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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  This was all very good and with my hangover I felt it with electric intensity. But I was aware of his reluctance, and let him stop. He was inexpert, and though he was excited, needed help. We sat back for a while, my hand all the time on his shoulder. I loved the nerve with which I’d done all this, and like most random sex it gave me the feeling I could achieve anything I wanted if I were only determined enough. There was now a fairly complicated set-up on screen, with all six boys doing something interesting, and one of them I realised was Kip Parker, a famous tousle-headed blond teen star. I ran my hand between my new friend’s legs and felt his cock kicking against the tightish cotton of his slacks. He helped me take it out, a short, punchy little number, which I went down on and polished off almost at once. God, he must have been ready. After a shocked recuperation he felt for his bag and went out without a word. I’d had a growing suspicion throughout this sordid but charming little episode, which rose to a near certainty as he opened the door and was caught in a slightly brighter light, that the boy was Phil from the Corry. He had smelt of sweat rather than talcum powder and there was a light stubble on his jaw, so I concluded that if it were Phil he was on his way to rather than from the Club, as I knew he was fastidiously clean, and that he always shaved in the evening before having his shower. I was tempted to follow him at once, to make sure, but I realised it would be easy enough to tell from seeing him later; and besides, a very well-hung kid, who’d already been showing an interest in our activities, moved in to occupy the boy’s former seat, and brought me off epically during the next film, an unthinkably tawdry picture which all took place in a kitchen.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the contrary, It is written (1 Cor. 13:5) that “charity is not ambitious, seeketh not her own.” Now nothing is contrary to charity, except sin. Therefore ambition is a sin. I answer that, As stated above ([3362]Q[103], AA[1],2), honor denotes reverence shown to a person in witness of his excellence. Now two things have to be considered with regard to man’s honor. The first is that a man has not from himself the thing in which he excels, for this is, as it were, something Divine in him, wherefore on this count honor is due principally, not to him but to God. The second point that calls for observation is that the thing in which man excels is given to him by God, that he may profit others thereby: wherefore a man ought so far to be pleased that others bear witness to his excellence, as this enables him to profit others. Now the desire of honor may be inordinate in three ways. First, when a man desires recognition of an excellence which he has not: this is to desire more than his share of honor. Secondly, when a man desires honor for himself without referring it to God. Thirdly, when a man’s appetite rests in honor itself, without referring it to the profit of others. Since then ambition denotes inordinate desire of honor, it is evident that it is always a sin. Reply to Objection 1: The desire for good should be regulated according to reason, and if it exceed this rule it will be sinful. In this way it is sinful to desire honor in disaccord with the order of reason. Now those are reproved who care not for honor in accordance with reason’s dictate that they should avoid what is contrary to honor. Reply to Objection 2: Honor is not the reward of virtue, as regards the virtuous man, in this sense that he should seek for it as his reward: since the reward he seeks is happiness, which is the end of virtue. But it is said to be the reward of virtue as regards others, who have nothing greater than honor whereby to reward the virtuous; which honor derives greatness from the very fact that it bears witness to virtue. Hence it is evident that it is not an adequate reward, as stated in Ethic. iv, 3.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Never before had I met anyone who combined such transparency (or the semblance of transparency) with such mystery, so that he seemed at once overexposed and hidden behind impervious defenses. We fell silent as we walked toward my building, both of us perhaps thinking of what awaited us there. On my street, the relative prosperity of which marked it off from its neighbors, Mitko turned into a shop for alcohol and cigarettes, a place I stopped at often; the people who worked there knew me, and I wondered uncomfortably what they would think when they saw us together. Mitko walked in first and placed both of his hands palm down on the glass counter, making the shopkeeper wince, and then leaned over to peer at the more expensive bottles displayed on the back wall. He examined several of these, asking the man repeatedly and to his increasing exasperation to pass them over the counter so he could read their labels. He chose the most expensive bottle of gin, as well as a cheap orange soda to accompany it, and then took the bag from my hand to carry it up the three flights to my apartment. I lived in a nice two-bedroom provided by my school, a fact I tried to communicate to Mitko when it became clear he thought I owned it. I don’t have that kind of money, I told him, wanting to establish the modest reality of my means, but he greeted the claim with skepticism, even disbelief. But you’re American, he said, all Americans have money. I protested, telling him I was a schoolteacher, that I made hardly any money at all; but of course he would think this, having seen my laptop computer, my cell phone, my iPod, signs of comfort if not particularly of wealth in America that here are items of some luxury. Mitko placed the bag with his bottles on the kitchen counter and opened the cabinets above it, looking for a glass. I stepped up behind him and slid my hands beneath his shirt, pressing my mouth to his neck, but he shrugged me off, saying we had plenty of time for that, he wanted to have a drink first. He took his large tumbler of gin and soda and opened the door to the small balcony that all apartments here have. He stood there for a while as he drank, looking out over the street where I live, which seems never to have been given a name. None of the smaller streets in Mladost have names, though in the center the nation’s whole history, its victories and defeats, the many indignities and small prides of a small country, play out in the names of its avenues and squares. Here in Mladost, it’s the blokove , the huge towers, that anchor one in space, each with its own number individually marked on city maps.