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 192 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He seemed curious in the same uncomplicated way about men. When he was on wake-up duty, he’d tap me (I slept on an upper bunk) and then he’d just stare at my early morning erection in my jockey shorts. He didn’t smile unless I caught his eye; then he’d sort of come out of his trance and give a grin. He was what the other fellows would have called a horny bastard, except he never posed as one. Maybe he wasn’t very intelligent. Now he and I were the only people awake in the whole glittering after-party house, surrounded by wheezing and gibbering penguins. I was sitting stunned by drink on a broken-down couch on a landing at the head of the grand staircase. Someone had passed out beside me. “Do you mind if I join you?” Mick asked. It was almost as though we’d had an appointment. Several times during dinner he’d caught my eye with his usual curiosity. His black hair had just been cut very short and I had the strongest urge to run my hand through it and before I’d thought twice I’d done it and suddenly his mouth was pressed to mine and we were rolling in each other’s arms and our hands were blindly tearing at shirts to open them and to feel that skin. Mick’s mouth tasted of crème de menthe. His hand had wormed its way down my trousers and was on my cock and I was thinking, We’ll become lovers we’ll live together forever I love him why were there no signs. He looked and acted like a ferret and now his hand became one; my hand stroked his stomach, so taut from all his sit-ups a dropped dime would have bounced on it and I thought, Does he love me too much, will he become a nuisance always underfoot in the fraternity house, this is probably a mistake. And then we’d half undressed each other, my cummerbund was cast on the floor, my studs had popped, and shifting streams of red and yellow light and heat flowed up from my legs through my chest and blazed across my closed eyes. “We’re crazy,” I whispered in his ear, “the other guys …” He pulled back and looked at me quizzically and then his tongue, muscular as a snail’s foot, was washing my face, the tip probing my nostril, now licking inside the arch above my eyelids and a second later back on my tongue and I was grateful for the ferocity of his desire because I felt borne up by it, just as though I were flying on the back of a stork—yes, one of those babies the stork wings down to its parents. His hand, calloused from all his commando workouts, closed over mine and led me into the room he shared with three other guys. Not a tender squeeze, just the practical pressure of horniness. His roommates were asleep, snoring or groaning only a few feet away from us.

• From Vox (1992)

  156 against your back and slide them up under your shirt, ah, all the way up so the fingers come out and go a little way along the nape of your neck into your hair before sub siding. It's a loose shirt, don't worry. Am I going too slow for you?" "No no, keep going, that's fine." "Oh, I love moving my hands over you under your loose shirt, I love that. I'd slide my hands around over your stomach, so that my fingertips met, and feel it pull in, and slide up slowly along your ribs, and when I got to where the curves of your breasts started, I would trace them around, out to the sides, back to the middle, and I would pass just my fingertips up between your breasts, up along your breastbone, pushing under the loose bra, and then one finger even higher, along your voice box, to where your chin starts, and you'd lean your head back and I would be able to smell your hair, and then I'd pull back down, deliberately avoiding your breasts." "And I would stand up," she said, "and turn around so I'm facing you, with my shins touching the armchair, and I'd undo the button of my pants. " "And I would reach out," he said, "and take hold of your zipper and push it slowly down, so that I'm pushing against your mound with it, not at your clitoris, but above it, and I'd slide my fingers under your waistband and guide your pants off over your hips and ass, and when they fell to your knees I'd put my foot on the inside of the crotch so you could step out of them easily, and I'd

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  If I’d had the courage, I would have advised my anthropology class that primitive man believes in the conservation of energy through the recycling of bodily fluids. I was a Buddhist, or would have been if I could have given up this hankering after a penis attached to two furry legs below and one Cyclopean eye above, as black and wobbly as black-currant jelly. Because of my Buddhist longing for peace, I’d decided to study Chinese. Wherever I went—fraternity house, dorm room, student union, dinner party, toilet—I had my handmade flashcards with me. Chinese character on one side, on the other its pronunciation and correct tone above the definition, or rather dated definitions, since meanings shifted over the centuries. We were just a handful of students clustering three nights a week around our conversation teacher in the one lit classroom in an otherwise dark building. The stairs creaked. Our teacher, an ageless Chinese woman in a dark blue lusterless silk dress, asked me in Mandarin to run out and see if it was a strange “nose person” (bi ren)—and in that instant we kids, all Caucasian, learned that’s what the Chinese called us because of our big noses. Our teacher clapped a hand over her mouth under her own suitably snub nose and blushed. We called her the “straight lady,” because she could have been drawn entirely in straight lines, her pageboy and bangs, her eye slits and thin wrists, her breastless body. She was quite proud of her up-to-date attitudes (she was both a Methodist and a lifetime member of the YWCA), but she retained odd scraps of folk wisdom (and the Chinese inability in English to distinguish between he and she). She said to me, “You look tired” (pronounced “tod”), “very, very tod. Me too, I always tod. One day I look at my dog and say, ‘Why he never tod? She never tod.’ Then I realize he never tod ’cause she sleep all the time. Now I sleep all the time too. When I have moment between class or food cook, I sleep. I sleep all the time. I never tod.” Through her and a Chinese social club I met a large group of students from Taiwan and Singapore. Two girls, Betty and Kay, invited me and other friends to an enormous dinner served Chinese-style with no tea (“Tea is for every time of the day except mealtime,” they explained) and dozens of tiny plates flying through the air, and, in the center of the table, big bowls of soup and steamed rice. Somehow I’d imagined Chinese women would be—well, Japanese, that is, modest, self-effacing, tittering. But, in fact, Kay, who wore her black hair held back by a wide pink band, was strong enough to defy her family’s insistence that she study medicine or law. All her Chinese friends had an artistic bent, but she alone had the courage to pursue a music degree (she played Chopin études for us on her overly live upright).

