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 187 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  He looked pleased. His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat. I was wearing a black suit, a black shirt, no tie. We sat down in two easy chairs. “You know,” he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin, “you don’t look like Jack Brewster. I mean, the resemblance is not particularly striking. Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company.” To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage … To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands … To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain … To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling—oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss! “No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters.” He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever. “Guess again, Punch.” “Ah,” said Punch, “so you have not come to bother me about those long-distance calls?” “You do make them once in a while, don’t you?” “Excuse me?” I said I had said I thought he had said he had never— “People,” he said, “people in general, I’m not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it’s absurd the way people invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre, they use the kitchen, they use the telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny accent, Captain.” “Quilty,” I said, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?” “Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?” “I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father.” “Nonsense,” he said. “You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as La Fierté de la Chair. Absurd.” “She was my child, Quilty.” In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by anything, but his blustering manner was not quite convincing. A sort of wary inkling kindled his eyes into a semblance of life. They were immediately dulled again. “I’m very fond of children myself,” he said, “and fathers are among my best friends.” He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat his pockets. He attempted to rise from his seat. “Down!” I said—apparently much louder than I intended. “You need not roar at me,” he complained in his strange feminine manner. “I just wanted a smoke. I’m dying for a smoke.” “You’re dying anyway.” “Oh, chucks,” he said. “You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you French, mister? Woolly-woo-boo-are? Let’s go to the barroomette and have a stiff—” He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Yes, when I find carrion, I like to clean it up. You said it, not me. The vulture metaphor is yours, ducks. The dead flesh is yours too. And Bennett’s.” “I think you like Bennett more than you admit. I think he turns you on.” “Can’t decide whether I’m queer or not,” he said, grinning. “I’ll bet that’s true.” “Think what you like, ducks. Anything to get out of really enjoying life. Anything to go on suffering. I know your type. Bloody Jewish masochist. Actually, I quite like Bennett, only he’s a bloody Chinese masochist. It would do him some good if you took off without him. It might show him that he can’t go on living this way, suffering all the time and calling in Freud as his witness.” “If I take off, I’ll lose him.” “Only if he’s not worth having.” “Why do you say that?” “It’s so obvious. If he takes off, then he’s not for you. And if he takes you back, it will be on a new footing. No more groveling. No more manipulating each other with guilt all the time. You can’t lose a thing. And meanwhile, we’ll have a great time.” I pretended to Adrian that I wasn’t tempted, but in fact I was. And sorely. When I thought about it, it did seem as if Bennett knew everything about life except that having fun ought to be part of it. Life was a long disease to be cured by psychoanalysis. You might not cure it, but eventually you’d die anyway. The base of the couch would rise around you and become a coffin, and six black-suited analysts would carry you off (and throw jargon on your open grave). Bennett knew about part objects and whole objects, Oedipus and Electra, school phobia and claustrophobia, impotence and frigidity, patricide and matricide, penis envy and womb envy, working through and free association, mourning and melancholia, intrapsychic conflict and extrapsychic conflict, nosology and etiology, senile dementia and dementia praecox, projection and introjection, self-analysis and group-therapy, symptom formation and symptom exacerbation, amnesiac states and fugue states, pathological weeping and laughter in dreams, insomnia and excessive sleeping, neurosis and psychosis until they were coming out of your ears, but he did not seem to know about laughing and joking, wisecracking and punning, hugging and kissing, singing and dancing—all the things, in short, which made life worthwhile. As if you could will life to be happy through analysis. As if you could get along without laughter as long as you had analysis. Adrian had laughter, and at that point I was ready to sell my soul for it. The smile. Who was it who said that the smile is the secret of life? Adrian had an antic grin. I too laughed all the time. When we were together we felt we could conquer anything merely by laughing. “You have to get away from him,” Bennett said, “and back into analysis. He’s not good for you.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Friday. Saw her going somewhere with a dark girl called Rose. Why does the way she walks—a child, mind you, a mere child!—excite me so abominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind of wiggly looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall. The ghost of a drag. Very infantile, infinitely meretricious. Humbert Humbert is also infinitely moved by the little one’s slangy speech, by her harsh high voice. Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across the fence. Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. Pause. “I must go now, kiddo.” Saturday. (Beginning perhaps amended.) I know it is madness to keep this journal but it gives me a strange thrill to do so; and only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script. Let me state with a sob that today my L. was sun-bathing on the so-called “piazza,” but her mother and some other woman were around all the time. Of course, I might have sat there in the rocker and pretended to read. Playing safe, I kept away, for I was afraid that the horrible, insane, ridiculous and pitiful tremor that palsied me might prevent me from making my entrée with any semblance of casualness.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  He pulled off his shirt so he could feel them against his naked chest. She closed her eyes, giving in to the rush between her legs. When he reached under her skirt, he hesitated for a second. She wasn’t wearing a panty girdle tonight, just a garter belt, stockings and nylon undies. This was where she always stopped him, whispering, No, Jack, we can’t. But she didn’t stop him tonight. If he was surprised she couldn’t tell. Her undies slipped off, then he was getting out of his trousers. She kept her eyes closed. He was naked next to her and she was naked, though she didn’t remember stepping out of her skirt or pulling down her half-slip—what did it matter…sweet Jesus, nobody told her it would feel this good to have his hands stroking her there. Someone else was singing now and the cat was purring louder, the cat was moaning, or wait—was it her? Yes, those sounds were coming from her. She felt something pushing against her, then slipping inside her. And she wanted it, she wanted it. Then a short, quick pain—did she cry out? Maybe, but she didn’t say stop. She didn’t say no. Her body tensed…what if, what if… But soon he stopped moving and let out one deep groan, and something warm was on her belly. Warm, like a dollop of thick sauce. He wiped it up with his underwear then kissed the spot where it landed as if it were sacred ground. NatalieNatalie lay against the pillows in her bed at Elizabeth General Hospital. Nurse Kirkegaard, who her parents had hired as her private duty night nurse, watched over her. Natalie was supposed to be sleeping but she never slept, not if she could help it. She was weak and tired but sleep was out of the question. She had a needle in her arm attached to a tube. “Just fluids to keep you hydrated,” Nurse Kirkegaard explained. “I want to go home,” Natalie said. “I know,” Nurse K said, “and you will, as soon as you’re able to eat, as soon as you’re strong enough.” “I’m very strong,” Natalie told her. “I can dance for hours without getting tired.” “Oh, you’re a dancer?” “Yes.” “My daughter is an actress. Maybe you’ve heard of her? Phyllis Kirk.” “Your daughter is Phyllis Kirk?” Now the nurse had Natalie’s full attention. Phyllis Kirk was famous. The magazines were always running stories about her. Everyone knew she was from Elizabeth, had gone to Battin High. Everyone knew her mother was a nurse at Elizabeth General but Natalie never dreamed this nurse, who was middle-aged and stout and not beautiful, could possibly be her mother. “She changed her name from Kirkegaard to Kirk,” the nurse explained. “It’s a stage name.” “I’m going to have a stage name, too.” “Natalie is a lovely name,” Nurse K said. “Look at Natalie Wood.” “Yes, but I don’t want people to confuse me with her.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At last the captain heard my knock and came to the door. He had a whole tent to himself, I could see, and he was still awake with a mystery novel and a bottle of Scotch. He appeared confused—at least he didn’t know who I might be. When he’d unraveled my identity and figured out I was ill, he urged me to spend the rest of the night with him. We’d go to the infirmary first thing in the morning, he said to me. We’d go together. He’d take care of me. I had to insist over and over again on the urgency of my seeing a nurse now (“I’m really sick, sir, it can’t wait”) before he finally relented and led me to the infirmary. Even as I was pleading with him I was wondering what it would be like to live in this spacious tent with him. But why hadn’t he noticed me before? Why hadn’t he tried to rub me? Was I inferior to my roommate in some way? Less handsome? At least I wasn’t abnormal, I said to myself, glancing over at his haggard unshaven face, at his profile with its shelf of eyebrows in the darkness bright with mercury. The next summer I refused to go to camp until my mother lied and told me I’d be a junior counselor in charge of dramatics at a lovely place in the northern woods where practically no discipline existed and what there was would be waived in my case. I rode up north before the season began with the owner of the camp, who humored me (“Yes, well, you’ll have to decide which plays you’ll want to stage—you are the dramatics department”). After he said such things, he seemed to choke on his own generosity; his mouth would contract into an acidic kiss.