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The college boys were followed by a brief, gloomy fragment of film involving older, moustachioed types, one of them virtually bald. This broke off suddenly, and without preamble another film, very cheery and outdoors, was under way. As always with these films, though I relished the gross abundance of their later episodes, it was the introductory scenes, buoyant with expectation, the men on the street or the beach, killing time, pumping iron, still awaiting the transformation our fantasy would demand of them, that I found the most touching. Now, for instance, we were in a farmyard. A golden-haired boy in old blue jeans and a white vest was leaning in the sun against a barn door, one foot raised behind him. A close-up admired him frowning against the sun, a straw jerking between his lips. Slowly we travelled down, lingering where his hand brushed across his nipples which showed hard through his vest, lingering again at his loose but promising crotch. On the other side of the yard, a second boy, also blond, was shifting bags of fertiliser. We watched his shirtless muscular torso straining as he lifted the bags on to his shoulder, traced the sweat running down his neck and back, got a load of his chunky denim-clad ass as he bent over. The eyes of the two boys met; one close-up and then another suggested curiosity and lust. In what seemed to be very slightly slow motion the shirtless boy ambled across to the other. They stood close together, both extremely beautiful, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age. Their lips moved, they spoke and smiled, but as the film had no sound-track, and we heard only the cinema’s throbbing, washing music, they communicated in a dreamlike silence, or as if watched from out of earshot through binoculars. The picture was irradiated with sunlight and, being fractionally out of focus, blurred the boys’ smooth outlines into a blond nimbus. The one in the vest appeared to put a question to the other, they turned aside and were swallowed up into the darkness of the barn. Where did they get them from, I wondered, these boys more wonderful than almost everything one came across in real life? And I remembered reading somewhere that a Californian talentspotter had photographic records of three thousand or more of them ranging back over twenty or thirty years and that a youngster, after a session in the studio, mooching through the files, had found pictures of his own father, posed long before. In the meantime there were other arrivals at the cinema, though it was difficult to make them out; while the sunlit introduction had brightened up the room and cast its aura over the scattered audience in the forward rows, the sex scenes within the barn were enacted in comparative gloom, allowing the viewers a secretive darkness. I tugged my half-hard cock out through my fly and stroked it casually.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I stepped back, tugged off my shoes (shabby old suede laceups which were never unlaced, a lazy affectation which I believed to be overtly sexy), unbuttoned and flung off my white cotton shirt, and with a hint of suspense, undid my fly and yanked off my trousers. Phil’s eyes were mesmerised by mine, and seemed reluctant to go down on my nodding dick. Then he too suddenly got undressed, and stood away from the window, his head bowed under the sloping ceiling. His body looked fantastic, highly developed, everywhere convex, hard and innocent. His whiteness was broken only by the red blotch of an insect bite in the tender, creased skin at his waistband. I was much more gentle with him now, stroking, kissing and nibbling—smiling, too, and making small pleasurable noises. And he began to respond, imitating me at first, but then making it up himself. Several times, though, it simply came to a stop, we stood back for a moment, seeing each other as we most often had before, in the showers or the changing room, naked and restrained. Perhaps the fact that the restraints of the public space had been taken away made us feel unnatural, inept at using our freedom. The small bed was like being at school or university. It wouldn’t encourage changes of position, but was all right for any simple sex act. When Phil and I rolled about our legs or our shoulders were hanging over the edge, increasing the precariousness of the situation: there was a strangely constricting need to cling together. Then he was on the point of falling on to the floor, his stomach muscles ridged to hold himself horizontal as I hauled him back by the waist, his head lurched upwards and our skulls cracked together quite painfully. The next day I had a perceptible bruise. Things were not working out with the instinctive ease I’d imagined. But I felt it was important to get on with it, and after a while and some laughter to relax him (though it also brought back an inhibiting normality) I turned him over and started to nose around his bum. It was deeply beautiful, creamily smooth when slack and when he clenched his buttocks almost cubic with built muscle. There was still the dust of Trouble for Men on the hairs in his crack, which I oiled back with my tongue, and sniffed through the dry smell of the talc to his own rectal smell—a soft stench like stale flower-water. His asshole was a clean pale purple, and shone with my saliva.