• From Vox (1992)

  160 together, with my hands on them, and you'd see the glossy wet place on my thigh, and then I'd encircle your legs with one arm, holding them together, and bend toward your bush and breathe on it, the little of it I can see, and I run my fingers just down the long place where the insides of your thighs touch, all the way to your knees, and then I'd let go of your legs, and they'd fall slightly apart, and as my hands started to move up inside them, with my fingers splayed wide, they'd move farther and farther apart, and then I'd lift your knees and hook them over the arms of the armchair, so that you were wide open for me, and in the darkness your bush would still be indistinct, and I'd look up at you, and I'd move on my knees so I'm closer, so I could slide my cock in you if I wanted, and I touch your shoulders with my hands, and pass my fingertips all the way down over your breasts and over your stomach and just lightly over your bush, just to feel the hair, and then I say, 'I'm going to lick you now, ' and I lick both your nipples once very briefly good bye, and I breathe my way down, and I pass over your bush this time with my mouth, and I see where the tan stops, and where the hair begins, and I keep going, and your legs are spread wide, and so I kiss inside one knee, and then across to the other, and up, back and forth, and at the end of each kiss I give a little upward lick with my tongue, up lick, lick, lick, back and forth, moving closer and closer to where your thighs meet. And then the last time I turn my head, there's nothing I can do, my mouth

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Critical attention to the social and political theorizing of Williams, “one of the leading intellectuals of the turn of the [twentieth] century,” calls forth a “new order of things,” in our understanding of existing traditions of Black intellectual production.11 In particular, I turn in this chapter to a series of speeches and articles she produced between 1893 and 1905, in which she forthrightly theorized the relationship of the club movement to the building of Black civil society. She introduces a series of terms and formulations, among them, organized anxiety, American peculiarity, race public opinion, and racial sociality, that are central to her broad political vision for African American people and that anchor her strident critique of the American democratic project. Like her clubwomen counterparts, Black women existed at the center of her narrative of Black and American nation-building.12 Her desire to take seriously the plight of Black women meant that she routinely critiqued Black men in her public work, especially W. E. B. Du Bois. Although some of her enmity toward Du Bois might be attributed to her and her husband’s devotion to Washington, a closer examination of her writings reveals legitimate ideological differences in her understandings of how to address Black social problems, particularly those of Black women. Making Black women’s problems visible within post-Reconstruction, turn-of-the-twentieth-century social discourses on the race problem necessitated clear and dedicated attention to studying Black women and their organizations. [image file=image_rsrc2RH.jpg] FIGURE 2. Fannie Barrier Williams. Courtesy of Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Manuscripts Division, Howard University, Washington D.C. The goal of this chapter, then, is twofold. First, it offers an intellectual history of the NACW School of Thought vis-à-vis the pioneering work of Fannie Barrier Williams, one of its key architects. Focusing on the intellectual history of the NACW builds on a voluminous body of literature on the Clubwomen’s Movement, which approaches it primarily as a social welfare organization. The germinal text among these histories is Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994. White and other historians have demonstrated the ways in which the NACW became the training ground for a Black female elite leadership class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13 Moreover, such work has also documented the sophisticated social welfare, educational, and political initiatives undertaken by the NACW both locally and nationally, particularly in the form of building schools, social settlement houses, and convalescent homes and offering parental training to Black communities that did not have access to these services. Williams has a formidable history of organizing and club work in her own right.14 However, her work as a theoretician of racial identity, public space, and what I term the civic unknowability of Black women offers a critical picture of the first two decades of the intellectual work of the NACW School.15

• From The Decameron (1353)

