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 156 of 344 · 20 per page

• From Vox (1992)

  She was looking straight at the TV—the light from the kitchen was behind her profile—and she had her legs crossed, and one of her forearms was resting on her stomach, and her tea was in her left hand. Her skirt was pleated. She looked so exceedingly clothed . She lifted the mug, and I could see her lips meet it—the water was still too hot, so she had to do one of those long inward sips that makes the liquid lift off from the surface into a tea aerosol, and her eyes narrowed when she felt the fine hot spray of it touch the tip of her tongue. And then the movie began— Pleasure So Deep . It starts with a maid who hears a tinkling bell and takes something on a tray to a man and they talk for a second and then she walks away.” “Have you rented this movie since then?” she asked. “Twice. It’s also one of the three I rented tonight, which I’m probably not going to watch. Much more fun telling it to you. Anyway, the maid walks away, and then this thin Europop electronic sex-music starts going, and then instantly: cut to half-naked woman and man with cock, with dubbed moans. The woman is in her late thirties maybe, very attractive, with her hair pinned back. Emily watched this for maybe a minute, and then she looked over at the windows and she said, ‘Are you sure people can’t see in?’ I do have curtains, but I honestly wasn’t sure if people could possibly see in or not, and my apartment is on the first floor, on the side of the building, so it was a legitimate concern, so I hopped up again and got my keys and said I’d be back in a second, and I went outside and tried to look in my windows, and it was surprisingly secure: not only could you not see Emily or anything in the room, you couldn’t even tell the TV set was on, I guess because it’s a small set. So I went back in and sat down, slightly out of breath, and told her that you couldn’t see a thing from outside. She said, ‘Great, thanks.’ I said, ‘What’s happened so far?’ and she said, in a slightly unnatural voice, ‘The woman and her lover have been fucking in various ways.’ It was the same scene, in fact—this Italian guy, whose name turns out to be Mario, has his amazingly long cock between her breasts—I remember seeing that image and immediately turning to Emily and watching her eyes: every time there was a cut, I could see her eyes make a tiny movement to find the center of gravity of the next image.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  But for an instant imagine the process reversed, go with me back through the years, then be me, me all alone as I submit to the weight, the atmospheric pressure of youth, for when I was young I was exhausted by always bumping up against this big lummox I didn’t really know, myself. It was as though I’d been forced into solitary confinement with a stranger who had unaccountable tastes, aversions, rhythms. Come with me, then, up the concrete steps to the toilet door, place a dime in the box, turn the chrome handle, open the door a crack, and slip in. You’ll be surprised by how many silent men are standing around. This businessman has rested his expensive leather briefcase on the filthy sink and is leaning against a tile wall. On the floor a bum, reeking of sweet red wine, is sleeping it off, snoring loudly, a sound that draws a red line under the conspicuous silence. Both stalls, one doorless, the other with its door half open, house men sitting right on the porcelain (the seats have long since been stolen). Both occupants have dropped their pants to the damp floor but are leaning forward to conceal their erections. The mood of the room is a cheap alloy of tension and boredom. A train clatters in, you can hear the doors open and shut, then shoes ringing on the pavement in the cavernous station. And then you lean against the wall and, enduring seconds that pulse in your ear, stretch out your hand toward the crotch of the man beside you. Your action triggers vitality all around you. In a second this raw country boy at the urinal with the rosy forearms and red knuckles, the sickle of a vein superimposed on the hammer of his hand, has turned toward the room, brandishing a big red penis. An instant later everyone has converged on him, the men in the stalls emerge, one is kissing him, the second licking his testicles, a third man the penis, and another is standing beside him, arm around his waist, as though to lend him courage and companionship. The businessman with the expensive briefcase has planted his face between the farmboy’s buttocks in total disregard of his expensive trousers, which are getting damp and dirty on the floor, wet with backed-up sewage. He’s lapping and lapping; I can see his eyes drifting peacefully from side to side, dreamily independent of the suckling action. Then the man sucking the cock comes up for air and you take his place, fitting yourself around a tumescence still warm and tasting of the other guy’s spit. You look up as someone else unbuttons the country boy’s shirt, revealing a hairless chest marbled by blue veins and decorated like a piece of wedding cake with two candle sockets in pink frosting—the erect nipples.