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  I took the bottle from her outstretched hand and swallowed two generous swigs, a warm river running down my throat. Emily smiled and stood up, her gorgeous green eyes twinkling in the darkness. “You know what I want? More than anything right now?” she said, hitching up her skirt to reveal the black lace panties with a pretty red bow. “I want you to fuck me like you fucked that gypsy girl.” I put the bottle down and pointed to the bed that sat waiting in the corner of the room. “Why do we need a bed when there’s a perfectly good table right here?” I watched as she climbed onto it, kicking a chair over with a bare foot as she turned over, pressing her back down on the hard wood, legs slowly spreading wider. “It’s time you wrote a new story, one I haven’t heard,” she whispered. Strawberries She was a curious girl, a wanderer, who spent her summers chasing fluttering pieces of prose and eating strawberries. Bitter Sweet Love To slap you, is to touch you. Scream for mercy. Beg for more. To bite you, is to kiss you. Tied and tethered, on the floor. To loathe you, is to love you. Pretty princess. Dirty whore. True Love When you’re in love, truly in love, you never have to question it. Confession Sticky fingers on sugary lips; a criminal returns to the scene of a crime. A wry smile, betrays her innocence; a signed confession witnessed by blushing cheeks and auburn hair. Naked guilt, a punishment dealt; over a wooden table, where a jam doughnut is noticeably absent. Virgin Snow Your scream startled birds, rising up from naked trees, laid bare by winter’s breath. Little clouds of spoken mist, from the lips of lovers lost, fade to nothing. Pretty knees turn to icy blue, on frozen sheets of brilliant white, in a bed of falling snow, stained red. Whispers Some nights I close my eyes and imagine feeling your lips on mine, your whispered words slowly pushing my legs apart. Uncharted Think of me as an uncharted map. I want your hands to explore every single city, town, and village. Dying Flowers Love came as it often does, all smiles and fragrant flowers, but when it left it left behind, the fallen petals of what was ours. Kiss Me Yes, I dream of many things, she said, and the thought of your hand between my legs is just one of them. Now shut up and kiss me. Pretty Torments I love, how you like to tease. Slowly crawling, while your legs do the talking, with knees that blush, on wooden floors. Dropping a pencil, and picking it up. Overwhelmed I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, she said, but I have an overwhelming urge to fuck you—right here, right now. Ice Cream Would you prefer chocolate or strawberry ice cream? I’m surprised I even have a choice, she replied. You don’t—

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  When K.’s mother dropped him off we were shy at first, it took a moment for me to reconcile the voice I knew with the boy before me, who was shorter than I and thin, with red hair he let hang over his eyes and a face that was beautiful and pale and streaked with acne. We had chosen my house over K.’s because we would have more privacy and freedom there, and if we had no real plans for the use of these things we had an instinctive preference for them. My father gave us a wide berth, having always been ill at ease around children, around anyone at all unknown, and after he shook K.’s hand he left us to ourselves. He had ordered pizza for us, and we ate it in my basement room, talking and laughing with each other. We had all the freedom we could want and yet we waited for even greater freedom, for my father and stepmother to retreat to the upper floor of the house and leave the large middle floor between us empty. And then, when we thought they were sleeping, we slipped into the garage, where it was easy to pop the large mechanical door free of its mechanism and then slide it up slowly, silently or nearly silently, just enough for us to crawl on our stomachs through. I did this almost every night, though there was no reason for it, I had nowhere to go, we lived in the suburbs and every street was the same. Nor was there any point to the secrecy, since by that time my father had largely if not yet finally washed his hands of me and I could do as I liked. But it was crucial somehow that I sneak out, that I disappear from my room without anyone knowing, beyond the reach of the authority I chafed under at every other moment of the day, at school and at home; it was only out on these walks that I felt I could relax the guard I kept at every other moment. Whatever the weather I went out and wandered, and now I wandered with K.; I introduced him to my solitude and he deepened it without disturbance. We clambered down the steep hill from my father’s house, which towered over the whole neighborhood, a sign of how far he had come. It was the night before Halloween and so there was, this once, something to look at in the streets, the houses had been decorated for the holiday, each more elaborately than the last.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  At the Corry life was going on full blast. I swam more joylessly than usual, hoping I might catch Phil, starved of him, longing to have and to hold him: I wanted the solidness of him in my arms, and for a moment excitedly mistook another swimmer for him as he lounged at the shallow end. He had trunks on just like Phil’s and when I surfaced grinning in front of him he gave me a bothered look before pushing off in a panicky, old-fashioned side-stroke. I felt keenly about the discipline of swimming, and then was suddenly bored by it, and by the taste of chlorinated water. When I hopped out I had a few words with Nigel. He was sprawling in those viewing seats erected long ago for matches and galas which never now took place. ‘Hullo, Will—good swim?’ ‘I’m not in the mood, I’m afraid, today. I can do it, you know, what’s the point?’ ‘Mm, still, good for you. How are you getting on with that book then? Good one, isn’t it?’ ‘I’m a bit disappointed by it, actually. You’ve lent me better.’ ‘Mm, but that Goldie, is it, I’d like to meet him. He can give me a taste of his truncheon any time.’ I shook my head sorrowingly. ‘He doesn’t exist, love. It’s just a silly book.’ ‘Get out,’ said Nigel, tutting and turning his head away. ‘I could show you something really sexy—and true,’ I said, in a sudden treacherous bid for his interest—he who didn’t interest me at all, handsome and idle though he was. ‘I’ve got some private diaries of a guy’ (Charles a guy? some affronted guardian spirit queried) ‘with amazing stuff in them. It’s even got things happening here—years ago …’ I had doubts and petered out. My true come-uppance not from a fascinated insistence I should tell more but from a deliberate lack of attention, as if to endorse my self-reproach. ‘You still going with that Phil?’ he wanted to know. ‘Yup.’ I squared my shoulders and tried to appear worthy. ‘He’s looking good.’ Nigel smiled at me slyly. ‘He was down here earlier on, splashing about, diving and that. Showing off. I wouldn’t mind a bit of that, I thought. Gave me a really fresh look too.’ ‘You little slut,’ I said, and flicked at him with my towel as I darted off. But I was reassured by how he had got it wrong, for though Phil was taken with his own body he almost stubbornly never tarted. His love was all bottled up and kept for me.