  There were, then, in Siena two young men of the people, whereof one was called Tingoccio Mini and the other Meuccio di Tura; they abode at Porta Salaja and consorted well nigh never save one with the other. To all appearance they loved each exceedingly and resorting, as men do, to churches and preachings, they had many a time heard tell of the happiness and of the misery that are, according to their deserts, allotted in the next world to the souls of those who die; of which things desiring to have certain news and finding no way thereto, they promised one another that whichever of them died first should, an he might, return to him who abode on life and give him tidings of that which he would fain know; and this they confirmed with an oath. Having come to this accord and companying still together, as hath been said, it chanced that Tingoccio became godfather to a child which one Ambruogio Anselmini, abiding at Campo Reggi, had had of his wife, Mistress Mita by name, and from time to time visiting, together with Meuccio, his gossip who was a very fair and lovesome lady, he became, notwithstanding the gossipship, enamoured of her. Meuccio, on like wise, hearing her mightily commended of his friend and being himself much pleased with her, fell in love with her, and each hid his love from the other, but not for one same reason. Tingoccio was careful not to discover it to Meuccio, on account of the naughty deed which himseemed he did to love his gossip and which he had been ashamed that any should know. Meuccio, on the other hand, kept himself therefrom,[358] for that he had already perceived that the lady pleased Tingoccio; whereupon he said in himself, 'If I discover this to him, he will wax jealous of me and being able, as her gossip, to bespeak her at his every pleasure, he will, inasmuch as he may, bring me in ill savour with her, and so I shall never have of her aught that may please me.' [Footnote 358: _i.e._ from discovering to his friend his liking for the lady.]

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  7 And among the naive [the inexperienced and gullible], I saw among the youths A young man lacking [good] sense, 8 Passing through the street near her corner; And he took the path to her house 9 In the twilight, in the evening; In the black and dark night. 10 And there a woman met him, Dressed as a prostitute and sly and cunning of heart. 11 She was boisterous and rebellious; a She would not stay at home. 12 At times she was in the streets, at times in the market places, Lurking and setting her ambush at every corner. 13 So she caught him and kissed him And with a brazen and impudent face she said to him: 14 “I have peace offerings with me; Today I have paid my vows. 15 “So I came out to meet you [that you might share with me the feast of my offering], Diligently I sought your face and I have found you. 16 “I have spread my couch with coverings and cushions of tapestry, With colored fine linen of Egypt. 17 “I have perfumed my bed With myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. 18 “Come, let us drink our fill of love until morning; Let us console and delight ourselves with love. 19 “For my husband is not at home. He has gone on a long journey; 20 He has taken a bag of money with him, And he will come home on the appointed day.” 21 With her many persuasions she caused him to yield; With her flattering lips she seduced him. 22 Suddenly he went after her, as an ox goes to the slaughter [not knowing the outcome], Or as one in stocks going to the correction [to be given] to a fool, 23 Until an arrow pierced his liver [with a mortal wound]; Like a bird fluttering straight into the net, He did not know that it would cost him his life. 24 Now therefore, my sons, listen to me, And pay attention to the words of my mouth. 25 Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways, Do not stray into her [evil, immoral] paths. 26 For she has cast down many [mortally] wounded; Indeed, all who were killed by her were strong. [Neh 13:26 ] 27 Her house is the way to b Sheol, Descending to the chambers of death. [1 Cor 6:9 ] Proverbs 8 The Commendation of Wisdom 1 D OES NOT wisdom call, And understanding lift up her voice? 2 On the top of the heights beside the way, Where the paths meet, wisdom takes her stand; 3 Beside the gates, at the entrance to the city, At the entrance of the doors, she cries out: 4 “To you, O men, I call, And my voice is directed to the sons of men.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  You must know, then, that there was once in Lombardy a convent, very famous for sanctity and religion, wherein, amongst the other nuns who were there, was a young lady of noble birth and gifted with marvellous beauty, who was called Isabetta and who, coming one day to the grate to speak with a kinsman of hers, fell in love with a handsome young man who accompanied him. The latter, seeing her very fair and divining her wishes with his eyes, became on like wise enamoured of her, and this love they suffered a great while without fruit, to the no small unease of each. At last, each being solicited by a like desire, the young man hit upon a means of coming at his nun in all secrecy, and she consenting thereto, he visited her, not once, but many times, to the great contentment of both. But, this continuing, it chanced one night that he was, without the knowledge of himself or his mistress, seen of one of the ladies of the convent to take leave of Isabetta and go his ways. The nun communicated her discovery to divers others and they were minded at first to denounce Isabetta to the abbess, who was called Madam Usimbalda and who, in the opinion of the nuns and of whosoever knew her, was a good and pious lady; but, on consideration, they bethought themselves to seek to have the abbess take her with the young man, so there might be no room for denial. Accordingly, they held their peace and kept watch by turns in secret to surprise her.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Accordingly, without saying aught of the matter to any, he punctually repaired thither at the hour appointed him and found the bagnio taken by the lady; nor had he waited long ere there came two slave-girls laden with gear and bearing on their heads, the one a fine large mattress of cotton wool and the other a great basket full of gear. The mattress they set on a bedstead in one of the chambers of the bagnio and spread thereon a pair of very fine sheets, laced with silk, together with a counterpane of snow-white Cyprus buckram[415] and two pillows wonder-curiously wrought.[416] Then, putting off their clothes they entered the bath and swept it all and washed it excellent well. Nor was it long ere the lady herself came thither, with other two slave-girls, and accosted Salabaetto with the utmost joy; then, as first she had commodity, after she had both clipped and kissed him amain, heaving the heaviest sighs in the world, she said to him, 'I know not who could have brought me to this pass, other than thou; thou hast kindled a fire in my vitals, little dog of a Tuscan!' Then, at her instance, they entered the bath, both naked, and with them two of the slave-girls; and there, without letting any else lay a finger on him, she with her own hands washed Salabaetto all wonder-well with musk and clove-scented soap; after which she let herself be washed and rubbed of the slave-girls. This done, the latter brought two very white and fine sheets, whence came so great a scent of roses that everything there seemed roses, in one of which they wrapped Salabaetto and in the other the lady and taking them in their arms, carried them both to the bed prepared for them. There, whenas they had left sweating, the slave-girls did them loose from the sheets wherein they were wrapped and they abode naked in the others, whilst the girls brought out of the basket wonder-goodly casting-bottles of silver, full of sweet waters, rose and jessamine and orange and citron-flower scented, and sprinkled them all therewith; after which boxes of succades and wines of great price were produced and they refreshed themselves awhile. [Footnote 415: _Bucherame._ The word "buckram" was anciently applied to the finest linen cloth, as is apparently the case here; see Ducange, voce _Boquerannus_, and Florio, voce _Bucherame_.] [Footnote 416: _i.e._ in needlework.]

