance, and their wide, courteous smiles, provided a brief antidote to Arthur and our joint troubles. Then the nearly deserted pool, the water lapping at the edge, had tired me and calmed me more. I watched Phil spring up out of the bath, shoot me a little look, self-conscious but somehow, I felt, pleased, and amble off to the stairs. His trunks were becoming small for the weight he was putting on in the ass. It would have been trite to follow him too soon, and I kicked about for a minute more. As I did so a head approached, old and large, held above the water, but given a sinister vacuity by pinktinted goggles and a white rubber bathing-cap. Its progress was extremely slow, and each time it rode up and pale, heavy shoulders were seen, a weak opening of the arms, a nugatory kicking of the legs, had evidently taken place. When it got very close it submerged completely for several seconds, then came up looking at me, as it had clearly been doing beneath the water, stopped dead and lurched up to the full height of a plump, dripping, wheezing old man, with smooth, drooping breasts. When he pushed the goggles up on to his brow I knew for certain that it was his Lordship.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  I sought Mitko out repeatedly over the next weeks, and after our third or fourth encounter I decided to invite him to my apartment. I wanted him to myself, free of the audience we so frequently had at NDK, where men would hover outside the stall door or press their ears to its walls, as I had done also when I found myself among the unchosen. I wanted more time and more privacy with Mitko, but I was uneasy, too, and recognized the foolishness of bringing this near stranger into my home. I remembered the warning of a man who had invited me, after we met in the bathroom, to have coffee with him in the large café in the main building of the Palace. These boys, he said to me, you can’t trust them, they will find out about you, they will tell your work, your friends, they will rob you—and indeed I had been robbed, once successfully and once I caught a young man’s hand as he withdrew it from my pocket, after which he stared wild-eyed at me, the poor boy, and fled. The rest of this man’s warning fell on deaf ears, as I had very little to lose from such revelations—no one would feel betrayed, nothing would be marred by the telling of secrets I hardly bothered to hide; I’ve never been good at concealing anything, the whole bent of my nature is toward confession. Mitko and I had already had sex; it was afterward, sitting on a bench in the sunlight, which was still warm though it was November now, the grapes had shriveled on their vines, that I decided to return to the bathrooms below and offer him my proposal. We set up a date for the following evening, and his eyes lit up at the sight of my phone, which I pulled out for the first time in his presence to take down his number. He snatched it from me, only after it was in his hand saying Mozhe li , may I, and as I watched him scroll through its various features and screens, I remembered the warning I had been given. But this unease wasn’t enough to dissuade me, and the next afternoon after classes I hurried downtown. We met again at NDK, where I found him in a huddle with three or four other men at the wall farthest from the entrance. They scattered when I appeared, though I didn’t approach them but stood awkwardly at the threshold.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  77 Things Past, makes an allusion to Shahrazad that he knows his readers will recognize. In Joyce’s Ulysses, bits of the book run through Leopold Bloom’s mind, and the book provided a lifelong inspiration for the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. John Barth, the American ¿ ction writer, has centered a great deal of his work on Shahrazad and 1001 Nights in such works as Chimera and Tidewater Tales, focusing on narrative structure in ways that make storytelling and playing with nesting techniques into the very subjects of the books. All of these references suggest once again that literature is a cross-cultural process that borrows and learns not just across language and geographical boundaries, but across temporal ones as well. Of the many ways in which 1001 Nights can be read, two are worth mentioning: it can be read as great entertainment, and it can also be read as a lesson in maturity. We will consider both of these readings in turn. The great-entertainment perspective on the collection is an easy one to adopt. The book gathers some of the best stories of the world into one place. It also features a variety of kinds of story: romantic, edifying, moral, bawdy, and tragic. Genres include anecdotes, animal fables, fairy stories, and serious stories about love and deception. Additionally, the entertainment value of the stories has a clear function: they save Shahrazad’s life and allow her to live happily ever after with King Shahrayar. On the