Desire

Passages

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

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• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  You know, it all went so quick I couldn’t tell what I felt . . . I don’t think I even put my finger inside you. I must have just touched the outside—that’s about all. Listen, sit down here on the couch . . . let’s be friends again.” I pulled her down beside me—she was melting visibly—and I put my arm around her waist, as though to console her more tenderly. “Has it always been like that?” I asked innocently, and I almost laughed the next moment, realizing what an idiotic question it was. She hung her head coyly, as though we were touching on an unmentionable tragedy. “Listen, maybe if you sat on my lap . . .” and I hoisted her gently on to my lap, at the same time delicately putting my hand under her dress and resting it lightly on her knee . . . “maybe if you sat a moment like this, you’d feel better . . . there, that’s it, just snuggle back in my arms . . . are you feeling better?” She didn’t answer, but she didn’t resist either; she just lay back limply and closed her eyes. Gradually and very gently and smoothly I moved my hand up her leg, talking to her in a low, soothing voice all the time. When I got my fingers into her crotch and parted the little lips she was as moist as a dishrag. I massaged it gently, opening it up more and more, and still handing out a telepathic line about women sometimes being mistaken about themselves and how sometimes they think they’re very small when really they’re quite normal, and the longer I kept it up the juicier she got and the more she opened up. I had four fingers inside her and there was room inside for more if I had had more to put in. She had an enormous cunt and it had been well reamed out, I could feel. I looked at her to see if she was still keeping her eyes shut. Her mouth was open and she was gasping but her eyes were tight shut, as though she were pretending to herself that it was all a dream. I could move her about roughly now—no danger of the slightest protest. And maliciously perhaps, I jostled her about unnecessarily, just to see if she would come to. She was as limp as a feather pillow and even when her head struck the arm of the sofa she showed no sign of irritation. It was as though she had anesthetized herself for a gratuitous fuck.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e place of ped- erasty in Leucippe and Clitophon, which is important enough to frame the fi rst quarter of the novel, helps us to situate contemporary attitudes to ped- erasty in terms of high imperial culture, rather than in comparison to clas- sical Greece. A heightened and almost impolitic insistence on the physical essence of love, an awareness that the beloved’s consent could not be squared with social honor, and narratives of eros that sought to understand the place of mankind’s sexual instincts within the cosmos: these, rather than disapproval or disinvestment, make up the story of pederasty in the Roman Empire.  Th e Greeks and Romans of this period believed that beauty resided in the male as well as the female body, and they were never surprised when the sight of a beautiful body aroused sexual desire. “Did you never feel eros for someone, for a boy or girl, slave or free?” A farcical tale of travel to the after- life imagined that on the Isle of the Blessed, “all the wives are shared in common without jealousy . . . and the boys all submit to their pursuers without re sis tance.” Pastoral poetry, meant to evoke an idealized harmony between man and nature, made boys the object of erotic attraction, from Virgil (who was said to be more fond of boys than of women) to Nemesia- nus, a court poet of the late third century. Marcus Aurelius, who learned from his adoptive grandfather to “cease all things concerned with the love of youths,” thanked the gods that he had touched “neither Th eodotus nor Benedicta”— the casual indiff erence to the gender of the erotic object is what is telling. Th e traditional myths still held that even the gods were sexually THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  indiscriminate: Zeus became a swan for Leda, but an ea gle for Ganymede: “some think one or the other is greater, but they’re equal to me.”  