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Ezra Pound was his true Penelope, and even Pound’s criminal politics and weird economics Lou was able to justify when it suited his mood. For Lou, Pound was strategic in any dismissal of Eliot’s absurdly English posturing, and both men rose serenely above the local American battle between the Beats and Academics. Lou couldn’t be an Academic. His fear and hatred of schools forbade that, as well as his contempt for sterile exercises. But the Beats, despite their appealing cult of drugs and Whitmanian sincerity, lacked the cool elegance Lou venerated. The values he really embraced were those of Negro jazz musicians who divided the world into what was square and what was cool. Things labeled cool were highly controlled if sometimes arbitrary and decorative, an expression of a narrow range of feelings: happy-guy exuberance, cerebral noodling, or a foggy but anxious melancholy. Each of those few times Lou wanted to like someone over fifty, he repeated Pound’s phrase about “old men with beautiful manners.” Only twenty years later did I stumble across the line and realize Pound was mocking the statesmen who brought on World War I. Lou had no sense of irony or history and none of comedy save the grand guignol of his indignation. At about this time, a homosexual magazine, One, began to be published in California. Lou was appalled. “Why should a bunch of criminals be allowed to have a magazine, for chrissake. They might as well let thieves publish The Safecracker’s Quarterly. One, indeed ...” If an apology for homophilia struck him as a bad joke (or was he afraid it might make gay life seem too square?), Lou was a respectful reader of the boy books that were emerging then, those magazines of black-and-white photos of teenagers with shaved chests, sucked-in if unexercised stomachs, and cloth posing-straps who stood on a dais silhouetted against a sunburst of seamless paper. They were pictured lifting a spear or throwing a discus so that the alibi of classical Greek homosexuality could be produced. Lou would roar with laughter over the short articles by a minister about Christian fellowship or by an athletic director about a sound mind and a sound body or by a “scholar” about Greek love, but he stared for hours at the boys, especially one, Bobby Phalen, whom he followed from one publication to another, month to month, and whose greatest shots he’d blown up and framed. “Look at that perfect ass, Bunny, the way it’s almost too big, nigger big, but just misses by being not all high and hard but perfectly round, pneumatic with youth, just as though it’d been drawn by a compass, no flattening here, no sag, and then the roundness!