other hand, we can also read the book as a lesson in maturity; Shahrazad, in the process of telling her stories, neutralizes Shahrayar’s misognyny and ruthlessness and helps him grow up. Some of the stories, like “The Merchant and the Demon,” seem to parallel Shahrazad’s own situation and give storytelling a redemptive quality. Shahrazad is also perhaps teaching Shahrayar new patterns of response that, according to critic Fedwa Malti- Douglas, substitute “extended and continuous desire and pleasure” for the “immature male pattern of excitement, satisfaction, and termination.” The new pattern continues desire from night to night in a way that combines sexual and textual issues. The Indian collections we previously discussed already noticed the parallels between sexuality and storytelling; John Barth develops these in his work with Shahrazad. In this reading Shahrazad becomes the wise woman who initiates a man into maturity and sophistication.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  We sat diagonally from each other and, every day, talked until our teacher threatened to separate us. I liked her in a way that made me excited to go to class, but I didn’t understand why. She was such a good friend and so fun and so smart I wanted to rise out of my seat and grab her hand and yell, “To hell with Hemingway!” and haul her out of class; all to some end I couldn’t quite visualize. From the corner of my eye, I stared at her freckles and imagined kissing her mouth. When I thought about her, I squirmed, tormented. What did it mean? I had a crush on her. That’s it. It wasn’t complicated. But I didn’t realize I had a crush on her. Because it was the early 2000s and I was just a baby in the suburbs without a reliable internet connection. I didn’t know any queers. I did not understand myself. I didn’t know what it meant to want to kiss another woman. Years later, I’d figured that part out. But then, I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid of another woman. Do you see now? Do you understand? 33 . Legal scholar Ruthann Robson calls this a “dual theoretical demand,” and adds, “the demand, of course, is in many cases more than dual. As Black lesbian poet Pat Parker writes in her poem For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend : ‘The first thing you do is forget that i’m Black / Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.’” 34 . It should be noted that Alice Mitchell was hardly the first woman to create such public confusion over her gender as it related to both her passions and her shocking act of violence. In 1879, when Lily Duer shot her friend Ella Hearn for rejecting her love, a headline in the National Police Gazette read in part, “A Female Romeo: Her Terrible Love for a Chosen Friend of Her Own Alleged Sex [emphasis mine] Assumes a Passionate Character.” Sometime before the murder, a witness reported an exchange in which Lily said, “Ella, why will you not walk out with me? Do you not love me?” “Oh, yes, I love you,” Ella responded, “but I am afraid of you.” 35 . It should be noted that the word battered (as in: battered wife, battered woman, battered lesbian), while woefully imprecise and covering only a fraction of abuse experiences, was the preferred term in this era. It is, of course, a specific legal term with specific legal implications, and I have never thought of myself as a “battered” anyone. The fact that the expression persisted for so long, despite the fact that the lesbian conversation in particular focused on many kinds of abuse that were not explicitly physical, is the perfect example of how inadequate this conversation has been—discouraging useful subtlety.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as a Stranger Comes to Town One day, she texts you to ask if you can give her a ride to the Cedar Rapids airport. She needs to pick up her girlfriend, Val, who is visiting from out of town. You agree because, of course. Historically you’ve done just about anything for a beautiful woman. (Years ago, when you lived in California, your stunningly gorgeous coworker called you at seven in the morning because she needed help jump-starting her car. You were out of bed and on your way in ten minutes, and when you opened the hood of her car you made a point of contemplating the machinery below you, as if you had any idea what it meant.) In the car, you are so busy talking you miss the exit—blowing past a strip club, Woody’s, and the sign for the airport. When you finally arrive and park your car, you walk to the baggage claim and watch these two beautiful, tiny women run at each other. One brunette, one blonde; like Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. The blonde sits and the brunette crawls in her lap; they laugh and kiss. (You would love that version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes .) You turn away and examine a poster for the University of Iowa very closely. In the car, the brunette laughs easily and openly at all of your jokes. You watch her surreptitiously in the rearview mirror. You drop them off back in town. A few days later, you’re talking to your mutual friend. “I think she likes you,” she says. “She’s really hot,” you say. “But she’s seeing someone. I just, like, literally picked up her girlfriend from the airport.” “Oh yeah,” your friend says. “They’re in an open relationship, though. That’s what she told me. I’m just saying.” She throws up her hands with mock innocence. “She’s mentioned you a bunch.” Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He wasn’t hurting me yet but I grew tense anyway, and he sensed this, bringing his forehead to my temple, laying it there and whispering again that I was good. And then he began to tighten his grip, very slowly and with a steady pressure on all sides, causing that terrible low ache to build in my abdomen, and I pressed my own forehead into the coarse fabric of the carpet, rubbing it very slightly back and forth. I groaned as he continued to squeeze, and then gasped as I felt his tongue on my cheek, a broad swipe from my jaw to my temple. Mozhesh , he said, you can take it, and then I cried out when suddenly he squeezed me harder and let me go. Good, he said again, whispering with his forehead still pressed to my temple, as I lay there recovering, though the worst thing about that particular pain is that you recover so slowly; the pain welled instead of ebbing, settling in my groin and the pit of my stomach and the backs of my thighs. When his weight shifted next to me I almost protested, I almost said chakaite , wait, I had even taken the breath to say it. But he hushed me, making a soothing sound to keep me in my place as he shifted his frame over mine, sliding himself over until he was resting on top of me. It helped, the weight of him, it pressed me down and pressed down the pain I still felt, that ache about which there is nothing erotic, or not for me. I know there are men who like it, who go to great lengths to find others who will hurt them in exactly this way, though I’ve never been able to fathom the pleasure they take from it. But then there’s no fathoming pleasure, the forms it takes or their sources, nothing we can imagine is beyond it; however far beyond the pale of our own desires, for someone it is the intensest desire, the key to the latch of the self, or the promised key, a key that perhaps never turns. It’s what I love most about the websites I visit, that you can call out for anything you desire, however aberrant or unlikely, and nearly always there comes an answer; it’s a large world, we’re never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end. He lay on me for some time, not moving or rather moving only to press me down, to ease out my pain and my will; he spread his length along mine, reaching until his hands were at my hands, coaxing free the fingers I had curled, and his feet found their place at my ankles, and then it was as if with his whole body he eased me, stretching and relaxing me at once.

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  80 Lecture 19: Wu Ch’eng-en’s Monkey The plot is full of fantastic adventures, mythic beings, animal spirits, fearsome battles, monsters, and miraculous deliverances. Its ¿ rst seven chapters deal with Monkey, hatched from a rock by the sun. In his quest for immortality, he storms heaven and is ¿ nally subdued by Buddha himself and imprisoned under a mountain for 500 years. Towards the end of this 500-year period, Buddha sends the bodhisáttva (Kuan-yin) to Earth to select a pilgrim and companions for the pilgrim who in turn will help people in the East to acquire more scriptures. She enlists Monkey as her ¿ rst companion to the yet- undisclosed pilgrim. Monkey agrees in exchange for forgiveness of some of his bad karma, and he waits under the mountain for the pilgrim to free him. Kuan-yin also enlists Pigsy, banished from heaven for a serious error and now working on a farm; growing more pig-like in appearance as time passes. He has no vocation for a spiritual quest, he gets easily discouraged, and he functions primarily as a comic foil to the pilgrim Tripitaka and Monkey. The novel then recounts the birth and early life of the man who will become Tripitaka, the pilgrim and nominal leader of the quest for scriptures. The story of his birth and early years is extraordinary, as be¿ ts one who will grow up to be a hero; as a baby, he was tied to a plank and sent down a river in a way reminiscent of the stories of Sargon the Great and Moses. After other adventures of an equally astounding nature, Tripitaka is given his charge, introduced to his companions, and they set off for India. The novel is full of incident but at the end, after a safe return home, all ¿ ve pilgrims are canonized and Tripitaka achieves full Buddhahood. Monkey is one of the great creations of world literature. He has antecedents in the trickster gods of many mythologies; the animal fables of Aesop; many Indian collections; the 1001 Nights , Chaucer’s tales of Chanticleer, Pertelote, and Reynard the Fox; and the monkey warrior of the Indian epic, the Ramayana. He is always still a monkey: curious, arrogant, brash, and willful. On the other hand, he also possesses the kind of supernatural powers we associate with comic-book heroes (e.g., he can shift his shape). Because of his intelligence and resourcefulness, he becomes the A Chinese proverb … refers to the monkey of the mind … the way your mind … needs to be disciplined to focus on anything for any length of time.