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Give it back,” she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms. I produced Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under thin crimson skin, and with the monkeyish nimbleness that was so typical of that American nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I had opened (pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves). Rapidly, hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo flipped violently through the pages in search of something she wished Humbert to see. Found it at last. I faked interest by bringing my head so close that her hair touched my temple and her arm brushed my cheek as she wiped her lips with her wrist. Because of the burnished mist through which I peered at the picture, I was slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently against each other. Dimly there came into view: a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend. I whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a sham effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The next night was the formal opening of the Congress, ushered in by a twilight cocktail buffet in the courtyard of the Hofburg—one of Vienna’s eighteenth-century palaces. The inside of the building had been renovated so that the public rooms exuded all the institutional charm of American motel dining rooms, but the courtyard was still back in the mists of the eighteenth century. We arrived at that purple hour—eight o’clock on a late July evening. Long tables stood framing the edges of the courtyard. Waiters moved through the crowd holding aloft champagne glasses (sweet German Sekt, it turned out to be, alas). Even the analysts were glittering in the mauve dusk. Rose Schwamm-Lipkin wore a pink beaded Hong Kong sweater, a red satin skirt, and her dressiest orthopedic sandals. Judy Rose slithered by in a braless body suit of silver lamé. Even Dr. Schrift was wearing a plum velvet dinner jacket and a large azalea-pink satin bow tie. And Dr. Frommer was in tails and a top hat. Bennett and I moved through the crowd looking for someone we knew. We wandered aimlessly until a waiter dispensing champagne gently dipped his tray to us and gave us something to do. I drank fast, hoping to get drunk immediately—no trick at all for me. In about ten minutes I was wandering through the still more purple mist seeing champagne bubbles in the corners of my eyes. I was supposedly in search of the ladies’ room (but really, of course, in search of Adrian). I found thousands of him stretching back into infinity in a long mirrored baroque hallway outside the ladies’ room. He shimmered in the mirrors. An infinite number of Adrians in beige corduroy trousers and plum-colored turtlenecks and brown suede jackets. An infinite number of dirty toenails in an infinite number of Indian sandals. An infinite number of meerschaum pipes between his beautiful curling lips. My zipless fuck? My man under the bed! Multiplied like the lovers in Last Year at Marienbad. Multiplied like Andy Warhol’s self-portraits. Multiplied like the Thousand and One Buddhas in the Temple at Kyoto. (Each Buddha has six arms, each arm has an extra eye…how many pricks did these millions of Adrians have? And each prick symbolizing the infinite wisdom and infinite compassion of God?) “Hello, ducks,” he says, turning to me. “I have something for you,” I say, handing him the inscribed book I’ve been carrying around all day. The edges of the pages are beginning to fray from my sweaty palms. “You sweetheart!” He takes the book. We link arms and start walking down the mirrored hall. “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse,” as my old buddy Dante would say. The poems pimped for love, and their author too. The book of my body was open and the second circle of hell wasn’t far off. “You know,” I say, “we’ll probably never see each other again.” “Maybe that’s why we’re doing this,” he says.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I’d begun to shiver. The day was turning darker and had blown all the birds out of the sky and half the boats back to harbor. I was huddling, hugging myself down in the hull, wet back to the wind. Mr. Wellington was letting out sail—the tock-tock-tock of the winch releasing the mainsheet—and he was looking at me, holding his judgment in reserve. Between us, these two tight minds, flew the great sail and Tom haunting it as he leaned back into it, pushing it, pushing until we came around, he ducked and the boom swung overhead and stopped with a shocking thud. Here was this boy, laughing and blonded by the sun and smooth-skinned, his whole body straining up as he reached to cleat something so that his T-shirt parted company with his dirty, sagging jeans and we—the father and I—could see Tom’s muscles like forked lightning on his taut stomach; here was this boy so handsome and free and well liked and here were we flanking him, looking up at him, at the torso flowering out of the humble calyx of his jeans. It seemed to me then that beauty is the highest good, the one thing we all want to be or have or, failing that, destroy, and that all the world’s virtues are nothing but the world’s spleen and deceit. The ugly, the old, the rich and the accomplished speak of invisible virtues—of character and wisdom and power and skill—because they lack the visible ones, that ridiculous down under the lower lip that can’t decide to be a beard, those prehensile bare feet racing down the sleek deck, big hands too heavy for slender arms, the sweep of lashes over faded lapis-lazuli eyes, lips deep red, the windblown hair intricate as Velázquez’s rendering of lace. That summer I spent with my father; I worked the Addressograph machine and I hired a hustler, who was as blond as Tommy. When I returned home to my mother I was a bit smug—but also frightened by the tenacity of my homosexual yearnings. One fall evening Tom called me to ask me if I’d like to go out on a double date. He’d be with Sally, of course, and I’d be with Helen Paper. Just a movie. Maybe a burger afterward. Not too late. School tomorrow. Her regular date had come down with a cold. I said sure. I dashed down the hall to tell my mother, who in a rare domestic moment had a sewing basket on her lap. Her glasses had slid down to the tip of her nose and her voice came out slow and without inflection as she tried to thread a needle. “Guess what!” I shouted. “What, dear?” She licked the thread and tried again. “That was Tom and he arranged a date for me with Helen Paper, who’s the most beautiful and sophisticated girl in the whole school.” “Sophisticated?” There, the thread had gone through.