Age dynamics were at the core of acceptable same- sex love in the Roman world. Th e “short season of rejoicing” was the span of time between early adolescence and the growth of the fi rst beard. In the wry words of a witty courtesan, “boys are beautiful so long as they look like females.” Th e physi- ological boundaries of pederasty were fl exible, if inexorable, indeed a sym- bol of evanescence: “time, which lays waste to beauty.” Sixteen to eigh teen were the canonically acceptable years, propriety decreasing by degrees with distance from this window, without fi rm breaks. A mischievous poet from the age of Hadrian was indiscreetly precise: the age of seventeen marked a sort of perfection reserved for Zeus himself; after that, he said, there was a risk the boy might turn the tables. It was a traditional charge: by twenty, when the boy had a bristling chin, there was too much suspicion of alter- nating sexual roles.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Or as God would look to man if the devil had given him wings. And with it all, in the fixed, close intimacy of a night without end she was radiant, jubilant, an ultra-black jubilation streaming from her like a steady flow of sperm from the Mithraic Bull. She was double barreled, like a shotgun, a female bull with an acetylene torch in her womb. In heat she focused on the grand cosmocrator, her eyes rolled back to the whites, her lips a-slaver. In the blind hole of sex she waltzed like a trained mouse, her jaws unhinged like a snake’s, her skin horripilating in barbed plumes. She had the insatiable lust of a unicorn, the itch that laid the Egyptians low. Even the hole in the sky through which the lackluster star shone down was swallowed up in her fury. We lived glued to the ceiling, the hot rancid fumes of the everyday life steaming up and suffocating us. We lived at marble heat, the ascending glow of human flesh warming the snakelike coils in which we were locked. We lived riveted to the nethermost depths, our skins smoked to the color of a gray cigar by the fumes of worldly passion. Like two heads carried on the pikes of our executioners we circled slowly and fixedly over the heads and shoulders of the world below. What was life on the solid earth to us who were decapitated and forever joined at the genitals? We were the twin snakes of Paradise, lucid in heat and cool as chaos itself. Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Mercury, conjunction Venus, conjunction Saturn, conjunction Pluto, conjunction Uranus, conjunction quicksilver, laudanum, radium, bismuth. The grand conjunction was every Saturday night, Leo fornicating with Draco in the house of brother and sister. The great malheur was a ray of sunlight stealing through the curtains. The great curse was Jupiter, king of the fishes, that he might flash a benevolent eye. The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too much. I remember everything, but like a dummy sitting on the lap of a ventriloquist. It seems to me that throughout the long, uninterrupted connubial solstice I sat on her lap (even when she was standing) and spoke the lines she had taught me. It seems to me that she must have commanded God’s chief plumber to keep the black star shining through the hole in the ceiling, must have bid him to rain down perpetual night and with it all the crawling torments that move noiselessly about in the dark so that the mind becomes a twirling awl burrowing frantically into black nothingness. Did I only imagine that she talked incessantly, or had I become such a marvelously trained dummy that I intercepted the thought before it reached the lips?

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. Her appearance otherwise was not pleasing. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her. He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.” He went home with her that night. He lay with her on her sagging, lumpy single mattress, tipping his head to blow smoke into the room. She butted her forehead against his chest. The mattress squeaked with every movement. He told her about Sharon. “I had a relationship like that when I was in college,” she said. “Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.” The room was pathetically decorated with postcards, pictures of huge-eyed Japanese cartoon characters, and tiny, maddening toys that she had obviously gone out of her way to find, displayed in a tightly arranged tumble on her dresser. A frail model airplane dangled from the light above the dresser. Next to it was a pasted-up cartoon of a pink-haired girl cringing open-mouthed before a spire-haired boy-villain in shorts and glasses. Her short skirt was blown up by the force of his threatening expression, and her panties showed. What kind of person would put crap like this up on her wall? “I’m afraid of you,” she murmured. “Why?” “Because I just am.” “Don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.” She curled against him and squeezed her feet together like a stretching cat. Her socks were thick and ugly, and her feet were large for her size. Details like this could repel him, but he felt tenderly toward the long, grubby, squeezed-together feet. He said, “I want a slave.” She said, “I don’t know.