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He stepped back, withdrawing from my mouth, and told me to lay myself out on the gray carpet face down, with my arms stretched over my head. It was a difficult position, the carpet was rough and there was no good place for my cock, which was still hard, having never softened, or softened only briefly, though we had been together I thought for a long time. He grunted as he knelt beside me, settling his large frame, and then he placed his hands on my back, not stroking or kneading but appraising. Mnogo si debel, he said again, you’re very fat, pinching my flesh between his fingers, but I like you, he said, haresvash mi, you’re pleasing to me, and I thanked him, I said radvam se, I’m glad of that, though a more literal translation would be something like I rejoice or take joy in it, which was closer to what I felt. His hands moved lower then, to my ass and the opening there, which he touched, still tenderly, though I flinched as he tested it, he said How is your hole and inched the tip of one dry finger inside. Kuchko, he said again, and again I like you, still speaking tenderly to me, so that I felt I had passed some test, that I had proven myself and entered within the scope of his affection, or if not his affection at least his regard. Then he stretched out beside me, not quite touching me, and brought his face close to mine as his hand moved lower still, between my legs, which I spread slightly before lifting up my hips to let his hand snake between my legs and touch my cock for the first time. And you like me too, he said, feeling how hard I was; he gripped me tightly before letting me go. Very much, I said, I like you very much, and it was true, I was excited by him in a new way, or almost new; I had never been with anyone so skilled or so patient. His hand was on my balls now, which he drew together and down, making a kind of ring with his thumb and forefinger, drawing them tighter before folding the rest of his hand around them. He wasn’t hurting me yet but I grew tense anyway, and he sensed this, bringing his forehead to my temple, laying it there and whispering again that I was good. And then he began to tighten his grip, very slowly and with a steady pressure on all sides, causing that terrible low ache to build in my abdomen, and I pressed my own forehead into the coarse fabric of the carpet, rubbing it very slightly back and forth. I groaned as he continued to squeeze, and then gasped as I felt his tongue on my cheek, a broad swipe from my jaw to my temple. Mozhesh, he said, you can take it, and then I cried out when suddenly he squeezed me harder and let me go.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  transferred to this new house, Jeanne seemed to undergo a transformation. She now acted like a complete angel, offering to help the prioress in all of her daily tasks. Moreover, given some books to read on Saint Teresa and mysticism, Jeanne became engrossed in the subject. She spent long hours discussing spiritual questions with the prioress. Within months she had become the house expert on mystical theology. She could be seen meditating and praying for hours, more than any other sister. Later that same year the prioress was transferred to another house. Deeply impressed by Jeanne’s behavior and ignoring the advice of others who did not think so highly of her, the prioress recommended Jeanne as her replacement. Suddenly, at the very young age of twenty-five, Jeanne now found herself the head of the Ursuline nuns in Loudun. Several months later, the sisters at Loudun began to hear some very strange stories from Jeanne. She had had a series of dreams, in which a local parish priest, Urbain Grandier, had visited and physically assaulted her. The dreams became increasingly erotic and violent. What was strange was that before these dreams, Jeanne had invited Grandier to become the director of the Ursuline house, but he had politely declined. In Loudun, locals considered Grandier a gallant seducer of young ladies. Was Jeanne merely indulging in her own fantasies? She was so pious that it was hard to believe she was making it all up, and the dreams seemed very real and unusually graphic. Soon after she began telling them to others, several sisters reported having similar dreams. One day the house confessor, Canon Mignon, heard a sister recount