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (common-sensical shoes, tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown to buy a present for a friend of a friend of hers, and would I please come too because I have such a wonderful taste in textures and perfumes. “Choose your favorite seduction,” she purred. What could Humbert, being in the perfume business, do? She had me cornered between the front porch and her car. “Hurry up,” she said as I laboriously doubled up my large body in order to crawl in (still desperately devising a means of escape). She had started the engine, and was genteelly swearing at a backing and turning truck in front that had just brought old invalid Miss Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when my Lolita’s sharp voice came from the parlor window: “You! Where are you going? I’m coming too! Wait!” “Ignore her,” yelped Haze (killing the motor); alas for my fair driver; Lo was already pulling at the door on my side. “This is intolerable,” began Haze; but Lo had scrambled in, shivering with glee. “Move your bottom, you,” said Lo. “Lo!” cried Haze (sideglancing at me, hoping I would throw rude Lo out). “And behold,” said Lo (not for the first time), as she jerked back, as I jerked back, as the car leapt forward. “It is intolerable,” said Haze, violently getting into second, “that a child should be so ill-mannered. And so very persevering. When she knows she is unwanted. And needs a bath.” My knuckles lay against the child’s blue jeans. She was barefooted; her toenails showed remnants of cherry-red polish and there was a bit of adhesive tape across her big toe; and, God, what would I not have given to kiss then and there those delicate-boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet! Suddenly her hand slipped into mine and without our chaperon’s seeing, I held, and stroked, and squeezed that little hot paw, all the way to the store. The wings of the driver’s Marlenesque nose shone, having shed or burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue anent the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in profile, while I prayed we would never get to that store, but we did. I have nothing else to report, save, primo: that big Haze had little Haze sit behind on our way home, and secundo: that the lady decided to keep Humbert’s Choice for the backs of her own shapely ears.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  As I entered it, I was almost knocked down by two men coming out. One of them touched my shoulder and drew me aside. He had a three days’ growth of beard on his cheeks, shiny wet canines, a rumpled raincoat of a fashionable cut that clung to his hips, and he was saying, “Don’t just rush by without saying hello.” Here he was at last, but now I knew for sure I wasn’t worthy—I was ugly with my sissy ways and the mole he’d find between my shoulder blades. “Do I know you?” I asked. I felt I did, as if we’d traveled for a month in a train compartment knee to knee night after night via the thirty installments of a serial but plotless though highly emotional dream. I smiled, embarrassed by the way I looked. “Sure you know me.” He laughed and his friend, I think, smiled. “No, honestly, what’s your name?” I told him. He repeated it, smile suppressed, as I’d seen men on the make condescend to women they were sizing up. “We just blew into town,” he said. “I hope you can make us feel at home.” He put an arm around my waist and I shrank back; the sidewalks were crowded with people staring at us curiously. His fingers fit neatly into the space between my pelvis and the lowest rib, a space that welcomed him, that had been cast from the mold of his hand. I kept thinking, these two guys want my money, but how they planned to get it remained vague. And I was alarmed they’d been able to tell at a glance that I was the very one who would respond to their advances so readily. I was so pleased the handsome stranger had chosen me; because he was from out of town he had higher, different standards. He thought I was like him, and perhaps I was, or soon would be. Now that a raffish man—younger and more handsome than I’d imagined, but also dirtier and more condescending—had materialized before me, I wasn’t at all sure what I should do: my reveries hadn’t been that detailed. Nor had I anticipated meeting someone so crosshatched with ambiguity, a dandy who hadn’t bathed, a penniless seducer, someone upon whose face passion and cruelty had cast a grille of shadows. I was alarmed; I ended up by keeping my address secret (midnight robbery) but agreeing to meet him at the pool in the amusement park the next day at noon (an appointment I didn’t keep, though I felt the hour come and go like a king in disguise turned away at the peasant’s door). The books in the bookstore shimmered before my eyes as I worked through a pile of them with their brightly colored paper jackets bearing photographs of pensive, well-coiffed women and middle-aged men in Irish knit sweaters with pipes and profiles.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  What next? I proceeded to the business center of Parkington and devoted the whole afternoon (the weather had cleared, the wet town was like silver-and-glass) to buying beautiful things for Lo. Goodness, what crazy purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days for check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts! Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? Did I have something special in mind? coaxing voices asked me. Swimming suits? We have them in all shades. Dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black. What about playsuits? Slips? No slips. Lo and I loathed slips. One of my guides in these matters was an anthropometric entry made by her mother on Lo’s twelfth birthday (the reader remembers that Know-Your-Child book). I had the feeling that Charlotte, moved by obscure motives of envy and dislike, had added an inch here, a pound there; but since the nymphet had no doubt grown somewhat in the last seven months, I thought I could safely accept most of those January measurements: hip girth, twenty-nine inches; thigh girth (just below the gluteal sulcus), seventeen; calf girth and neck circumference, eleven; chest circumference, twenty-seven; upper arm girth, eight; waist, twenty-three; stature, fifty-seven inches; weight, seventy-eight pounds; figure, linear; intelligence quotient, 121; vermiform appendix present, thank God. Apart from measurements, I could of course visualize Lolita with hallucinational lucidity; and nursing as I did a tingle on my breastbone at the exact spot her silky top had come level once or twice with my heart; and feeling as I did her warm weight in my lap (so that, in a sense, I was always “with Lolita” as a woman is “with child”), I was not surprised to discover later that my computation had been more or less correct. Having moreover studied a midsummer sale book, it was with a very knowing air that I examined various pretty articles, sport shoes, sneakers, pumps of crushed kid for crushed kids. The painted girl in black who attended to all these poignant needs of mine turned parental scholarship and precise description into commercial euphemisms, such as “petite.” Another, much older woman, in a white dress, with a pancake make-up, seemed to be oddly impressed by my knowledge of junior fashions; perhaps I had a midget for mistress; so, when shown a skirt with two “cute” pockets in front, I intentionally put a naïve male question and was rewarded by a smiling demonstration of the way the zipper worked in the back of the skirt. I had next great fun with all kinds of shorts and briefs—phantom little Lolitas dancing, falling, daisying all over the counter. We rounded up the deal with some prim cotton pajamas in popular butcher-boy style. Humbert, the popular butcher.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  12This proved to be the last of twenty entries or so. It will be seen from them that for all the devil’s inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same. First he would tempt me—and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how to do it, without impinging on a child’s chastity; after all, I had had some experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possessed dappled nymphets in parks; had wedged my wary and bestial way into the hottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of strap-hanging school children. But for almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all my pathetic machinations. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Haze woman (who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for that nymphet—for the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid claws—would have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The best thing about making love with a new man after all those years of marriage was rediscovering a man’s body. One’s husband’s body was practically like one’s own. Everything about it was known. All the smells and tastes of it, the lines, the hairs, the birthmarks. But Adrian was like a new country. My tongue made an unguided tour of it. I started at his mouth and went downward. His broad neck, which was sunburned. His chest, covered with curly reddish hair. His belly, a bit paunchy—unlike Bennett’s brown leanness. His curled pink penis which tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth. His very pink and hairy balls which I took in my mouth one at a time. His muscular thighs. His sunburned knees. His feet. (Which I did not kiss.) His dirty toenails. (Ditto.) Then I started all over again. At his lovely wet mouth. “Where did you get those little pointed teeth?” “From the stoat who was my mother.” “The what?” “Stoat.” “Oh.” I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t care. We were tasting each other. We were upside down and his tongue was playing music in my cunt. “You’ve a lovely cunt,” he said, “and the greatest ass I’ve ever seen. Too bad you’ve got no tits.” “Thanks.” I kept sucking away but as soon as he got hard, he’d get soft again. “I don’t really want to fuck you anyway.” “Why?” “Dunno why—I just don’t feel like it.” Adrian wanted to be loved for himself alone, and not his yellow hair. (Or his pink prick.) It was rather touching, actually. He didn’t want to be a fucking machine. “I can fuck with the best of them when I feel like it,” he said defiantly. “Of course you can.” “Now you’ve got your bloody social worker voice on,” he said. I had been a social worker on a couple of occasions in bed. Once with Brian, after he’d been released from the psycho ward and was too full of Thorazine (and too schizoid) to screw. For a month we’d lain in bed and held hands. “Like Hansel and Gretel,” he said. It was rather sweet. What you’d imagine Dodgson doing with Alice in a boat on the Thames. It was also something of a relief after Brian’s manic phase when he’d come very close to strangling me. And even before he cracked up, Brian’s asexual preferences were somewhat odd. He only liked sucking, not fucking. At the time, I was too inexperienced to realize that all men weren’t that way. I was twenty-one and Brian was twenty-five, and remembering what I’d heard about men reaching their sexual peak at sixteen and women at thirty, I figured that Brian’s age was to blame. He was in decline. Over the hill, I thought. I did get very good at sucking, though. I’d also played social worker to Charlie Fielding, the conductor whose baton kept wilting.