• From Vox (1992)

  “Oh, and I’d tighten my thigh muscle where your pussy was pressing down on it and feel your wetness slide; against me, and I’d look up at you and kiss you again, and slide my hands down to your hips and push down, so that there was more pressure still against your notch, and I’d feel your hips move slightly, adjusting themselves so that it felt best …” “And while we were kissing I’d reach down and catch my fingers under one leg hole of your underpants and pull it up and over your cock and balls and then I’d hold your balls in my hand for a second and then I’d bring my hand up and squeeze the head of your cock in my fist and kind of pull and push on it while I was squeezing it tightly.”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Mick was from the South. Everything about him was glossy. Each hair on his head looked as though it had been individually dipped and twirled in hot mink oil. His prominent temples, his bony jaw, the machine-tooled grooves of his ears, his sealskin eyebrows all threw off highlights, and his big black eyes looked like the reservoirs of that lubrication, just as his shiny black nipples looked like the controls. He wasn’t “masculine” with the full pachydermal weight that word carried back then. He was more like a ferret—quick, intent. And a loner. He was always alone, backing out of rooms with a grin and that nearly subvocal chorus of yea-saying (“Yessiree, better get crackin’ if I’m going to make ROTC”). He’d hang on the witticisms of the older guys with that huge grin. It was hard to look at it since there was no scrim over it, and only if someone teased him (“Stop eatin’ shit, Mick”) did he become conscious of his smile. Then he used it defensively; he’d dial it bigger and brighter, rotate and beam it into every corner. The brothers didn’t think he was a “face man” only because he wasn’t given to an eye-batting awareness of his own beauty. But he did have the sort of good regular looks that go with a parade uniform. One could picture his features under a helmet, deep-set eyes sunk into the shadow cast by the brim. He had a girlfriend whom he never stopped touching when he was with her—fingering her sash, stroking her hair, massaging her neck, guiding her through the door by patting her shoulder. They were always the first to hit the dimmed make-out room at a dance and the last to leave in complete dishevelment. She wasn’t a “Greek.” In fact, she had no distinction in our eyes except as Mick’s girl. Mick seemed much less complicated than everyone else about sex; he didn’t talk about cunnilingus for hours and didn’t vomit on his date. He seemed curious in the same uncomplicated way about men. When he was on wake-up duty, he’d tap me (I slept on an upper bunk) and then he’d just stare at my early morning erection in my jockey shorts. He didn’t smile unless I caught his eye; then he’d sort of come out of his trance and give a grin. He was what the other fellows would have called a horny bastard, except he never posed as one. Maybe he wasn’t very intelligent.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Next to him lay a man who was introduced to me as Lou and who gave me a warm, brown, limp hand, which he presented at an odd angle as though I were meant to kiss it or touch it to my forehead. He was in blue jeans he’d sawed down to the briefest shorts I’d ever seen, which were held up by a thick bicycle chain and safety lock for belt and buckle. He was thin, which my mind stupidly attributed to the long, beautiful scar that traced the entire inner lining of his ribcage—up from the chain belt across the solar plexus and down the other side. His hair had been cut fuzzy-wuzzy short with clippers. When he smiled, his teeth looked like expensive replacements. Although he was clean-shaven, black Benday dots traced the narrow pathway of his thin mustache and the stippled edge of his jaw. His jawbone and nose looked out of joint, as if they’d been broken by the same event that had smashed his teeth and inscribed the scar. Even the index finger of his right hand didn’t quite lie down smoothly. It looked as if it had been snapped, rotated slightly, then rewired. And yet nothing gruesome or shocking was suggested by these alterations. Rather, they counted as painful but elegant tribal decorations cicatrized into the flesh, a sort of allover circumcision. This tribal idea was emphasized by his hairless torso, his long, smooth, slightly bowed legs, and his small- pored, high-cheekboned face, which fit as tightly to his skull as a swimming cap. He was half American Indian, the countertenor told me later that night. I took the countertenor home with me. He held me against his capacious chest and sang in his piercing high voice. Later I stood over him in bed, which led the singer, who was serious and sentimental and full of imported beer, to smile and blow me kisses. “Do you live here all by yourself?” he asked me, looking around my mother’s gilded cage. “Yes,” I said. “Are you in school or do you work?” “No, I don’t do anything,” I said. “I know that sounds terribly un-American, but I haven’t decided yet what to do with my life.” The tenor nodded and hugged me. The next morning, after several telephone calls, he arranged for us to eat with all the other men we’d met on the beach. It turned out Lou lived in the same building, in the identical apartment twelve stories down. We all went to a coffee shop on Rush for breakfast. I ate so many syrup-soaked pancakes and drank so much bitter coffee that I got a stomachache. Maybe it was due to the excitement I felt looking at and talking to Lou. He was wearing a blue velour sweatshirt. No one I’ve ever known before or since had his curious way of moving.