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

  Objection 2: Further, the rational powers, according to the Philosopher (Metaph. viii, 2), extend to opposite things. But the will is a rational power, because, as he says (De Anima iii, 9), “the will is in the reason.” Therefore the will extends to opposite things, and therefore it is determined to nothing of necessity. Objection 3: Further, by the will we are masters of our own actions. But we are not masters of that which is of necessity. Therefore the act of the will cannot be necessitated. On the contrary, Augustine says (De Trin. xiii, 4) that “all desire happiness with one will.” Now if this were not necessary, but contingent, there would at least be a few exceptions. Therefore the will desires something of necessity. I answer that, The word “necessity” is employed in many ways. For that which must be is necessary. Now that a thing must be may belong to it by an intrinsic principle—either material, as when we say that everything composed of contraries is of necessity corruptible—or formal, as when we say that it is necessary for the three angles of a triangle to be equal to two right angles. And this is “natural” and “absolute necessity.” In another way, that a thing must be, belongs to it by reason of something extrinsic, which is either the end or the agent. On the part of the end, as when without it the end is not to be attained or so well attained: for instance, food is said to be necessary for life, and a horse is necessary for a journey. This is called “necessity of end,” and sometimes also “utility.” On the part of the agent, a thing must be, when someone is forced by some agent, so that he is not able to do the contrary. This is called “necessity of coercion.” Now this necessity of coercion is altogether repugnant to the will. For we call that violent which is against the inclination of a thing. But the very movement of the will is an inclination to something. Therefore, as a thing is called natural because it is according to the inclination of nature, so a thing is called voluntary because it is according to the inclination of the will. Therefore, just as it is impossible for a thing to be at the same time violent and natural, so it is impossible for a thing to be absolutely coerced or violent, and voluntary. But necessity of end is not repugnant to the will, when the end cannot be attained except in one way: thus from the will to cross the sea, arises in the will the necessity to wish for a ship.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was my first fuck, by Jesus, and it had to be that a train would come along and shower hot sparks over us. Lola was terrified. It was her first fuck too, I guess, and she probably needed it more than I, but when she felt the sparks she wanted to tear loose. It was like trying to hold down a wild mare. I couldn’t keep her down, no matter how I wrestled with her. She got up, shook her clothes down, and adjusted the bun at the nape of her neck. “You must go home,” she says. “I’m not going home,” I said, and with that I took her by the arm and started walking. We walked along in dead silence for quite a distance. Neither of us seemed to be noticing where we were going. Finally we were out on the highway and up above us were the reservoirs and near the reservoirs was a pond. Instinctively I headed toward the pond. We had to pass under some low-hanging trees as we neared the pond. I was helping Lola to stoop down when suddenly she slipped, dragging me with her. She made no effort to get up; instead she caught hold of me and pressed me to her, and to my complete amazement I also felt her slip her hand in my fly. She caressed me so wonderfully that in a jiffy I came in her hand. Then she took my hand and put it between her legs. She lay back completely relaxed and opened her legs wide. I bent over and kissed every hair on her cunt; I put my tongue in her navel and licked it clean. Then I lay with my head between her legs and lapped up the drool that was pouring from her. She was moaning now and clutching wildly with her hands; her hair had come completely undone and was lying over her bare abdomen. To make it short, I got it in again, and I held it a long time, for which she must have been damned grateful because she came I don’t know how many times—it was like a pack of firecrackers going off, and with it all she sunk her teeth into me, bruised my lips, clawed me, ripped my shirt and what the hell not. I was branded like a steer when I got home and took a look at myself in the mirror. It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. A month later the Niessens moved to another city, and I never saw Lola again. But I hung her sporran over the bed and I prayed to it every night. And whenever I began the Czerny stuff I would get an erection, thinking of Lola lying in the grass, thinking of her long black hair, the bun at the nape of her neck, the groans she vented and the juice that poured out of her.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  For him, the climbing ecstasy of shared plea sure encapsulated the real meaning of eros. When the woman neared the “climax of Aphrodite,” she became frenzied with plea sure, and at the peak of orgasm the woman’s gasps even carried a little of her vital spirit into the mouth of her lover, where it mingled with his wandering kiss and returned to the heart.  