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Of course, I wanted to sleep with them, a good many of them, and they were strong and brown and at home on this beach and in this city, whereas I was a white foreigner. Simultaneously, in another corner of my mind I felt a queasiness about being here with so many tacky queens, these drags with the plucked eyebrows and bass voices, with the silver toenails and immense feet—chagrined and attracted and afraid. Lou had no such hesitations. He maintained his high-paying job and knew how to pitch an account to the president of a corporation, just as in group- therapy sessions he knew how to cite Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia. But leaving aside these concessions to the middle class, he’d moved into a marginal neighborhood and even had Misty’s initials tattooed on his shoulders in a blue-and-red heart. On the train back to town, the subway came up aboveground to pass over a long low stretch on trestles. The eight-o’clock sunlight fell on a girl standing at the head of the car. Her blonde hair caught in the wind pouring in through an open window, danced around her like the energy at the heart of the sun. I rested my head on Lou’s tattooed shoulder and half dozed. Some of the gay boys were still playing records, and two were jitterbugging. I longed for a Coke. As my eyes fluttered open and shut with delicious sleepiness, our train passed above an inland marsh and the girl turned slowly, idly around a pole while her hair transformed the solid silver cylinder into goldest filigree.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  There was, then, no great while ago, in Florence a damsel very handsome and agreeable, according to her condition, who was the daughter of a poor father and was called Simona; and although it behoved her with her own hands earn the bread she would eat and sustain her life by spinning wool, she was not therefor of so poor a spirit but that she dared to admit into her heart Love, which,--by means of the pleasing words and fashions of a youth of no greater account than herself, who went giving wool to spin for a master of his, a wool-monger,--had long made a show of wishing to enter there. Having, then, received Him into her bosom with the pleasing aspect of the youth who loved her whose name was Pasquino, she heaved a thousand sighs, hotter than fire, at every hank of yarn she wound about the spindle, bethinking her of him who had given it her to spin and ardently desiring, but venturing not to do more. He, on his side, grown exceeding anxious that his master's wool should be well spun, overlooked Simona's spinning more diligently than that of any other, as if the yarn spun by her alone and none other were to furnish forth the whole cloth; wherefore, the one soliciting and the other delighting to be solicited, it befell that, he growing bolder than of his wont and she laying aside much of the timidity and shamefastness she was used to feel, they gave themselves up with a common accord to mutual pleasures, which were so pleasing to both that not only did neither wait to be bidden thereto of the other, but each forewent other in the matter of invitation. Ensuing this their delight from day to day and waxing ever more enkindled for continuance, it chanced one day that Pasquino told Simona he would fain have her find means to come to a garden, whither he wished to carry her so they might there foregather more at their ease and with less suspect. Simona answered that she would well and accordingly on Sunday, after eating, giving her father to believe that she meant to go a-pardoning to San Gallo,[250] she betook herself, with a friend of hers, called Lagina, to the garden appointed her of Pasquino. There she found him with a comrade of his, whose name was Puccino, but who was commonly called Stramba,[251] and an amorous acquaintance being quickly clapped up between the latter and Lagina, Simona and her lover withdrew to one part of the garden, to do their pleasure, leaving Stramba and Lagina in another.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  "The stones found by Landolfo," began Fiammetta, to whose turn it came to tell, "have brought to my mind a story scarce less full of perilous scapes than that related by Lauretta, but differing therefrom inasmuch as the adventures comprised in the latter befell in the course of belike several years and these of which I have to tell in the space of a single night, as you shall hear. There was once in Perugia, as I have heard tell aforetime, a young man, a horse-courser, by name Andreuccio di Pietro,[95] who, hearing that horses were good cheap at Naples, put five hundred gold florins in his purse and betook himself thither with other merchants, having never before been away from home. He arrived there one Sunday evening, towards vespers, and having taken counsel with his host, sallied forth next morning to the market, where he saw great plenty of horses. Many of them pleased him and he cheapened one and another, but could not come to an accord concerning any. Meanwhile, to show that he was for buying, he now and again, like a raw unwary clown as he was, pulled out the purse of florins he had with him, in the presence of those who came and went. As he was thus engaged, with his purse displayed, it chanced that a Sicilian damsel, who was very handsome, but disposed for a small matter to do any man's pleasure, passed near him, without his seeing her, and catching sight of the purse, said straightway in herself, 'Who would fare better than I, if yonder money were mine!' And passed on. [Footnote 95: _i.e._ son of Pietro, as they still say in Lancashire and other northern provinces, "Tom o' Dick" for "Thomas, son of Richard," etc.] Now there was with her an old woman, likewise a Sicilian, who, seeing Andreuccio, let her companion pass on and running to him, embraced him affectionately, which when the damsel saw, she stepped aside to wait for her, without saying aught. Andreuccio, turning to the old woman and recognizing her, gave her a hearty greeting and she, having promised to visit him at his inn, took leave, without holding overlong parley there, whilst he fell again to chaffering, but bought nothing that morning. The damsel, who had noted first Andreuccio's purse and after her old woman's acquaintance with him, began cautiously to enquire of the latter, by way of casting about for a means of coming at the whole or part of the money, who and whence he was and what he did there and how she came to know him. The old woman told her every particular of Andreuccio's affairs well nigh as fully as he himself could have done, having long abidden with his father, first in Sicily and after at Perugia, and acquainted her, to boot, where he lodged and wherefore he was come thither.