• From Vox (1992)

  “Was it a good movie?” she asked. “Were there any statues?” “Statues? Ah, you mean statues ! I don’t know if it was set in Rome or not. It was about this woman who seemed to be managing some kind of counterfeiting operation that stored the fake money in caskets. In one scene she has sex with this guy who has a huge clownish yellow tie on with a U.S. dollar sign on it. Pointless, silly—but never mind, Emily was right, the fact that it was dubbed was outstandingly erotic. And the breasts really looked European somehow: not quite so corn-fed and symmetrical, but again maybe that was an illusion of the sound track.” “So you watched the movie, or you watched Emily? What was Emily wearing, by the way?” “She was wearing a skirt, and a short-sleeved sweatery thing, I think it was dark red, some kind of dark red with thin vertical gold stripes. Lovely small, proud, elegant breasts—I mean in the sweater.” “And you were in a jacket and tie?”

• From Vox (1992)

  14 of a catalog shoot, all these male models, when the walk out took place, so they're wearing exactly what they were wearing on the shoot, which are the usual aubergine paisley boxer shorts, and Henri Rousseau bathrobes, and Erté pajamas, and that sort of thing, but there was no time for them to change, they had to be herded barefoot into this giant warehouse because the company was bombed with orders. April was their biggest month. So— one male model takes this woman's order slip, and stud ies it, looks at her name on it—what's her name?" "Jill." "Looks at her name, Jill Smith, and then takes the order slip and crumples it against the piece of horseradish in his foulard silk boxer shorts, and he hands it to the next male model, a gorgeous peasant with strange slitty nipples, who smooths it out, studies it, duh, Jill Smith, squeezes his asscheeks together, and passes it to the next guy, who smooths it out, studies it, bites one corner, and hands it to the next guy, and so on down this row of male models, each one broader-shouldered and sinewier- stomached than the last, until finally the order slip gets to the last guy, who's fallen asleep sitting on one tang of the forklift, a much slighter gentleman, with a beautiful throat with a softly pulsing jugular you just wanted to eat it looked so good, and of course wearing a green moiré silk codpiece, pushed forward and upward by the one tang of the forklift. This male model rouses himself, smacks his lips sleepily, studies the slip of paper, gets in

• From Vox (1992)

  I could hear their sticky little rollers moving over that wall, ssshp, ssshp, ssshp , and they were having an idle conversation about the chick they saw on the lake that weekend riding in the back of an inboard motorboat in a pair of overalls with no top, so her tits flopped around behind the fasteners on the top flap, and then they made reference to the time on one job when one of them evidently quote ‘ate out’ the woman whose house they were painting and then she jerked him off onto a cracked slate hearthstone because she was paranoid about hurting the finish on the antique pine floors, and again I called out, as nicely as I could, ‘Guys, please, make sure you’re painting the right colors!’ and this time, instead of answering, one of them simply took his little roller and got it very heavy with the semi-gloss Paper Lantern and touched it to the right side, you know, the … cheek, of my ass, and then I could feel him rolling a stripe of paint right down my leg, over my calf, right down to my Achilles tendon, and then rolling right back up again. Like the seam of a pre-war stocking, except wide. Then he worked the roller a little on the tray, loading it up again, and he started on my other asscheek, and went very deliberately down and up again. At first he pressed quite lightly, so I could just barely feel the sodden fluff touching my skin on my upper thigh, and the roller barely rolled, but then as he traveled down he pressed harder, and some of the paint was squeezed from the roller and dripped down my leg ahead of it. It was so surprisingly warm. They’d had the paint cans in the back of their truck, which was parked in the sun. When the roller traveled over the backs of each of my knees it felt very very nice. I felt myself arching myself up slightly, like a cat who’s being stroked. Meanwhile the third painter, who was in the room that my head and my upper self were in, was still blithely painting away, with his back to me, so at least part of the job was moving steadily forward. And I expected that the two of them in the hall would now get back to work. But instead I felt a pair of hands on each leg, and I was lifted for a moment, and a paint can was slid under each of my feet. This was not a particularly comfortable position.