Th is description of the woman’s plea sure, the reader of the romance re- members, is delivered by a young man whose experiences, on his own ad- mission, have been limited to professional women. Part of us may wonder if Clitophon has not himself been sold a convincing act, but that is to bring a modern cynicism into the picture. Achilles is a sly author, to be sure, but his rendering of female plea sure is integral to the whole conception of eros in the novel. Th e novels embrace the physical power of eros and celebrate its potential to be reconciled within the order of married life and the city- state. Th e Greeks and Romans recognized eros as a wild, destructive force. Th e novels present a cosmos where the feral power of eros is harnessed by mar- riage, not dampened by it. For Achilles, marriage itself exists as part of na- ture, or at least on an indistinct border between wild nature and human civilization. Th e novels are about the ending, about marriage, but they are not sermons or po liti cal pamphlets on behalf of marriage. In the world of the novel, civilization does not repress eros. For the novelist, the fi res of sexual love gave warmth and meaning to human life. Civilization is nour- ished by absorbing eros into its most vital institution. THE GLOOMY ONES: THE PHI LOS O PHERS AND SEXUALITY In the very opening scene of Leucippe and Clitophon, the “author” sails to Sidon and meets Clitophon in a temple of the goddess Astarte. Th e topic of eros arises and the two descend to a nearby grove bordered by a clear cold stream; the rest of the novel is Clitophon’s fi rst- person account of his expe- riences. Th e story of Clitophon and Leucippe’s romance is an afternoon conte in the cool shade of the plane trees. Th e ancient reader would have known immediately that we have been placed in the surroundings of Plato’s Phaedrus, one of the Athenian’s most celebrated dialogues on eros, in which THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  Socrates extols the power of love to draw humans toward the divine. It was by design an ambitious place to set an erotic story. From the beginning Achilles Tatius evokes the atmosphere of philosophy and the possibility of a rivalry between philosophy and art. Th e novel presents a narrative of eros that is permeated at every turn by the concerns of contemporary philoso- phy. Leucippe and Clitophon is a philosophical novel, though not a dogmatic one.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk; there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap; there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive; there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside; there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in ecstasy; there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave little flags at Christmas time; there are telegraphic cunts which practice the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried bread crumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter; there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded; there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown? And then there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all but of that bright country to which we were long ago invited to fly. Here the dew is ever sparkling and the tall reeds bend with the wind. It is here that the great father of fornication dwells, Father Apis, the mantic bull who gored his way to heaven and dethroned the gelded deities of right and wrong. From Apis sprang the race of unicorns, that ridiculous beast of ancient writ whose learned brow lengthened into a gleaming phallus, and from the unicorn by gradual stages was derived the late-city man of which Oswald Spengler speaks. And from the dead cock of this sad specimen arose the giant skyscraper with its express elevators and observation towers. We are the last decimal point of sexual calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate of straw. Now for the aluminum wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells. Everything goes forward like oiled clocks; for each minute of the dial there are a million noiseless clocks which tick off the rinds of time.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Here is the novels’ most authentic level of repre sen ta tion, and the greatest opportunity they aff ord to explore the relationship between erotic ideologies and social structure in the late classical period. Th ey pre- serve for us something of the vitality, complexity, and chaos of sexual life in the second- century empire. Because Leucippe and Clitophon deliberately off ers a panoramic vision of eros and its place in the world, we follow Achil- les Tatius and consider the sexual experience of the high empire from various angles—same- sex eroticism, the expectations placed on women, the sexual life- course of men, the dynamics of marriage, the attitudes of the phi los o- phers. Th roughout, our goal is to fi nd the interface between sexual energy and prevailing morality, the points of contact between the circulation of pleasures and the regulatory force of sexual norms. In the age of the romance, eros fl ourished unawares, serenely confi dent in its eternal powers, and if we did not know that Christianity was stirring in the hills, we might never  FROM SHAME TO SIN have believed that the fi rst icy gusts of denial could be felt sweeping across the ancient valleys. THE CURRENT FASHION: SAME- SEX EROS IN THE HIGH EMPIRE Around the age of nineteen, Clitophon’s cousin Leucippe came to live with him and his family in Tyre. He fell in love with her at fi rst sight. Paralyzed by his infatuation, he took his troubles to his cousin Clinias, only two years his elder but already “an initiate of eros.” Clinias quickly became his trusty counselor. Th e passions of Clinias were for a meirakion, a boy somewhere in his later teens, and his coaching is meant to be understood in terms of ped- erastic norms. Th e ancient novels are, both superfi cially and in their deep structure, stories of heterosexual love, but same- sex amours still fi nd an important place. In fact, the fi rst two books of Leucippe and Clitophon are framed by the traditional assumptions of classical Greek pederasty, trans- posed onto a heterosexual plot.