• From Dirty Pretty Things (2014)

  Desire I never understood desire until I felt your hands around my throat. Suggestion I love thinking about your mouth on my nipples and your hand up my skirt, she said, in fact the very suggestion of you makes me want to pull my panties down. Playing with Matches I lit this fire, burning fierce, and all-consuming. My desperate tears, useless, against flames that leap, turning my breaking heart to blackened cinders. Lipstick Grab my hair and bring me to my knees. Smudge my lipstick and ruin my pretty lips. My Girl Who Writes I watch you write, my love, my life, my start of everything. Each little sigh, a pen run dry, another painful page begins. Your fingers bleed, I do concede, for a sentence of your making. To which you say, on sunshine days, it is for words my heart is breaking. A Question for Anna Do you know what a palindrome is, madam? Bonsai What could be a love so fierce, in your hands so gently trimmed. Each little cut you take with caution, a love suspended but never grown. Book Put your hands on my knees, she said, and think of me as a book you’ve been dying to read. Her Little Secret I know it’s wrong, but the very thought of your hands, reaching up under my skirt, and touching me, makes me blush in all the right places. Love Story To read in books of love well told, leaves nothing in the meaning. For the love we have is barely held, between pages of our reading. True Love True love is elusive, she said. Sometimes I think it’s as rare as a red moon on a cloudless night. First Love Petals unfurl from a delicate flower, closer to picked with each passing hour, losing the I and gaining an our. Hypnotized I am hypnotized. Sleepwalking to the rhythm of your words, Never wishing to wake— Love Letters The kind of love letters I write are the ones you read in bed, stretched out under the sheets with one hand between your legs. Dreams She turns her mind to countless things, then back again where it begins. This restless urge, and all it brings, to be someone— to do something. The Gift Her eyes were beautifully gift-wrapped; long black lashes of velvet ribbon— and every time she opened them, it felt like Christmas. Poetic Now’s not the time to be poetic, she said. Just pull my panties down and do me up against this tree. The End I could taste the sting of whiskey on your lips, a final kiss, before we said our last good-bye, without a word being said.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  The only object in it of any interest at all was the bed on which they sat, the two K.s, which was unmade, the sheets tangled at its foot where he had kicked them off, and I remembered with sudden sharpness the heat of his body beside me as we slept. We talked for a while, K. wanted to get to know me, she said, and she drew me out, but as she and I talked K. was silent. He was frustrated, I realized, he didn’t want us to talk; but K. insisted, when I fell silent she drew me out again, asking about my family and my school, about stories she had heard, things she had learned from K. I was stung that he had told her so much, that he had used my stories as a way to strengthen his bond with her: they were secrets we had shared, and now they were secrets he shared with her. She kept talking, making K. wait, which was the point of her questions; it was a way to hold him off, one of the games they played. Finally K. got up from the bed, he went to the stereo on a shelf above the desk and turned on some music, not loud, not with the intention of covering noise but to cover the absence of noise, the absence of talk, which he put a stop to when he sat back down on his bed and placed his hand on K.’s thigh, leaning in and pressing his mouth to hers. She didn’t resist him, anything but; she relaxed and allowed him to lean her back against the wall. As they kissed each other I felt something twist in me, something that made me look quickly away to the posters pinned inert to the walls, but I couldn’t look away for long, again and again I was drawn back to the sight of them on the bed. I didn’t want them to catch me looking but there was no need to worry, their eyes were closed, they were entirely engrossed in each other. I was surprised to see that though K. had toyed and delayed she was leading the action now; it was her hand that dropped into his lap and as I saw it my excitement deepened, my excitement and my dread both. They were still kissing each other, their lips hadn’t parted though now K.’s hand was at his belt; all her nervousness was gone, replaced with expertise, or what looked like expertise as she worked to undo it with a single hand. She knew how to please him, I thought as her hand slipped into his jeans, where I could see it moving as she touched him, and could see his erection as well, the shape of it against the cloth.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was beginning to see why he did not attract drinking companions, & wondering whether we too might not be moving on, when he invited us all to go & hear the negro band at the Savoy: ‘It’s the most wonderful music there is,’ he said. So we knocked off the rest of the champagne at giddy speed, & lurched out into the street: I assumed we wd walk, but our author’s pedestrian performance was as wayward as his sessile one: it combined the futile caution of the drunkard with a true instinct for elegance—if of a somewhat decadent kind. With each step he rippled upwards, from foot to head, whilst appearing somehow to steer & balance himself with low-down oscillations of his hands: again I was reminded of wall-paintings in Egyptian tombs—there was so linear a quality to him. We hailed a cab in Piccadilly Circus & as he slumped into the smoky compartment beside me he exhaled his new resolve: ‘We must have the most heavenly talk about Africa.’ Phil agreed to come with me to visit Ronald Staines, and since we were at my flat I dressed him myself. I forbade him underwear, and forced him into an old pair of fawn cotton trousers which, tight on me, were anatomically revealing on him. The central seam cut up deeply between his balls, and his little cock was espaliered across the top of his left thigh. A loose, boyish, blue Aertex shirt set this off beautifully, and as I followed him downstairs I was thrilled at my affront to his shyness, and could hardly wait for the strapping I would give him when we got back. All along the pavement in the beating sunshine I kept letting my hands knock him, my fingertips trail over him as they swung. We crossed over Holland Park Avenue and were strolling north up Addison Avenue when there was the slap-slap of running sandalled feet behind us, and my little nephew Rupert was prancing along beside us. ‘Roops—this is a pleasure,’ I said. ‘Are you running off somewhere again? You don’t seem very well kitted out if you are.’ He had on smartly pressed shorts with an elasticated waistband and a T-shirt advertising the previous year’s Proms. ‘No, I’m just going for a walk,’ he said. ‘It’s such a lovely day—one would hate to stay indoors!’ ‘One would indeed,’ I agreed. ‘Roops, this is my friend Phil, who’s staying with me for a bit.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As we slowed towards stops I looked around at the other passengers, wary slumpers and strap-hangers who never met each other’s eyes for more than a fraction of a second. Half-heartedly playing the game James and I used to play I tried to select which person in the carriage I would least object to having sex with. Occasionally the choice could be made difficult by the presence of too many scrumptious schoolboys or too many dusty-handed navvies. Normally, as now, the problem was to choose between that businessman, regular and suited but with a moody something about him, and the too-tall youth in the doorway giving off a tinny, high-hat patter from his headphones, and looking flightily around through a haze of Trouble for Men. It was James’s theory that everyone had about them some wrinkle at least of lovability, some peculiar and attractive thing—a theory which gained poignancy from the problems in applying it. Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been. I remembered for some reason a little public lavatory in Winchester, a urinal and a couple of cubicles visited by bandy-legged old men going to the market and at night by ghostly fantasists who left their traces. It was up an alley where the College turned one of its high stone corners against the town—not a place for boys, for scholars, though I went there once or twice with an almost scholarly curiosity. The cistern filled for ever, the floor was slippery, there was no toilet paper, and between the cubicles a number of holes had been diligently bored, large enough only to spy through. Talentless drawings covered the walls, and wishful assignations, and also, misspelt in laborious capitals, long unparagraphed accounts of sexual acts—‘they had her together … 12 inches … at the bus station’. In between these were fantastic rendezvous, often vague to allow for disappointment, but able sometimes to touch you with their suggestion of a shadowy world in which town and gown pried on each other. I had read: ‘College boy, blond, big cock, in here Friday—meet me next Friday, 9 pm.’ Then: ‘Tuesday?’ Then: ‘Next Friday November 10’ … I had thought almost it could have been me, until I just made out, bleared and over-written, the date ‘1964’: a decade of dark November Fridays, generations of College blonds, had already passed since those anonymous words were written.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He looked better than the last time I had seen him, his clothes were clean, his head freshly shaved, so it was a shock to learn that he had spent the last ten or so weeks in a hospital in Varna, laid up with a liver disorder of some kind. I couldn’t make out the details, either because of my Bulgarian or because he shied away from telling me too much. He did speak of the terrible boredom he felt in the hospital, where he was confined to a bed, without a computer or even a television for distraction, since the one mounted in his room would only play if fed constantly with coins. Nor were books or magazines a diversion, since he read Cyrillic with difficulty; he had left school in the seventh grade, and was more comfortable with the Latin characters used in Internet chat rooms. He confessed this to me with evident shame one day when I had run out briefly for something he wanted—cigarettes or alcohol or the sweets he loved—and returned to find him at the computer moaning with frustration, unable either to type in the Cyrillic script it was set to or to switch it back. His only visitors had been his mother and grandmother and the boy he called brat mi , whom I hadn’t seen since that first day at NDK. But he was better now, he said, he felt fine, though in a month he was supposed to return to the hospital, for a stay that might be as long as the first. I thought of how often, for all his ebullience, I had seen Mitko sick, his colds, the ear infection he had had for weeks, the herpes that sometimes disfigured his mouth; I thought of his drinking and the risks of his trade, and for an instant I wanted desperately to save him, though from what exactly and how I wasn’t sure. I knew it was a ridiculous desire, that it imagined a relationship I didn’t want; and I also knew Mitko had never expressed any desire of his own to be saved. He was in an Internet café (every now and again I saw someone walk by behind him), and he made more and more use of the keyboard as we talked, typing comments that were too suggestive for him to speak out loud. This had the effect he intended, overwhelmingly when he stood and under the pretext of stretching displayed his body to me, reaching into his pockets to pull the folds of his jeans tight against his crotch. By the end of the conversation, surprising myself, I had proposed to come to Varna at the end of the week, a proposition he was eager to accept.