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  When the man fucked the boy, the boy always had his rump up in the air, propped up on a pillow, and the man would lick his anus and tongue it and finger it before greasing it up with KY and fucking it, long and hard, while the boy squirmed in pain or pleasure. While being fucked, the boy ignored his own dick and even lost his hard-on, proof of how thoroughly his was concentrating on his ass. After the man shot his load, he’d stay in the boy, they’d roll over on their sides, and the boy would now be free to masturbate quickly while held tightly in his man’s arms. Once in a while, the boy was permitted to fuck the man, as a loving concession to the boy’s own masculinity, espaliered but still rawly alive, shimmeringly ambiguous. As soon as the boy came, they wiped off with the already stiff and greasy trick towel, and the boy sat on the toilet and shit out sperm. Lou reserved special scorn for boys who whispered to their lovers on the way to a midnight movie, “I’ve still got your babies inside me.” “Don’t they know those babies are dead spunk festering up their filthy bungholes!” A real boy, someone skinny and under twelve who walked around with his mouth open, sent Lou into raptures. One sweaty afternoon in Chicago we rode the elevated and sat behind a boy of eleven or so in shorts and T-shirt. The boy stared out the window and wagged his right leg against his stationary left leg, in a ceaseless, thoughtless way. A hard little erection could be seen pressed flat against his tummy in his white shorts. Unconsciously he kept batting at the erection with the back of his right hand, now to one side of it, now to the other, as though despite trial and error he had yet to find the exact spot. His skin had no pores, no bulges, and no sheen—it was as mat and consistent as face powder, except it looked cool, firm, and alive. It drank the light as soil drinks water. His shoulders and thin arms hung limply down with sublime inconsequence, though his shoulder blades looked too knotty under the cotton, as if they were about to hatch wings. The same fine, nearly invisible gold down that covered his cheeks, and had collected in a haze just below the line of his light brown hair, dusted his nape in a precise pattern, the shape of a cursive letter M, rising on either side and dipping in the center toward his spine. If the down had been molten it would have roared as it rose to descend that glistening chute. “Yes,” Lou insisted, “if it made a sound.” He sank into a silence then sighed: “If it were gold ... just look at that nape.” Lou spoke as loudly as if we were conversing in a language all our own.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The next day I said, “Lou says it’s wrong to see each day as a separate beginning. It’s wrong to divide time up into days and weeks. He says you should live as though time is one unbroken flow.” “Is that right?” Again that look of anxiety, that wincing look of concentration. “Yes, and I have no business saying this now, after I’ve just met you, but I feel that you’re going to turn my life into something like that. Today, all day at the office, I was so full of expectation.” Sean nodded. We ate our salad out of a battered saucepan, sharing Sean’s only fork. “Tell me about Lou,” Sean said. What a fool I am, I thought. “Oh, he’s terrific; I love him very much.” “Were you and he ever lovers?” “Yes.” “When?” “About a hundred years ago. The best friends are old lovers, don’t you think?” “I don’t know. I never had a lover.” “I can’t believe that.” “Well,” Sean said, “I had an affair with this guy Ted. But we’re not friends now. He drove me nuts. He’s a professional broken heart. Moons around all the time, threatens suicide, calls me up when he’s drunk.” Sean leapt up and opened the refrigerator. Staring into it he said, “I guess that’s what I think. That’s what my friend Julio says. It sounds right.” “You don’t know?” He sank back down. “I don’t know anything. Tell me anything and I’ll believe it. And that’s not even true.” “Who’s Julio?” “Oh, this great guy I met through Ted. You’ll meet him. He’s a famous dress designer.” All evening long I questioned Sean about every detail of his life. I memorized each name. I wanted to know all of Sean’s history right away. Every word he uttered either raised or dashed my hopes. “I’m very tired tonight”—bad, he wants to get rid of me. “But who needs sleep? It’s more important to talk to you and” (radiant smile) “more fun”—good, very, very good. “I should study some Latin”—bad. “Can you read while I work? I don’t want you to go. I like you here” (pats the couch deliberately, looking me in the eye)—good. Excellent. Every night for weeks we got together, sometimes at my place, sometimes at his. We didn’t have sex very often, but Sean liked me to stay over. He liked to hug me in the bed at night. He liked my mind and would force me to give opinions, which wasn’t my way. I wanted to write fiction precisely because I could only see things dramatically, not politically or abstractly. I assumed he liked my sweetness, but once I became sarcastic with a book salesman who had never heard of Ronald Firbank. The salesman kept saying, over and over again, “Is that the suspense writer? He’s the suspense guy, right?” I said something nasty and haughty. On the street again Sean chortled and said he liked that; he even referred to the incident several times later.