such a dream. Mignon, like many others, had long despised Grandier, and he saw in these dreams an opportunity to finally do him in. He called in some exorcists to work on the nuns, and soon almost all of the sisters were reporting nightly visits from Grandier. To the exorcists it was clear— these nuns were possessed by devils under the control of Grandier. For the edification of the citizenry, Mignon and his allies opened the exorcisms up to the public, who now flocked from far and wide to witness a most entertaining scene. The nuns would roll on the ground, writhing, showing their legs, screaming endless obscenities. And of all the sisters, Jeanne seemed the most possessed. Her contortions were more violent, and the demons that spoke through her were more strident in their satanic oaths. It was one of the strongest possessions they had ever seen, and the public clamored to witness her exorcisms above all the others. It now seemed apparent to the exorcists that Grandier, despite never having set foot in the house or having met Jeanne, had somehow bewitched and debauched the good sisters of Loudun. He was soon arrested and charged with sorcery. Based on the evidence, Grandier was condemned to death. After much torture, he was burned at the stake on August 18, 1634, before

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Erotica In the late spring, you surprise yourself by asking her to cover your mouth as you come. She does, pressing a firm palm against your crescendoing howl, and it’s as if the sound is being pushed back into your body so that it might suffuse your every molecule. When you are ebbing, and try to inhale but can’t, she lets go, and you can feel the lingering tingle of unlanguage. After this, you ask her to talk to you in a low, raspy stream while she fucks you, and she does: switching effortlessly between English and French, muttering about her cock and how it’s filling you up, pushing her hand over your face and grabbing the architecture of your jaw to turn it this way and that. She shaves her cunt smooth, and it glows like the inside of a conch shell. She loves wearing a harness; you suck her off that way and she comes like it’s real, bucking and lifting off the mattress. You don’t know what is more of a miracle: her body, or her love of your body. She haunts your erotic imagination. You are both perpetually wet. You fuck, it seems, everywhere: beds and tables and floors; over the phone. When you are physically next to each other, she loves to marvel over your differences: how her skin is pale as skim milk and yours, olive; how her nipples are pink and yours are brown. “Everything is darker on you,” she says. You would let her swallow you whole, if she could.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Of course you would go to an Ivy League school, but that by itself wouldn’t do the trick. “The point is not Harvard, but which Harvard? By Harvard one means Porcellian, Fly, or AD.” And he said that the key to which Harvard one attended, or which Yale, or which Princeton, and therefore which life one led thereafter, was one’s prep school. “Harvard or Yale or Princeton is not enough. It is the really exclusive prep school that counts. . . .” Packard said there were over three thousand private schools in America. Only a very few satisfied his standard of exclusivity. He specified them in a brief list almost exactly the same as Geoffrey’s. I understood, pondering these names in the library of Concrete High, that the brilliant life they promised depended on leaving most people out, to loud walls and bad tailors. I did not want to be left out. Now that I had felt the possibility of this life, any other life would be an oppression. Packard made a point of saying that these schools were just about impossible for outsiders to get into. But he did mention that they gave scholarships, and that many of the scholarships went to “descendants of once-prosperous alumni who had come into difficult times.” That made me feel as if the people at Deerfield were just sitting around waiting to hear from me. I wrote off for application forms. The schools responded quickly, with cover letters in whose stiff courtesy I managed to hear panting enthusiasm. I did get a friendly note from John Boyden, the headmaster of Deerfield and the son of the man who had thrown my father out. He said that the school was already swamped with applications that year, and recommended that I apply to some other schools. His list was familiar. In a handwritten postscript he added that he remembered my father, and wished me all the best. I fixed on this cordial nod as a signal of favor. When the forms were all in, I sat down to fill them out and ran into a wall. I could see from the questions they asked that to get into one of these schools, let alone win a scholarship, I had to be at least the boy I’d described to my brother and probably something more. Geoffrey was willing to take me at my word; the schools were not. Each of the applications required supporting letters. They wanted letters from teachers, coaches, counselors, and, if possible, their own alumni. They asked for an account of my Community Service, and left a space of disheartening length for the answer. Likewise Athletic Achievements, likewise Foreign Travel, and Languages. I understood that these claims were to be confirmed in the letters of recommendation. They wanted my grades sent by Concrete High on its official transcript form.