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Graham, yes, yes. Do clear away. And William, I must give you just before you go something else to read.’ I hopped up, alert to these covert stage directions in Charles’s talk, and helped him up too. He shuffled round his chair, and looked about for whatever it was. I was convinced he knew where to find it, and had politely and theatrically introduced this air of uncertainty. He handed me a document of several pages, the size of a pamphlet of poems, bound in black shot silk boards and tied legalistically with pink ribbon. ‘Don’t read it now,’ he cautioned. ‘Read it when you get home.’ Graham had gone out with the tray, and we followed a few moments afterwards, Charles’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Thanks so much,’ I said. ‘Thank you, my dear.’ He leant on me and—which he had never done before—kissed me on the cheek. I clumsily patted him on the back. On my way home I stopped at the Corry for a swim. It was that transitional half-hour before six o’clock, and the last of the afternoon customers—oldsters, college boys, the unemployed—were combing their hair and wringing out their trunks as the evening crowd, the workers, began to pour in and down the stairs. In twenty minutes every locker would be taken, and those who had been held up in traffic, late for their fitness classes or for a squash booking fast elapsing, would come cantering through the swing doors flushed and swearing. Like restaurants and Underground stations the Corry had its times of day, and to come in on a weekday afternoon or a Sunday evening was to find it in the unhindered possession of a small number of people—like a school at half-term, when only the masters and those boys who live abroad are left. The pool, the gym, the handball court had the grateful calm of places only briefly reprieved from habitual clamour. As I arrived the calm was yielding fast. I took advantage of the crowd, and of the need I always felt on leaving Charles to be childish and naughty. In the showers were a gaggle of Italian kids, in London on a language course. The Club often played host to these groups, and though their bored ragging was a nuisance in the pool the members by some unspoken agreement forgave them everything for their sleek brown bodies, the tiny wet leaves of their swimwear and all their posturing and tossing back of curls. I halted under a fizzing nozzle before going down to the pool and looked them over frankly. It was impossible, with my opera-goer’s Italian, to understand what they were saying, but as they took notice of me I heard their chatter sprinkled with cazzo … cazzo, slurred, whispered and then called aloud, almost chanted, so that they fell about in coarse, lazy giggles at their audacity.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  To this end he acquainted the prince that he had a house admirably situated for the chase, and that if he would come thither and hunt three or four stags in the month of May, he would have excellent sport. The prince promised he would do so, and he kept his word. He found a handsome house prepared for his reception, in the best order, as belonging to the richest nobleman in the 36 THE HEPTAMEROJV OF THE [Novel 4. country. Its owner lodged her whom he loved better than himself in an apartment opposite to that which he assigned to the prince and princess. Her bedroom was so well tapestried above, and so well matted below, that it was impossible to perceive a trap-door he had con- trived in the alcove, and which led down into the room occupied by his aged and infirm mother. As the good old lady coughed a great deal, and was afraid of disturb- ing the princess, she exchanged bedrooms with her son. Not an evening passed that the old lady did not carry confections to the princess, on which occasions her son failed not to accompany her ; and as he was much liked by the brother, he was allowed to be present at the sister's coucher and lever, when he always found cause for the increase of his passion. One night he stayed so late with the princess that, seeing she was falling asleep, he was obliged to leave her and return to his own chamber. He took the hand- somest and best perfumed shirt he had, and a nightcap of the choicest kind ; then, looking at himself in the glass, he was so satisfied with his own appearance that he thought no lady could possibly withstand his good looks. Promising himself marvels therefore from his en- terprise, he lay down on his bed, where he did not think he should stay long, for he expected to exchange it for one more honourable. No sooner had he dismissed his attendants than he rose and locked the door, and listened for a long time to hear whether there was any noise in the princess's cham- ber, which, as already said, was above his own. When he had satisfied himself that all was quiet, he began to put his fine project in execution, and gradually let down the trap-door, which was so well made and so well cov- ered with cloth that it did not make the least noise First day. ] Q UEEN OF NA VARRE , ^