• From Vox (1992)

  72 men in the garden being able to see my breasts stuffed flat against the foggy mirror. Once I even brought in some lip gloss after my swim and spent a long time putting lip gloss around my nipples and soaping it off. " "God, car washes must have driven you wild." "Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really—it was very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine—I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn't know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don't work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my breasts over the windshield just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn't something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal." "There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren't there?" he said. "If it doesn't work, and if it doesn't metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn't survive." "Yeah, even in the buildup to one orgasm, it's a kind of bake-off. You think: two cocks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I'm a geometry teacher measuring boys' penis length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficulty

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  When she awakened, she was lying on an iron bed in a shabby room. A man was asleep beside her. She was naked, and he too, but half-covered by the sheet. She recognized the body which had crushed her the night before in the Bois. It was the body of an athlete, big, brown, muscular. The head was handsome, strong, with wild hair. As she looked at him admiringly, he opened his eyes and smiled. “I could not let you go back with the others, I might never have seen you again,” he said. “How did you get me here?” “I stole you.” “Where are we?” “In a very poor hotel, where I live.” “Then you’re not . . .” “I’m not a friend of the others, if that is what you mean. I am simply a workman. One night, bicycling back from my work, I saw one of your partouzes. I got undressed and joined it. The women seemed to enjoy me. I was not discovered. When I had made love to them, I stole away. Last night I was passing by again and I heard the voices. I found you being kissed by that man, and I carried you off. Now I brought you here. It may make trouble for you, but I could not give you up. You’re a real woman, the others are feeble compared to you. You’ve got fire.” “I have to leave,” said Linda. “But I want your promise that you will come back.” He sat up and looked at her. His physical beauty gave him a grandeur, and she vibrated at his nearness. He began to kiss her and she felt languid again. She put her hand on his hard penis. The joys of the night before were still running through her body. She let him take her again almost as if to make sure that she had not dreamed. No, this man who could make his penis burn through her whole body and kiss her as if it were to be the last kiss, this man was real. And so Linda returned to him. It was the place where she felt most alive. But after a year she lost him. He fell in love with another woman and married her. Linda had become so accustomed to him that now everyone else seemed too delicate, too refined, too pale, feeble. Among the men she knew, there was none with that savage strength and fervor of her lost lover. She searched for him again and again, in small bars, in the lost places of Paris. She met prizefighters, circus stars, athletes. With each she tried to find the same embraces. But they failed to arouse her.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  Pierre’s double would turn over on his side, and Kay would hold her breath. If he awakened, he would find her with her hands in a strange position. Then suddenly, as if he had guessed her wishes, he would place his hand between her legs and leave it there, so that she could not move. The presence of his hand aroused her more than ever. Then she would close her eyes again and try to imagine that his hand was moving. To create a sufficiently vivid image for herself, she would begin to contract and open her vagina, rhythmically, until she felt the orgasm. PIERRE HAD nothing to fear from the Elena he knew and had so delicately circumnavigated. But there was an Elena he did not know, the virile Elena. Although she did not wear short hair or a man’s suit, ride a horse, smoke cigars or frequent the bars where such women congregate, there was a spiritually masculine Elena, dormant in her for the moment. In all but matters of love, Pierre was helpless. He could not nail a nail to a wall, hang up a picture, repair a book, discuss technical matters of any kind. He lived in terror of servants, concierges, plumbers. He could not make a decision, sign a contract of any sort; he did not know what he wanted. Elena’s energies rushed into these lacunas. Her mind became the more fecund. She bought the books and newspapers, incited activity, made decisions. Pierre permitted this. It suited his nonchalance. She gained in audacity. She felt protective towards him. As soon as the sexual aggression was over, he reclined like a pasha and let her rule. He did not observe another Elena emerging, affirming new contours, habits, a new personality. Elena had discovered that women were drawn to her. She was invited by Kay to meet Leila, a well-known nightclub singer, a woman of dubious sex. They went to Leila’s house. She was lying in bed. The room was heavily charged with the perfume of narcissus, and Leila rested against the headboard in a languid, intoxicated way. Elena thought she was recovering from a night of drinking, but this was Leila’s natural pose. And from this languid body came a man’s voice. Then the violet eyes fixed themselves on Elena, appraising her with masculine deliberateness.