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  It was all heavy ordnance, seriously life threatening and illegal. My stepmother was scolding him. She wanted to know what he planned to do with them. He pushed a bunch of cherry bombs over to me and said, “Blow ‘em up, dear, blow ’em up.” I BEGAN TO take a sharp, acquisitive interest in cars after Skipper customized the Ford. As I walked my paper route I took apart the cars I saw and put them back together in more interesting ways, lowered, louvered, dagoed, chopped-and-channeled. I read the used-car advertisements in the papers, comparing prices, measuring them against the money I was making. I thought of what it would be like to own a car, to be able to just get in and go. After I’d delivered my papers one day I folded up my news bag and crossed the bridge leading out of camp, then waited with my thumb in the air until a car stopped for me. I didn’t know the man—he was a construction worker from the dam upriver. I got in and he asked me where I was going. He added, “You’re good as far as Seattle. Then you’re on your own.” Seattle. I could, if I chose, ride all the way to Seattle. I said that I was going to Concrete, which seemed far enough for now, but by the time we reached Marblemount I lost my nerve and asked the man to let me out. Within moments I caught another ride back to Chinook. This was my first time hitchhiking. As the summer went on I ranged farther and farther down the valley, to Concrete and Bird’s Eye and Van Horn and Sedro Woolley; once, just before school started, all the way to Mount Vernon. I would walk around the streets of these towns for a few minutes, waiting for something to happen, and when it didn’t I would go back to the road and stick my thumb out again. I was always home by the time Dwight and my mother got off work. No one ever missed me. Now and then I went with Arthur, but usually alone. Alone I could lie more freely and I felt more open to chance. Someday, I thought, someone would stop for me and say, “You’re good as far as Wilton, Connecticut. . .” SKIPPER WAS AWAY for only a couple of weeks. He came back, packed up his things, and was gone the next morning. I saw him occasionally after that, when he came home for Thanksgiving and Christmas or when we visited him in Seattle. He lived in little apartments with other men for a couple of years, then he got married and took another job with the power company. I sat around with him the night before his wedding. It was one of two times I ever saw him choked up.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Bildungsroman I didn’t date when most people dated. When other teenagers were figuring out what good and bad relationships looked like, I was busy being extremely weird: praying a lot, getting obsessed with sexual purity. The summer I was thirteen I was saved around a bonfire at a Christian summer camp. I’d spent most of the weeklong session making box-stitch plastic lanyards and climbing trees, but now the counselors—barely in their twenties—fed us s’mores and encouraged us to think about everything we’d ever done wrong. A “Certificate of New Birth,” printed on thin, grainy paper, was presented to me the next morning. It marks the exact moment of conversion at 10:20 p.m., well past my bedtime. Afterward, I was an antihipster, as earnest about Jesus as I could possibly be. I walked around with a patch on my backpack that said “Ask Me Why I’m a Christian.” I wore a ring that said “True Love Waits.” I went to church and liked it. I believed Jesus was my savior; that he had a personal stake in my salvation, as personal as my parents’ love for me. When I was sixteen, a new associate pastor, Joel Jones, was rotated into our United Methodist parish. When he introduced himself to the church youth, I felt a kick deep in my pelvis. He was handsome, with a goatee and straight, sandy hair that jutted out over his forehead. He was a little pudgy, but only just. He had a wedding ring. And when he shook my hand, he looked directly into my eyes. Joel was around a lot. He participated in youth group events alongside his normal church duties. He gave smart, politically progressive sermons that sowed chaos and indignation among the older congregants, which delighted me no end. Sometimes I would linger after the service was over. He always talked to me like I was an adult; he always remembered my name. In my senior year of high school, our church connected with a Methodist congregation