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  And then, since he did finally turn to leave with his friend, nodding in goodbye, I called out Chakai chakai chakai , wait wait wait, repeating the word quickly and in the precise inflection I had heard an old woman use at an intersection one afternoon when a stray dog began to wander into traffic. Mitko turned back at once, as docile as if our transaction had already taken place; maybe in his mind it was already a sure thing, as it was in mine, though I pretended to be skeptical of the goods on offer, trying to assert some mastery over the overwhelming excitement I felt. I looked down at his crotch and then back up, saying Kolko ti e , how big are you, the standard phrase, always the first question in the Internet chat rooms I used. Mitko didn’t say anything in response, he smiled and stepped into a stall and unbuttoned his fly, and my pretense of hesitation fell away as I realized I would pay whatever price he wanted. I took a step toward him, reaching out as if to claim those goods right away, I’ve always been a terrible negotiator or haggler, my desire is immediately legible, but Mitko buttoned himself back up, raising a hand to hold me off. I thought it was payment he wanted, but instead he stepped around me, telling me to wait, and returned to the line of porcelain sinks, all of them cracked and stained. Then, with a bodily candor I ascribed to drunkenness but would learn was an inalienable trait, he pulled the long tube of his cock free from his jeans and leaned over the bowl of the sink to wash it, skinning it back and wincing at water that only comes out cold. It was some time before he was satisfied, the first sign of a fastidiousness that would never cease to surprise me, given his poverty and the tenuous circumstances in which he lived. When he returned I asked his price for the act I wanted, which was ten leva until I unfolded my wallet and found only twenty-leva notes, one of which he eagerly claimed. Really what did it matter, the sums were almost equally meaningless to me; I would have paid twice as much, and twice as much again, which isn’t to suggest that I had particularly ample resources, but that his body seemed almost infinitely dear. It was astonishing to me that any number of these soiled bills could make that body available, that after the simplest of exchanges I could reach out for it and find it in my grasp. I placed my hands under the tight shirt he wore, and he gently pushed me back so that he could remove it, undoing each of its buttons and then hanging it carefully on the hook of the stall door behind him.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He seemed entirely unconcerned by the passersby, the heavy traffic on one of Sofia’s busiest streets; and when he caught me watching him, he stuck his tongue out and wagged his cock in his hand, sending his piss in high arcs over the water, where it glimmered in the lights of oncoming cars. It was a gesture so innocent, so full of childlike irreverence, that I found myself smiling stupidly back at him, filled with a sense of goodwill that buoyed me toward the metro station and our short commute. There was only one metro line in Sofia (though more were planned and great trenches had been gouged in neighborhoods throughout the city), and during peak hours it seemed as though the entire population were shuttling underground, alternately swallowed and disgorged through the closing doors. There were no seats on the Mladost train, and Mitko and I were separated from each other, standing finally some distance apart in the press of bodies. Mitko studied the maps above each set of doors, watching the stations light up as we passed them, but every now and then he glanced at me, as if to make sure I was still there or that my attention was still fixed on him, and his look now wasn’t innocent, anything but; it was a look that singled me out, a look full of promise, and under its heat I felt myself gripped yet again by both pleasure and embarrassment, and by an excitement so terrible I had to look away. When we emerged at the subway’s last stop, Mladost 1, spilling with the other passengers onto Andrei Sakharov Boulevard, I was surprised to see that Mitko knew the area well. Once he had oriented himself, he pointed toward one of the blokove , the dire Soviet apartment complexes that line both sides of the boulevard, and said that it was the home of one of his priyateli . As was always the case during our time together, I was frustrated by the fragments that were all I could understand of his stories, both because of my poor Bulgarian and because he kept speaking in a kind of code, so that I seldom understood precisely the nature of the relationships he described or why they ended as they did.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He didn’t seem disappointed when I refused this offer; he just folded his page up carefully again and replaced it in his pocket. But he didn’t leave, either, as I had feared he might. I wanted him to stay, even though over the course of our conversation, which moved in such fits and starts and which couldn’t have lasted more than five or ten minutes, it had become difficult to imagine the desire I increasingly felt for him having any prospect of satisfaction. For all his friendliness, as we spoke he had seemed in some mysterious way to withdraw from me; the longer we avoided any erotic proposal the more finally he seemed unattainable, not so much because he was beautiful, although I found him beautiful, as for some still more forbidding quality, a kind of bodily sureness or ease that suggested freedom from doubts and self-gnawing, from any squeamishness about existence. He had about him a sense simply of accepting his right to a measure of the world’s beneficence, even as so clearly it had been withheld him. He looked at his friend, who hadn’t moved to rejoin us after Mitko hid away his tiny stash, and after they exchanged another glance the friend turned his back to us, not so much guarding the door anymore, I felt, as offering us a certain privacy. Mitko looked at me again, friendly still but with a new intensity, and then he tilted his head slightly and moved one hand over his crotch. I couldn’t help but look down, of course, as I couldn’t restrain the excitement I’m sure he saw when I met his gaze again. He rubbed the first three fingers of his other hand together, making the universal sign for money. There was nothing in his manner of seduction, no show of desire at all; what he offered was a transaction, and again he showed no disappointment when reflexively and without hesitation I said no to him. It was the answer I had always given to such proposals (which are inevitable in the places I frequent), not out of any moral conviction but out of pride, a pride that had weakened in recent years, as I realized I was being shifted by the passage of time from one category of erotic object to another. But as soon as I uttered the word I regretted it, as Mitko shrugged and dropped his hand from his crotch, smiling as if it had all been a joke.