• From Another Country (1962)

  And her mind was filled again with that bright, blue field. She shook with the memory of his weight, her desire, her terror, and her cunning. Not here. Where? Oh, Richard. The cruel sun, and the indifferent air, and the two of them burning on a burning field. She knew that, yes, she must now surrender, now that she had him; she knew that she could not let him go; and, oh, his hands, his hands. But she was frightened, she realized that she knew nothing: Can’t we wait? Wait. No. No. And his lips burned her neck and her breasts. Then let’s go to the woods. Let’s go to the woods. And he grinned. The memory of that grin rushed up from its hiding place and splintered her heart now. You’d have to carry me, or I’d have to crawl, can’t you feel it? Then, Let me in Cass, take me, take me, I swear I won’t betray you, you know I won’t! “I love you, Cass,” he said, his lips twitching and his eyes stunned with grief. “Tell me where you’ve been, tell me why you’ve gone so far away from me.” “Why I,” she said, helplessly, “have gone away from you?” The smell of crushed flowers rose to her nostrils. She began to cry. She did not look down. She looked straight up at the sun; then she closed her eyes, and the sun roared inside her head. One hand had left her—where his hand had been, she was cold. I won’t hurt you. Please. Maybe just a little. Just at first. Oh. Richard. Please. Tell me you love me. Say it. Say it now. Oh, yes. I love you. I love you. Tell me you’ll love me forever. Yes. Forever. Forever. He was looking at her, leaning on the bar, looking at her from far away. She dried her eyes with the handkerchief he had thrown in her lap. “Give me a cigarette, please.” He threw her the pack, threw her some matches. She lit a cigarette. “When was the last time you saw Ida and Vivaldo? Tell me the truth.” “Tonight.” “And you’ve been spending all this time—every time you come in here in the early morning—with Ida and Vivaldo?” She was frightened again, and she knew that her tone betrayed her. “Yes.” “You’re lying. Ida hasn’t been with Vivaldo. She’s been with Ellis. And it’s been going on a long time.” He paused. “The question is—where have you been? Who’s been with Vivaldo while Ida’s been away—till two o’clock in the morning?” She looked at him, too stunned for an instant, to calculate. “You mean, Ida’s been having an affair with Steve Ellis? For how long? And how do you know that?” “How do you—not know it?” “Why—everytime I saw them, they seemed perfectly natural and happy together——” “But many of the times you say you’ve been with them. you couldn’t have been with them because Ida’s been with Steve!”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The young man, hearing his mother's words, was at first abashed, but presently, bethinking himself that none was better able than she to satisfy his wishes, he put away shamefastness and said thus to her: 'Madam, nothing hath wrought so effectually with me to keep my love hidden as my having noted of most folk that, once they are grown in years, they choose not to remember them of having themselves been young. But, since in this I find you reasonable, not only will I not deny that to be true which you say you have observed, but I will, to boot, discover to you of whom [I am enamoured], on condition that you will, to the best of your power, give effect to your promise; and thus may you have me whole again.' Whereto the lady (trusting overmuch in that which was not to come to pass for her on such wise as she deemed in herself) answered freely that he might in all assurance discover to her his every desire, for that she would without any delay address herself to contrive that he should have his pleasure. 'Madam,' then said the youth, 'the exceeding beauty and commendable fashions of our Jeannette and my unableness to make her even sensible, still less to move her to pity, of my love and the having never dared to discover it unto any have brought me whereas you see me; and if that which you have promised me come not, one way or another, to pass, you may be assured that my life will be brief.'

• From The Decameron (1353)

  However, as God, having compassion on my youth, hath willed it, I have happened on yonder man, with whom I abide in this chamber, wherein it is unknown what manner of thing is a holiday (I speak of those holidays which you, more assiduous in the service of God than in that of the ladies, did so diligently celebrate) nor ever yet entered in at this door Saturday nor Friday nor vigil nor Emberday nor Lent, that is so long; nay, here swink we day and night and thump our wool; and this very night after matinsong, I know right well how the thing went, once he was up. Wherefore I mean to abide with him and work; whilst I am young, and leave saints' days and jubilees and fasts for my keeping when I am old; so get you gone about your business as quickliest you may, good luck go with you, and keep as many holidays as you please, without me.' Messer Ricciardo, hearing these words, was distressed beyond endurance and said, whenas he saw she had made an end of speaking. 'Alack, sweet my soul, what is this thou sayest? Hast thou no regard for thy kinsfolk's honour and thine own? Wilt thou rather abide here for this man's whore and in mortal sin than at Pisa as my wife? He, when he is weary of thee, will turn thee away to thine own exceeding reproach, whilst I will still hold thee dear and still (e'en though I willed it not) thou shalt be mistress of my house. Wilt thou for the sake of a lewd and disorderly appetite, forsake thine honour and me, who love thee more than my life? For God's sake, dear my hope, speak no more thus, but consent to come with me; henceforth, since I know thy desire, I will enforce myself [to content it;] wherefore, sweet my treasure, change counsel and come away with me, who have never known weal since thou wast taken from me.' Whereto answered the lady, 'I have no mind that any, now that it availeth not, should be more tender of my honour than I myself; would my kinsfolk had had regard thereto, whenas they gave me to you! But, as they had then no care for my honour, I am under no present concern to be careful of theirs; and if I am herein _mortar_[142] sin, I shall abide though it be in pestle[142] sin. And let me tell you that here meseemeth I am Paganino's wife, whereas at Pisa meseemed I was your whore, seeing that there, by season of the moon and quadratures of geometry, needs must be planets concur to couple betwixt you and me, whereas here Paganino holdeth me all night in his arms and straineth me and biteth me, and how he serveth me, let God tell you for me. You say forsooth you will enforce yourself; to what?