in Lichtenburg, South Africa, that was looking to start a youth camp for its children and teens. A group of adults—including Joel—decided to do a trial run, and they invited me to go with them. We departed a frigid Northeast midwinter and arrived in the middle of a Southern Hemisphere summer. The camp was held on a sprawling farm outside town, a palatial property with a pool and a large white fountain and a gate running along the road. The campers, ranging from my age—seventeen—down to nine, stayed in a converted barn. I ran an arts-and-crafts elective. We built bonfires around which we sang and played guitar and made spontaneous confessions. Boerboels—a South African breed of giant dogs that resemble mastiffs—roamed the grounds. There was a new mother with distended nipples and a loping gait, and her massive puppies, who scrambled over each other to get to our outstretched hands.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Man vs. Nature In New York City you visit a store that sells natural and scientific ephemera. Deer skulls in cases, petrified wood, articulated bat skeletons in bell jars, amethyst geodes as tall as a child, taxidermied mice, trilobite fossils, leather-bound birding books. There is something hypnotic about this store. You wish you could spend all day there; you wish you could spend thousands of dollars there. It reminds you of a store you used to go to as a kid—Natural Wonders, RIP—and how it always made you feel like equal parts Ellie Sattler and Lara Croft. That night, lying next to her on a futon, you tell her about a fantasy you have: “We have a beautiful home; the sort of home that has its own library, filled with books and the sort of things an amateur gentleman scientist would have had in his library in the nineteen-tens. And we throw a huge, lavish party, and everyone comes, and there is laughter and drinking and delicious food. I’m in a beautiful, clingy fifties swing dress, and you are in a suit and tie. At some point in the evening, when everyone is a few drinks in, you pull me into a private corner of a small room and slip your hand up my dress, murmuring into my ear what will happen when the guests have gone home. And then later, when you have kissed the last person on the cheek and locked the front door, we fumble and tumble our way toward the library, where you push me down on a lush, red divan and I unknot your tie and unbutton your shirt, and there among the bones and the books and the paintings you slide your hand up me and bite my neck and after I come I jerk you off while dead things look over us.” This fantasy springs up so fully formed it feels like it’s already happened in some past era, as if instead of creating it you’ve just plucked it out of a soup of history and consciousness. “Yes,” she says. “Yes.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  We sat diagonally from each other and, every day, talked until our teacher threatened to separate us. I liked her in a way that made me excited to go to class, but I didn’t understand why. She was such a good friend and so fun and so smart I wanted to rise out of my seat and grab her hand and yell, “To hell with Hemingway!” and haul her out of class; all to some end I couldn’t quite visualize. From the corner of my eye, I stared at her freckles and imagined kissing her mouth. When I thought about her, I squirmed, tormented. What did it mean? I had a crush on her. That’s it. It wasn’t complicated. But I didn’t realize I had a crush on her. Because it was the early 2000s and I was just a baby in the suburbs without a reliable internet connection. I didn’t know any queers. I did not understand myself. I didn’t know what it meant to want to kiss another woman. Years later, I’d figured that part out. But then, I didn’t know what it meant to be afraid of another woman. Do you see now? Do you understand? 33. Legal scholar Ruthann Robson calls this a “dual theoretical demand,” and adds, “the demand, of course, is in many cases more than dual. As Black lesbian poet Pat Parker writes in her poem For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend: ‘The first thing you do is forget that i’m Black / Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.’” 34. It should be noted that Alice Mitchell was hardly the first woman to create such public confusion over her gender as it related to both her passions and her shocking act of violence. In 1879, when Lily Duer shot her friend Ella Hearn for rejecting her love, a headline in the National Police Gazette read in part, “A Female Romeo: Her Terrible Love for a Chosen Friend of Her Own Alleged Sex [emphasis mine] Assumes a Passionate Character.” Sometime before the murder, a witness reported an exchange in which Lily said, “Ella, why will you not walk out with me? Do you not love me?” “Oh, yes, I love you,” Ella responded, “but I am afraid of you.” 35. It should be noted that the word battered (as in: battered wife, battered woman, battered lesbian), while woefully imprecise and covering only a fraction of abuse experiences, was the preferred term in this era. It is, of course, a specific legal term with specific legal implications, and I have never thought of myself as a “battered” anyone. The fact that the expression persisted for so long, despite the fact that the lesbian conversation in particular focused on many kinds of abuse that were not explicitly physical, is the perfect example of how inadequate this conversation has been—discouraging useful subtlety.