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The hypocrite returned to St. Martin's, carrying with him the criminal fire which consumed him day and night, and occupied his mind only in trying to find means for accomplishing his unrighteous end. Being afraid of the abbess, whose virtue he was aware of, he thought he could not do better than remove her from that convent. With that view, he went to Madame de Vendome, who was then residing at La Fere, where she had built and endowed a convent of the order of St. Benedict, named Mont d' Olivet. In his professed character of a sovereign reformer, he represented to her that the abbess of Mont d'Olivetwas not capable of governing such a community. The good lady begged him to name one who should be worthy to fill that ofifice. This was just what he wanted, and he at once recommended her to take the abbess of Gif, whom he depicted to her as the abbess of the great- est capacity in France. Madame de Vendome sent for her forthwith, and gave her the government of her con- vent of INIont d'Olivet ; whilst the prior, who commanded the suffrages of all the communities, had one who was devoted to him elected abbess of Gif. This being done, he went to the convent to try once more if by prayers or promises he could prevail over Sister Marie. He succeeded no better than the first time, and returning in despair to St. Martin's, he there contrived more villany. As much with a view to accom- plish his original purpose as to be revenged on the uncomplying nun, and for fear the affair should obtain TAtrd da;y.] QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 22* publicity, he had the relics stolen from the convent of Gif by night, accused the confessor of the convent, an aged and worthy monk, of having committed the theft, and imprisoned him at St. Martin's. Whilst he kept him there he suborned two witnesses, who deposed that they had seen the confessor and Sister Marie committing an infamous and indecent act in a garden ; and this he wanted to make the old monk confess. The good man, who knew all the prior's tricks, begged him to assemble the chapter, and said he would state truly all he knew in presence of the monks. This demand he took care not to grant, fearing lest the confessor's justification should condemn himself ; but finding the latter so invin- cibly steadfast, he treated him so ill that some say he died in prison ; others say that the prior forced him to unfrock and quit the realm. Be it as it may, he was never seen afterwards.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  The two had shared wrestling rooms and road trips for years, summers on end, as part of the youth wrestling fanaticism in the state. They had known for years that they were different, a little special. Dan was more pronouncedly so, the son of a wrestling coach; it was a given, knowing Dan’s father, Doug LeClere, that Daniel would be brought into the sport and kept there, even if no one realized back then how much he might achieve. It would never occur to Dan that he might find himself, at the moment of approaching that kind of greatness, in a position to suddenly lose it all. It would never occur to him to think that way, because there’s no future in it, and that makes it impractical, and wrestling, like farming, is just not the sort of thing one can do and be impractical at the same time. And it would certainly never occur to Dan that his path might carry a personal cost beyond the physical, beyond exhaustion and mere pain. He would never see the dark side coming. Only gradually would it become apparent that Dan had other opponents to deal with before he could try to become the wrestler that he and Doug wanted him to be. Jay and Dan have known each other since elementary school, began wrestling at about the same time they got any good at walking. They are the ones who grew up in the shadow of the Iowa Hawkeyes program, becoming Little Hawks themselves, dreaming of their futures with Gable in Iowa City. They are the ones who gradually shunned other sports, casting them off one by one, year by year, advancing upon this singular pursuit. They will join with six or eight other athletes from the eastern part of the state to form arguably the greatest senior class in the annals of wrestling in Iowa. But without that fourth title, Jay and Dan will join a long list of people who won a bunch but didn’t really get it all—respected wrestlers, who had periodic bouts of excellence without quite ascending to heaven. Merely really good, is all. By essentially winning everything in sight for as long as anyone has been taking notice, Jay and Dan have made it clear what the expectations should be of their talent. You don’t leave your talent lying around in a sport like wrestling. You tend it. They will tend their talent, then, because nobody else can. They will ultimately do it on their own, because the sport is wrestling, and the thing about wrestling that makes it so perfect is the fact of there being no easy way to approach it. You want to become an immortal? Listen, everybody does. It’s the part about actually getting there that makes this such an Iowa tale.