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  He stretched himself on the floor. She crouched over his face and held her dress so that it fell and covered his head. With his two hands he held her buttocks like a fruit and passed his tongue between the mounts over and over again. Now he also stroked her clitoris, which made Bijou move forwards and backwards. His tongue felt every response, every contraction. As she crouched over him, she saw his erect penis vibrate with each gasp of pleasure he uttered. There was a knock on the door. Bijou rose quickly, startled, with her lips still wet from the kisses and her hair undone. The clairvoyant answered quietly however: “I am not ready yet.” And then turned and smiled at her. She smiled back. He dressed himself quickly. Soon everything was outwardly in order. They agreed to meet again. Bijou wanted to bring her friends Leila and Elena. Would he like it? He begged her to do this. He said, “Most of the women who come here do not tempt me. They are not beautiful. But you—come whenever you want to. I’ll dance for you.” His dance for the three women took place one evening when all the clients were gone. He stripped himself, showing his gleaming golden-brown body. To his waist he tied a fake penis modeled like his own and the same color. He said, “This is a dance from my own country. We do this for the women on feast days.” In the dimly lit room, where the light shone like a small fire over his skin, he began to move his belly, making the penis wave in a most suggestive way. He jerked his body as if he were entering a woman and simulated the spasms of a man caught in the varied tonalities of an orgasm. One, two, three. The final spasm was wild, like that of a man giving up his life in the act of sex. The three women watched. At first only the fake penis dominated, but then the real one, in the heat of the dance, began to compete in length and weight. Now they both moved in rhythm with his gestures. He closed his eyes as though he had no need of the women. The effect on Bijou was powerful. She took her dress off. She began to dance around him temptingly. But he merely touched her now and then with the tip of his sex, wherever he encountered her, and continued to turn and jerk his body in space like a savage dancing against an invisible body. The teasing affected Elena, too, and she slipped her dress off and kneeled near them, just to be in the orbit of their sexual dance. She suddenly wanted to be taken until she bled, by this big, strong, firm penis dangled in front of her, as he performed a male danse du ventre, with its tantalizing motions.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  33 IF HER GOAL was to prove to herself that it was over, that they both wanted to end it, she got her chance two days after she settled in with Lamb and Abby, when Bru came looking for her at the Dynamo office, a cramped space on the second floor of a ratty building on Beach Road. She was alone in the office, taking inventory in the supply closet, when he called, “Hello ... anybody home?” Please, God ... help me live through this. Help me to be strong. “Hey,” he said, finding her as still and lifeless as one of the vacuum cleaners. He held out a bunch of peonies. She took them, her hands shaking. She was afraid to look at him, afraid if she did she’d lose it. “Hey ...” he said again, tilting up her chin. She tried to focus on the wall clock over his shoulder —4:15 P.M. He waved his hand in front of her face. “Victoria?” Okay. She could do this. She’d keep it light, as if it meant nothing, as if he meant nothing. “What happened to your nose?” she asked. She could see he’d had an accident. A Band-Aid covered the bridge of his nose, but it only made him more attractive, giving his face a mysterious, slightly dangerous look. “Hockey,” he said. She nodded, reached up, touched it. A mistake. His arms went around her. “Missed you,” he whispered. “Missed you so much.” She was all over him in the truck, tugging at his shirt, undoing the zipper of his jeans. She’d never felt this kind of lust. He pulled off the road and fell onto her, pushing her panties aside, his jeans around his knees. Her head banged against the door as he pumped her but she barely noticed. The peonies crushing beneath her released their fragrance. She would never smell peonies again without reliving this