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It came to pass, after some months, that the friends and kinsfolk of Gisippus resorted to him and together with Titus exhorted him to take a wife, to which he consenting, they found him a young Athenian lady of marvellous beauty and very noble parentage, whose name was Sophronia and who was maybe fifteen years old. The term of the future nuptials drawing nigh, Gisippus one day besought Titus to go visit her with him, for that he had not yet seen her. Accordingly, they being come into her house and she seated between the twain, Titus proceeded to consider her with the utmost attention, as if to judge of the beauty of his friend's bride, and every part of her pleasing him beyond measure, what while he inwardly commended her charms to the utmost, he fell, without showing any sign thereof, as passionately enamoured of her as ever yet man of woman. After they had been with her awhile, they took their leave and returned home, where Titus, betaking himself alone into his chamber, fell a-thinking of the charming damsel and grew the more enkindled the more he enlarged upon her in thought; which, perceiving, he fell to saying in himself, after many ardent sighs, 'Alack, the wretchedness of thy life, Titus! Where and on what settest thou thy mind and thy love and thy hope? Knowest thou not that it behoveth thee, as well for the kindness received from Chremes and his family as for the entire friendship that is between thee and Gisippus, whose bride she is, to have yonder damsel in such respect as a sister? Whom, then, lovest thou? Whither lettest thou thyself be carried away by delusive love, whither by fallacious hope? Open the eyes of thine understanding and recollect thyself, wretch that thou art; give place to reason, curb thy carnal appetite, temper thine unhallowed desires and direct thy thoughts unto otherwhat; gainstand thy lust in this its beginning and conquer thyself, whilst it is yet time. This thou wouldst have is unseemly, nay, it is dishonourable; this thou art minded to ensue it behoveth thee, even wert thou assured (which thou art not) of obtaining it, to flee from, an thou have regard unto that which true friendship requireth and that which thou oughtest. What, then, wilt thou do, Titus? Thou wilt leave this unseemly love, an thou wouldst do that which behoveth.'

• From The Decameron (1353)

  On this wise he bespoke him at one time and another, to enkindle him the more, till one night, what while it chanced my lord doctor held the light to Bruno, who was in act to paint the battle of the rats and the cats, the former, himseeming he had now well taken him with his hospitalities, determined to open his mind to him, and accordingly, they being alone together, he said to him, 'God knoweth, Bruno, there is no one alive for whom I would do everything as I would for thee; indeed, shouldst thou bid me go hence to Peretola, methinketh it would take little to make me go thither; wherefore I would not have thee marvel if I require thee of somewhat familiarly and with confidence. As thou knowest, it is no great while since thou bespokest me of the fashions of your merry company, wherefore so great a longing hath taken me to be one of you that never did I desire aught so much. Nor is this my desire without cause, as thou shalt see, if ever it chance that I be of your company; for I give thee leave to make mock of me an I cause not come thither the finest serving-wench thou ever setst eyes on. I saw her but last year at Cacavincigli and wish her all my weal;[402] and by the body of Christ, I had e'en given her half a score Bolognese groats, so she would but have consented to me; but she would not. Wherefore, as most I may, I prithee teach me what I must do to avail to be of your company and do thou also do and contrive so I may be thereof. Indeed, you will have in me a good and loyal comrade, ay, and a worshipful. Thou seest, to begin with, what a fine man I am and how well I am set up on my legs. Ay, and I have a face as it were a rose, more by token that I am a doctor of medicine, such as I believe you have none among you. Moreover, I know many fine things and goodly canzonets; marry, I will sing you one.' And incontinent he fell a-singing. [Footnote 402: _i.e._ love her beyond anything in the world. For former instances of this idiomatic expression, see ante, passim.]