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “If I care about her too much, I can’t risk exposing my aggression. I care about what she thinks of me, see? The person can’t be too close to me, or I feel threatened. I need distance to be turned on.” Jed is trying to map out the structure of his sexuality for Coral. Aggression is the initial motivator, but the real sexual charge is the autonomy that aggression permits him. “It’s about how manners don’t matter anymore. What other people think doesn’t matter anymore. Dignity doesn’t matter anymore. All there is is need, animal desire. It’s freedom, which I’ve been fighting for my whole life.” Let’s face it: Jed and Coral aren’t an ideal sexual fit. And it’s possible that this part of their relationship will never become Nine and 1/2 Weeks. Yet each time they’ve considered parting, they’ve realized that they may find a better sexual match, but not a better life partner. Here’s the direction I took. Given Jed’s ability to feel mastery largely in sexual dominance, I endorsed Coral’s request that she experience some of Jed’s assertiveness beyond the bedroom. “Part of what makes this so weird for me is that Jed is incredibly passive in every other aspect of our life. The contrast is totally jarring. I wish he were more decisive and less deferential generally.” I encourage Jed to start making some claims outside the sexual arena. He’s a novice at this kind of assertiveness. Choosing a restaurant or a movie is hard for him; telling her he wants to stay in New York for Thanksgiving (and not see her entire extended family, as they do every year) is almost impossible. I never suggest to Jed that he needs to reconfigure his sexuality. But I do urge him to learn to wield power in other areas of his life as well. It’s important for Jed to know that his wants will be honored outside the rituals of S-M. By the same token, he wouldn’t mind it if Coral transferred some of her directorial boldness from the editing room to their four-poster bed. Jed makes the point that Coral, too, could bring some assertiveness to their sex life. “When you finish brushing your teeth and putting on your pajamas, and then you ask me if we’re going to have sex tonight in this matter-of-fact, nudging way, it just doesn’t do anything for me. I need more of a charge. Tell me you want me, unzip my pants, walk naked into the room. Something, anything, besides, ‘Are we going to have sex tonight?’ I do it for you. I light the candles, create the mood you like, make love to you slowly. I do the vanilla for you. I try; you don’t.”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as a Stranger Comes to Town One day, she texts you to ask if you can give her a ride to the Cedar Rapids airport. She needs to pick up her girlfriend, Val, who is visiting from out of town. You agree because, of course. Historically you’ve done just about anything for a beautiful woman. (Years ago, when you lived in California, your stunningly gorgeous coworker called you at seven in the morning because she needed help jump-starting her car. You were out of bed and on your way in ten minutes, and when you opened the hood of her car you made a point of contemplating the machinery below you, as if you had any idea what it meant.) In the car, you are so busy talking you miss the exit—blowing past a strip club, Woody’s, and the sign for the airport. When you finally arrive and park your car, you walk to the baggage claim and watch these two beautiful, tiny women run at each other. One brunette, one blonde; like Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. The blonde sits and the brunette crawls in her lap; they laugh and kiss. (You would love that version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.) You turn away and examine a poster for the University of Iowa very closely. In the car, the brunette laughs easily and openly at all of your jokes. You watch her surreptitiously in the rearview mirror. You drop them off back in town. A few days later, you’re talking to your mutual friend. “I think she likes you,” she says. “She’s really hot,” you say. “But she’s seeing someone. I just, like, literally picked up her girlfriend from the airport.” “Oh yeah,” your friend says. “They’re in an open relationship, though. That’s what she told me. I’m just saying.” She throws up her hands with mock innocence. “She’s mentioned you a bunch.” Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.