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  William Everett Hunton was one of the first handsome homosexuals I’d ever met, a small, neatly made little guy who would flounce and languish around me but turn gravely masculine around the other law students. Even though he was hoping to reform himself and was quite optimistic about a cure, at least for a while he had been gay, and could still be considered at least a transitional case. Annie and I would sit around his room in the law quad and listen to his adventures, presented as evidence of his depravity but with a suggestion that his scarlet sins, at least, had been mink-lined. We were alone, he and I, for a moment. He was shaving and dressing and I watched him as a child might, as though I myself didn’t perform these same rites every morning (or in the case of shaving, every third morning). When I told him in which Midwestern city I’d been born, he laughed and said, “But that’s where my patron lives, the real Everett Hunton.” “Come again?” William widened his blue eyes, smiled, and came over and sat on my lap. “Oh, look, I’ve gotten foam on your neck,” and he brushed it away. He swiveled in my lap, linked his hands behind my neck, and leaned back to look at me. With one more wiggle of his bottom he whispered, “I was wondering if I could get a rise out of you.” He stood and pretended to be a matron slowly raising a lorgnette to her eye to inspect the degree and angle of the damage she’d done. “I can’t tell if you pack a big basket or not.” “What do you mean exactly?” “You’re not that naive.” He went back to his sink and mirror. “God, but do I feel like a tarnished angel around you.” He turned and held up a warning finger. “Equal emphasis on tarnished and angel.” “You are angelic, William, a naughty angel,” I said, surprising myself with my low tone, which was the vocal counterpart to a lazy pat on a chorus girl’s fanny. William instantly responded with a shiver. “You think so? Oh, I was telling you about my ‘patron.’ He’d die if he heard me using that word; he tells everyone we’re cousins, though that’s just as dangerous—with these really old families the cousins are all present and accounted for.” He clapped his hand over his mouth. “No, I must change the subject. So, tell me, Ducky, are you hung or not?” He slapped himself, looked at his reflection, and hissed, “You slut, I didn’t say that.” “Do I have a big penis? Oh, I suppose it’s just average.” “Suppose? Darling, a real man might get away with vagueness about that one vital statistic, but it’s not as though you haven’t done major comparison shopping.” He laughed as an actress might, tossing his head back to emphasize his long neck.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  In the locker room the man smiled at me again, not in the usual furtive way (seductive, hostile, afraid) but just as though we were already friends. He had wonderful green eyes and an engaging smile, although one tooth was a delicate biscuit brown. His shoulders reflected the overhead light. When he turned I could see that his buttocks registered in sinewy detail every motion he made; they weren’t piled high like stiff mounds of whipped cream, the way teenage boys’ butts looked. No, his hips were narrow and fluent. No one else was around in the locker room, although two or three voices boomed from the pool. The smell of chlorine was giving me a headache. We started talking, and everything I said made him nod and smile. I thought he might be laughing at me. What puzzled me was why someone so handsome would show an interest in me. As he dressed, I could see he had beautiful clothes, and that intimidated me, too. He invited me to come to his apartment for a cup of tea. It was already dark out. A cold wind was blowing steadily, sifting snow. The afternoon had been warm enough to melt the snow on the sidewalk, but now it had frozen white as milk glass. I felt a small secret pride in being with someone so handsome. His carefully combed hair froze stiff. His salient cheekbones shone and caught the passing lights. The intimacy between us seemed as sudden and transitionless as in a dream. When we reached a dark side street, he put my mittenless hand in his pocket and held it without saying anything. His apartment was big and underfurnished, as though a flood had scattered the contents of a single room over several. He sat me on a straight-back chair stranded in the middle of a carpetless wood floor, but when he stepped back and saw me marooned there he laughed and invited me into his bedroom. His name, he said, was Fred. His window cast a yellow trapezoid on the pure blue snow outside. The wind had traced in snow the black bark of the tree below. A soft tango was playing on the radio. He switched off the light. The snow looked fluffier, almost as though it had risen slightly. We sprawled side by side, athwart the bed, fully dressed, our wet shoes on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Fred’s voice and the tango explored the folds of my brain like a deadly parasite, whose progress can’t be detected except after it slowly starts to unsnap higher functions. In the center of the ceiling a pressed metal rosette had lost detail under each new layer of paint. Fred’s voice made my ear glow, or was it the cold? He told me that he’d just been released from a mental hospital.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Tex introduced us. The man’s first name was Lester and the last something Russian that ended in “iak.” He wore horn-rims that he kept taking off as he spoke or examined a book, as though they served no function other than rhetorical. He wore a shaggy coat as a metonym for the hair I felt certain must cover his entire body. He had the bulging forehead, shaggy brows, and strong jaw of Beethoven in the hand-size, chalky busts that my childhood piano teacher, Herr Pogner, doled out to students as prizes. And now Tex had proposed this New York Beethoven as a prize for me, someone I’d be allowed to service later as he reclined on the anonymous hotel bed, his thoughts winging back to the East Coast a full day before his heavier body. Surely this man had no need of me. Surely Beethoven was entirely self-reliant. At that time I had a horrible brush cut my father had chosen for me, neither long enough to comb nor short enough to be marine-sexy, and I wore not ivy-league horn-rims but thick black glasses that girls said made me look “intellectual,” a dubious compliment in the 1950s. Although Tex had assured me only the other day that New Yorkers prized intelligence, I wasn’t sure mine could be counted on. It didn’t feel like a thing in our very thinglike world, a world where identity began with the choice of massive automobile (my mother was a “gay divorcee” as could be seen from her powder-blue Buick convertible with its upholstery outlined in red piping; my father was “no-comment” rich in his midnight-blue Cadillac). I asked the man what he thought of the Kierkegaard boom. He mouthed the word boom and picked up another book. I was left standing there. But then, despite or maybe because of the rebuff, it became more and more important to me that he be aware of me, realize that I was “feeling gay tonight.” I kept standing next to him, like a horse whose bridle has been dropped. I picked up a book and turned the pages without seeing them. I inched closer to him and let my shoulder brush his. He stood there taking it, until suddenly he looked up, frowned, put the book back, and moved away. For the next hour I kept inching close to Lester while maintaining a space between our shoulders or stationing myself in the next aisle face-to-face with him over bookshelves. If he caught my glittering eye he’d smile the pained smile reserved for possibly crazy people. I guess Lester must have been waiting for Tex to close shop. When I desired someone, especially a stranger, I poured myself into him (“Don’t stare,” my mother would tell me). Not that I found Lester so handsome; it was just that he was a chance, some sort of chance.