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “Wow! Looks swank,” remarked my vulgar darling squinting at the stucco as she crept out into the audible drizzle and with a childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had stuck in the peach-cleft—to quote Robert Browning. Under the arclights enlarged replicas of chestnut leaves plunged and played on white pillars. I unlocked the trunk compartment. A hunchbacked and hoary Negro in a uniform of sorts took our bags and wheeled them slowly into the lobby. It was full of old ladies and clergymen. Lolita sank down on her haunches to caress a pale-faced, blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swooning on the floral carpet under her hand—as who would not, my heart—while I cleared my throat through the throng to the desk. There a bald porcine old man—everybody was old in that old hotel—examined my features with a polite smile, then leisurely produced my (garbled) telegram, wrestled with some dark doubts, turned his head to look at the clock, and finally said he was very sorry, he had held the room with the twin beds till half past six, and now it was gone. A religious convention, he said, had clashed with a flower show in Briceland, and—“The name,” I said coldly, “is not Humberg and not Humbug, but Herbert, I mean Humbert, and any room will do, just put in a cot for my little daughter. She is ten and very tired.” The pink old fellow peered good-naturedly at Lo—still squatting, listening in profile, lips parted, to what the dog’s mistress, an ancient lady swathed in violet veils, was telling her from the depths of a cretonne easy chair. Whatever doubts the obscene fellow had, they were dispelled by that blossom-like vision. He said, he might still have a room, had one, in fact—with a double bed. As to the cot— “Mr. Potts, do we have any cots left?” Potts, also pink and bald, with white hairs growing out of his ears and other holes, would see what could be done. He came and spoke while I unscrewed my fountain pen. Impatient Humbert! “Our double beds are really triple,” Potts cozily said tucking me and my kid in. “One crowded night we had three ladies and a child like yours sleep together. I believe one of the ladies was a disguised man [my static]. However—would there be a spare cot in 49, Mr. Swine?” “I think it went to the Swoons,” said Swine, the initial old clown. “We’ll manage somehow,” I said. “My wife may join us later—but even then, I suppose, we’ll manage.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And it shall come to passe as thou sittest in the boat thou shalt see an old man swimming on the top of the river, holding up his deadly hands, and desiring thee to receive him into the barke, but have no regard to his piteous cry; when thou art passed over the floud, thou shalt espie old women spinning, who will desire thee to helpe them, but beware thou do not consent unto them in any case, for these and like baits and traps will Venus set to make thee let fall one of thy sops, and thinke not that the keeping of thy sops is a light matter, for if thou leese one of them thou shalt be assured never to returne againe to this world. Then shalt thou see a great and marvailous dogge, with three heads, barking continually at the soules of such as enter in, but he can do them no other harme, he lieth day and night before the gate of Proserpina, and keepeth the house of Pluto with great diligence, to whom if thou cast one of thy sops, thou maist have accesse to Proserpina without all danger: shee will make thee good cheere, and entertaine thee with delicate meate and drinke, but sit thou upon the ground, and desire browne bread, and then declare thy message unto her, and when thou hast received such beauty as she giveth, in thy returne appease the rage of the dogge with thy other sop, and give thy other halfe penny to covetous Charon, and come the same way againe into the world as thou wentest: but above all things have a regard that thou looke not in the boxe, neither be not too curious about the treasure of the divine beauty. In this manner the tower spake unto Psyches, and advertised her what she should do: and immediately she tooke two halfe pence, two sops, and all things necessary, and went to the mountaine Tenarus to go towards hell. After that Psyches had passed by the lame Asse, paid her halfe pennie for passage, neglected the old man in the river, denyed to helpe the woman spinning, and filled the ravenous month of the dogge with a sop, shee came to the chamber of Proserpina. There Psyches would not sit in any royall seate, nor eate any delicate meates, but kneeled at the feete of Proserpina, onely contented with course bread, declared her message, and after she had received a mysticall secret in a boxe, she departed, and stopped the mouth of the dogge with the other sop, and paied the boatman the other halfe penny. When Psyches was returned from hell, to the light of the world, shee was ravished with great desire, saying, Am not I a foole, that knowing that I carrie here the divine beauty, will not take a little thereof to garnish my face, to please my love withall?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She was too perfect set against this white backdrop. Looking at her made him feel open to ideas, possibilities, allowances, arguments that two minutes earlier he would have rejected. Just now would be a very good moment, for example, for Levi to ask for twenty dollars or for Jack French to ask him to chair a panel on the future of the University. But then – thank the sweet Lord – she turned her head away. ‘I’ll catch up with you,’ said Victoria to two young men who were walking backwards in front of her, grinning and packing snowballs in raw, pink hands. Victoria fell into step with Howard. Howard noticed how her hair kept the snow differently than Howard’s own hair. It sat neatly on top of her head like icing. ‘I’ve never seen it like this!’ she said gaily as they passed out of the gate and prepared to cross the small road that led to Wellington’s main yard. She had placed her hands in a funny position, in the back pockets of her jeans, her elbows jutting backwards like the stumps of wings. ‘It must have got going while we were in class. Bloody hell . It’s like movie snow!’ ‘I wonder whether movie snow costs a million dollars a week to clear.’ ‘Blimey – that much.’ ‘That much.’ ‘That’s a shitload.’ ‘Quite.’ This, only the second private conversation they’d ever had, was the same as the first: dumb and oddly charged with humour, Vee smiling toothily and Howard unsure if he was being ridiculed or flirted with. She had slept with his son – was that the joke? If so, he couldn’t say he found it too amusing. But he had taken her lead from the start: this unspoken pretence that they had never met  the anatomy lesson before this semester and had no connection other than that of teacher and student. He felt wrong-footed by her. She was unafraid of him. Any other student in his class would be trawling their brains right now for a brilliant sentence, no, they would never have approached him in the first place without some sparkling opener prepared earlier, some tedious little piece of rhetorical flash. How many hours of his life had he spent smiling thinly at these carefully constructed comments, sometimes bred and developed days or even weeks before in the nervous hothoused brains of these ambitious kids? But Vee wasn’t like that. Outside of class she seemed to take pride in being somewhat moronic. ‘Umm, look – you know this thing that all the college societies have, this stupid dinner?’ she said, tilting her face upwards to the white-out skies. ‘Each table has to invite three professors – mine’s Emerson Hall, and we’re not too formal, it’s not as poncy as some of the others . . . it’s all right, actually – mixed, women and men –

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

  Some, however, are commended in the Scriptures, not on account of perfect virtue, but for a certain virtuous disposition, seeing that it was owing to some praiseworthy sentiment that they were moved to do certain undue things. It is thus that Judith is praised, not for lying to Holofernes, but for her desire to save the people, to which end she exposed herself to danger. And yet one might also say that her words contain truth in some mystical sense. Reply to Objection 4: A lie is sinful not only because it injures one’s neighbor, but also on account of its inordinateness, as stated above in this Article. Now it is not allowed to make use of anything inordinate in order to ward off injury or defects from another: as neither is it lawful to steal in order to give an alms, except perhaps in a case of necessity when all things are common. Therefore it is not lawful to tell a lie in order to deliver another from any danger whatever. Nevertheless it is lawful to hide the truth prudently, by keeping it back, as Augustine says (Contra Mend. x). Reply to Objection 5: A man does not lie, so long as he has a mind to do what he promises, because he does not speak contrary to what he has in mind: but if he does not keep his promise, he seems to act without faith in changing his mind. He may, however, be excused for two reasons. First, if he has promised something evidently unlawful, because he sinned in promise, and did well to change his mind. Secondly, if circumstances have changed with regard to persons and the business in hand. For, as Seneca states (De Benef. iv), for a man to be bound to keep a promise, it is necessary for everything to remain unchanged: otherwise neither did he lie in promising—since he promised what he had in his mind, due circumstances being taken for granted—nor was he faithless in not keeping his promise, because circumstances are no longer the same. Hence the Apostle, though he did not go to Corinth, whither he had promised to go (2 Cor. 1), did not lie, because obstacles had arisen which prevented him.

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

  I answer that, As stated above [3793](A[2]), the religious state is an exercise and a school for attaining to the perfection of charity. For this it is necessary that a man wholly withdraw his affections from worldly things; since Augustine says (Confess. x, 29), speaking to God: “Too little doth he love Thee, who loves anything with Thee, which he loveth not for Thee.” Wherefore he says (QQ. lxxxiii, qu. 36) that “greater charity means less cupidity, perfect charity means no cupidity.” Now the possession of worldly things draws a man’s mind to the love of them: hence Augustine says (Ep. xxxi ad Paulin. et Theras.) that “we are more firmly attached to earthly things when we have them than when we desire them: since why did that young man go away sad, save because he had great wealth? For it is one thing not to wish to lay hold of what one has not, and another to renounce what one already has; the former are rejected as foreign to us, the latter are cut off as a limb.” And Chrysostom says (Hom. lxiii in Matth.) that “the possession of wealth kindles a greater flame and the desire for it becomes stronger.” Hence it is that in the attainment of the perfection of charity the first foundation is voluntary poverty, whereby a man lives without property of his own, according to the saying of our Lord (Mat. 19:21), “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell all [Vulg.: ‘what’] thou hast, and give to the poor . . . and come, follow Me.” Reply to Objection 1: As the gloss adds, “when the Apostle said this (namely “not that you should be burthened,” i.e. with poverty),” he did not mean that “it were better not to give: but he feared for the weak, whom he admonished so to give as not to suffer privation.” Hence in like manner the other gloss means not that it is unlawful to renounce all one’s temporal goods, but that this is not required of necessity. Wherefore Ambrose says (De Offic. i, 30): “Our Lord does not wish,” namely does not command us “to pour out our wealth all at once, but to dispense it; or perhaps to do as did Eliseus who slew his oxen, and fed the poor with that which was his own so that no household care might hold him back.”