• From Vox (1992)

  The glass was cold. I wanted to press my breasts against the mirror, but it was too high for that, but I imagined myself pressing my breasts against this little mirror, so first squeezing them together and then pressing them against the mirror, and I’d just seen something on TV about one-way mirrors, so I thought of men in the garden being able to see my breasts stuffed flat against the foggy mirror. Once I even brought in some lip gloss after my swim and spent a long time putting lip gloss around my nipples and soaping it off.” “God, car washes must have driven you wild.” “Car washes. I did like that one part at the end, where the felt flappers drag over you, but no, not really—it was! very rare that my family took the car to the car wash. Almost never. Oh, but I do remember one thing I used to imagine—I imagined that I shared a ride back home from college with someone I didn’t know, and we get caught in a terrible tropical monsoon of some kind, and his windshield wipers don’t work, and so I have to go out on the hood of the car and take off my top and kneel there and hold on to the antenna and kind of sop my breasts over the windshield just so he can drive. Actually, that wasn’t something I thought of very much, that was just a one-shot deal.” “There are strong evolutionary pressures on fantasies, aren’t there?” he said. “If it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t metamorphose itself into something that does work, it doesn’t survive.” “Yeah, even in the buildup to one orgasm, it’s a kind of bake-off. You think: two cocks, each one poking from under one of my armpits, sperm squirting from them? Yes or no. No. I’m a geometry teacher measuring boys’ penis length? Yes or no. No. Am I a nurse at a fertility clinic and my job is to strip for clients who have difficulty coming and then suck their cocks and let their sperm drip from my tongue into a test tube? No. I’m in a dressing room and some native-Hawaiian security guard is watching me try on blue jeans over the video monitor? Ooh, maybe yes. In fact it’s kind of like getting dressed for a party, and being unsure of what to wear right up to the last minute, and frantically trying on one image after another like clothes, not knowing which combination looks really good , and it’s getting later and later, ancj then finally you pull out this wonderful dress, with some rich pattern, and you slip it on, and ah, you can come.” “Jesus. But what about if you’re reading and the images are not under your control? Say maybe with a Book Mate thing holding the book open?” “Hah hah!

• From Vox (1992)

  38 slower-moving, but no friction, and in a luminous tube. As I went along these pairs of hands would enter the tube a little ahead of me, waving around blindly, looking for something to feel, and then my feet would brush under them, and they would try to grasp my ankles, but their fingers were dripping with oil, and as I moved forward they slid up my legs, holding me quite hard, but without friction because of the oil, and then they pressed down as my stomach went under them, and then they sort of turned to encounter my breasts, the two thumbs were almost touching, and they slid very slowly over my breasts, pushing them up, and believe me, in this fantasy I had very large heavy breasts, it took a long time for the hands to slide over them." "Wow! What did old Pamela say when you told her that?" "I finished describing it, and I asked her if she had thoughts like that and she said 'No!' in quite a shocked voice. She said, 'No! Tell me another. ' You think maybe my tube was what turned her into a lesbian?" "Well, it certainly would have turned me into a les bian. But now—can you clarify one thing for me? Do you right now have the light on or off in the room you're in, the combination living room dining room?" "I have it on. It's a table lamp. I could turn it off if you'd like." "Perhaps that, perhaps that would ..." "Listen." There was a click.

• From Vox (1992)

  But this time she didn’t have it in her teeth, it was loose over her, so her movements began to pull it down. I watched the fringe say good-bye to her throat, and begin to travel slowly over her bunched-up sweater, and over the bunched-up bra under that, and then the individual fringe things fanned out and conformed to her breasts and slipped off them. The slow descent finally stopped at the waist of her skirt. I was a little hesitant to watch her directly now; I watched her more out of the corner of my eye: I saw her squeeze one nipple with a finger-do-the-walking kind of movement, and then her hand moved to the other breast. This was her left hand. And no oohs and ahs, everything quiet, just breathing, sometimes her mouth open slightly, sometimes closed. Once she pressed her lips together and bit them. Certain signs also made me think that at times she was biting the insides of both her cheeks. I could tell now exactly how her legs were positioned—they were somewhat apart, the blanket drooped between them, and the back of her hand was making the blanket move freely—but that wasn’t the thing that got me. What got me was, her whole arm was now visible, her whole right arm, and the fringe intersected with it just at the wrist, which was arched, reaching down, circling, and the thing was that I could see her long beautiful forearm tendon pulling and pulling, controlling her fingers. I just kept watching this. Then the scene ended; I pulled my hand out of my pants, Emily crossed her arms over her breasts. She whistled a little, mock casually. Three wet fingers rested on her arm. We waited. More filler. The heroine goes into an office with two men we haven’t seen before, both in business clothes. They think she is charging them with cheating her in the payment for the counterfeit money. She says something like ‘Gentlemen, I’m talking about my own needs.’ And suddenly two men with ties on are standing on either side of her, and she’s sitting in a straight-back chair wearing white stockings, and she’s sucking one and then the other. Emily whispered, ‘ That’s it,’ and her hands both now slid under the fringe. And then she whispered, ‘Do you want some blanket?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ so she held on to her half so that it didn’t slide off her any more and I pulled some of it over me, so we were both covered from the waist down. I undid my belt and pants and pushed off my clothes.

• From Vox (1992)

  96 the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane's going very fast and I'm going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I'm miles long, and, because it's so cold, I'm crystalline. Very long arms, you'll be pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshhp, as my short warm self. It must have some thing to do with my estrogen level. But that's what tele phone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that's what it is like." "Ooh, I love you, you tell me everything." "I do seem to, don't I? It's very unlike me." "It is?" he said. "God, I'm a compulsive confessor. But it's rare for me to cast my bread on the waters and have it return tenfold like this." "Tell me the rest of what happened with your friend Emily." "Why? No, no, it'll make me seem like too much of a type." "You are a type," she said. "You're right, I am." "Don't feel bad about it—I am too. I just want to know what you're like when you're physically holding a woman. As opposed to calling up catalogs and strangers named Klein and that sort of thing, worthwhile pursuits though they may be. What did you and Emily end up doing?"