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

  AUGUSTINE. (de Quæst. Ev. l. ii. qu. 33.) This man then having two sons is understood to be God having two nations, as if they were two roots of the human race; and the one composed of those who have remained in the worship of God, the other, of those who have ever deserted God to worship idols. From the very beginning then of the creation of mankind the elder son has reference to the worship of the one God, but the younger seeks that the part of the substance which fell to him should be given him by his father. Hence it follows, And the younger of them said unto his father, Give me the portion of goods which falleth to me; just as the soul delighted with its own power seeks that which belongs to it, to live, to understand, to remember, to excel in quickness of intellect, all which are the gifts of God, but it has received them in its own power by free will. Hence it follows, And he divided unto them his substance. THEOPHYLACT. The substance of man is the capacity of reason which is accompanied by free will, and in like manner whatever God has given us shall be accounted for our substance, as the heaven, the earth, and universal nature, the Law and the Prophets. AMBROSE. Now you see that the Divine patrimony is given to them that seek; nor think it wrong in the father that he gave it to the younger, for no age is weak in the kingdom of God; faith is not weighed down by years. He at least counted himself sufficient who asked, And I wish he had not departed from his father, nor had had the hindrance of age. For it follows, And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country. CHRYSOSTOM. (ut sup.) The younger son set out into a distant country, not locally departing from God, who is every where present, but in heart. For the sinner flees from God that he may stand afar off. AUGUSTINE. (in Ps. 70.) Whoever wishes to be so like to God as to ascribe his strength to Him, (Ps. 59:9.) let him not depart from Him, but rather cleave to Him that he may preserve the likeness and image in which he was made. But if he perversely wishes to imitate God, that as God has no one by whom He is governed, so should he desire to exercise his own power as to live under no rules, what remains for him but that having lost all heat he should grow cold and senseless, and, departing from truth, vanish away.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Next question.” I played a C-major scale. “Are you going to make me do all the work in this conversation?” “Possibly.” He grabbed his crotch, then looked down at his white hand, the white of cooked ham, gave it an extra shake and, as though satisfied with his test, smiled. “You’re a good kid,” he said, releasing himself. I could hear the football team shouting as the guys entered the athletics building next door; that must be the thunder of their cleats on the stone floor just inside the double doors. “Say you and Bugs are listening to music or something and you’re all alone in the parents’ suite and nobody’s around, because it is real isolated after all, and say you smoke some—” “We get high. So go on.” “You both get high and …” I closed the lid over the keys and rested my hands on the curved, reflecting wood. “Suppose he was the kind of guy who wanted to fool around. Who wanted to party.” I used the word the black whore had used. “I’m with you. You’re amazing. Here we are in goddamn suburbia and I’ve got some fuckin’ teenage hipster on my hands. Go on.” “Well, suppose he gets high and wants to blow you, nothing more, you don’t have to do a thing, just dig the music, would you let him?” Mr. Beattie was brushing his right hand back and forth over his crew cut. He seemed to be concentrating on this job, getting the feel of those soft quills against his palm. He wasn’t looking at me. “That’s a pretty funny question. Why do you ask? Is your question academic or what?” “I’m asking,” I said, “because I’d like to party with you.” He nodded quickly. “Got it. Groovy.” He looked at the clock. “I could make it real good for us both. Come back at five-fifteen, five-thirty and it’ll be dark and the fuckin’ animals next door”—head jerk to indicate the athletics building—“will have cleared out by then. We’ll be all alone down here and I’ll put on some nice classical music and we’ll blow some weed, I’ve got nice stuff, and we’ll see, just see what happens. Okay?” I who was always conscious of the formlessness of real life now saw it imitate art, though the meaning of this action, which was surely turning out to be tragic, escaped me. I had my appointment with the headmaster at four. At five-thirty, after I’d betrayed Mr. Beattie, I’d return to have sex with him. The next day he’d be fired. He’d learn of my denunciation and he wouldn’t be able to say anything against me. He wouldn’t be able to discredit me by saying I was a practicing homosexual since we would have practiced homosexuality together. He’d be powerless. I would have gotten what I wanted, gotten away with it and gotten rid of him: the trapdoor beside the bed. At last I could seduce and betray an adult.