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And from that in a few minutes to Dostoevski, then the world stopped dead, and then, like a great rosebush opening in the night, his sister Rita’s warm, velvety flesh. Now this is what is rather strange. . . . A few minutes after I thought of Rita, her private and extraordinary quim, I was in the train, bound for New York and dozing off with a marvelous languid erection. And stranger still, when I got out of the train, when I had walked but a block or two from the station, whom should I bump into rounding a corner but Rita herself. And as though she had been informed telepathically of what was going on in my brain, Rita too was hot under the whiskers. Soon we were sitting in a chop suey joint, seated side by side in a little booth, behaving exactly like a pair of rabbits in rut. On the dance floor we hardly moved. We were wedged in tightly and we stayed that way, letting them jog and jostle us about as they might. I could have taken her home to my place, as I was alone at the time, but no, I had a notion to bring her back to her own home, stand her up in the vestibule and give her a fuck right under Maxie’s nose—which I did. In the midst of it I thought again of the mannikin in the show window and of the way he had laughed that afternoon when I let drop the word quim. I was on the point of laughing aloud when suddenly I felt she was coming, one of those long drawn out orgasms such as you get now and then in a Jewish cunt. I had my hands under her buttocks, the tips of my fingers just inside her cunt, in the lining, as it were; as she began to shudder I lifted her from the ground and raised her gently up and down on the end of my cock. I thought she would go off her nut completely, the way she began to carry on. She must have had four or five orgasms like that in the air, before I put her feet down on the ground. I took it out without spilling a drop and made her lie down in the vestibule. Her hat had rolled off into a corner and her handbag had spilled open and a few coins had tumbled out. I note this because just before I gave it to her good and proper I made a mental note to pocket a few coins for my carfare home. Anyway, it was only a few hours since I had said to Maxie in the bathhouse that I would like to take a look at his sister’s quim, and here it was now smack up against me, sopping wet and throwing out one squirt after another. If she had been fucked before she had never been fucked properly, that’s a cinch.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a thick paste of dark blood; I watched them open and close with the utmost fascination, whether they hissed a viper’s hate or cooed like a turtle dove. They were always close up, as in the movie stills, so that I knew every crevice, every pore, and when the hysterical slavering began I watched the spittle fume and foam as though I were sitting in a rocking chair under Niagara Falls. I learned what to do just as though I were a part of her organism; I was better than a ventriloquist’s dummy because I could act without being violently jerked by strings. Now and then I did things impromptu like, which sometimes pleased her enormously; she would pretend, of course, not to notice these irruptions, but I could always tell when she was pleased by the way she preened herself. She had the gift for transformation; almost as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to the panther and the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the flamingo, the swan in rut. She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she had spotted a ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing immediately on the tidbits—the heart, the liver, or the ovaries—and making off again in the twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her eyes not quite closed but immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk. Prod her a bit and she would become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals and of a fragrance that was overpowering. It was amazing how marvelously I learned to take my cue; no matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in her lap, bird lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of laps, the lip of lips, tip to tip, feather to feather, the yoke in the egg, the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and cantharides. Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et cetera; love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, clutch this, clutch that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. Come food time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the egg cheep-cheep , blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice breaking his fast. And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze of the succubus devouring her young. What a blissful night of love! Saliva, sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the cavern world where even the wind is stilled.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She stepped into a flower store. The store was clean and white, except for a few smudges on the linoleum floor. Homosexuals with low voices stood behind the counter. Arranged stalks bearing absurd blossoms protruded from sedate round vases and bristled in the aisles. She had a paroxysm of fantasy. He held her, helpless and swooning, in his arms. They were supported by a soft ball of puffy blue stuff. Thornless roses surrounded their heads. His gaze penetrated her so thoroughly, it was as though he had thrust his hand into her chest and begun feeling her ribs one by one. This was all right with her. “I have never met anyone I felt this way about,” he said. “I love you.” He made her do things she’d never done before, and then they went for a walk and looked at the new tulips that were bound to have grown up somewhere. None of this felt stupid or corny, but she knew that it was. Miserably, she tried to gain a sense of proportion. She stared at the flowers. They were an agony of bright, organized beauty. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to give him flowers. She wanted to be with him in a room full of flowers. She visualized herself standing in front of him, bearing a handful of blameless flowers trapped in the ugly pastel paper the florist would staple around them. The vision was brutally embarrassing, too much so to stay in her mind for more than seconds. She stepped out of the flower store. He was not there. Her anxiety approached despair. They were supposed to spend the weekend together. He stood in a cheap pizza stand across the street, eating a greasy slice and watching her as she stood on the corner. Her anxiety was visible to him. It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. Her appearance otherwise was not pleasing. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was open to a picture of a masked woman dressed in a red rubber suit that a man was inflating with a pump. On the next page, a naked girl was tied with belts in a kneeling position on a bathroom floor. An ornery-looking young fellow approached her from behind with a rubber hose; she looked over her shoulder, her lips parted in a look of coy fear. He was surprised at how pretty she was. Her cheekbones and shoulders were like Daisy’s. — Daisy and Joey emerged from the movie theater holding hands. “We have no place to go,” said Daisy. “It’s been a month since we’ve been alone in a room. And David won’t leave.” They walked, still holding hands. “I feel so terrible about David,” she said. “He’s such a lovely, innocent person. He’s the purest person I know.” “There are no pure people.” “You haven’t seen David. He has such naked eyes. When you touch him, it’s like there’s nothing between you and him.” She looked at him quizzically. “You’re not like that. When I touch you, I don’t feel you at all.” “There’s nothing to feel.” “Don’t say that about yourself.” She dropped his hand and rubbed his back with her mittened hand. “Anyway, it’s good you’re not like David. Even as you are, I worry about you being too nice to me.” He put his hand around her neck. “I don’t know what makes you think I have any intention of being nice to you.” She turned and kissed him. He took a handful of her hair in his fist and pulled her head tautly back while he kissed her. They sat on the cold stone steps of an apartment building. They unbuttoned their jackets and huddled together, his hands on either side of her softly sweatered body. “You’re so strange,” she said. “It’s hard to talk to you.” “How so?” “You’re always talking at me. You don’t listen to what I say.” “I seem strange because I’m special.” “I think it’s because you take so many pills.” “You should start taking them. Did you know the government gives them to soldiers who are about to go into combat? They sharpen the reflexes, senses, everything.” “I’m not going into combat.” There was a sound from above. They turned and saw a handsome, well-dressed middle-aged couple at the head of the steps. Joey saw a flicker of admiration in Daisy’s face as she looked at the tall blond lady in her evening dress. The couple began to descend. Daisy and Joey stood and squeezed into a stony corner to let them pass. The man’s shoulder scratched against Joey.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her. He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.” He went home with her that night. He lay with her on her sagging, lumpy single mattress, tipping his head to blow smoke into the room. She butted her forehead against his chest. The mattress squeaked with every movement. He told her about Sharon. “I had a relationship like that when I was in college,” she said. “Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.” The room was pathetically decorated with postcards, pictures of huge-eyed Japanese cartoon characters, and tiny, maddening toys that she had obviously gone out of her way to find, displayed in a tightly arranged tumble on her dresser. A frail model airplane dangled from the light above the dresser. Next to it was a pasted-up cartoon of a pink-haired girl cringing open-mouthed before a spire-haired boy-villain in shorts and glasses. Her short skirt was blown up by the force of his threatening expression, and her panties showed. What kind of person would put crap like this up on her wall? “I’m afraid of you,” she murmured. “Why?” “Because I just am.” “Don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.” She curled against him and squeezed her feet together like a stretching cat. Her socks were thick and ugly, and her feet were large for her size. Details like this could repel him, but he felt tenderly toward the long, grubby, squeezed-together feet. He said, “I want a slave.” She said, “I don’t know. We’ll see.” He asked her to spend the weekend with him three days later.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It was my first fuck, by Jesus, and it had to be that a train would come along and shower hot sparks over us. Lola was terrified. It was her first fuck too, I guess, and she probably needed it more than I, but when she felt the sparks she wanted to tear loose. It was like trying to hold down a wild mare. I couldn’t keep her down, no matter how I wrestled with her. She got up, shook her clothes down, and adjusted the bun at the nape of her neck. “You must go home,” she says. “I’m not going home,” I said, and with that I took her by the arm and started walking. We walked along in dead silence for quite a distance. Neither of us seemed to be noticing where we were going. Finally we were out on the highway and up above us were the reservoirs and near the reservoirs was a pond. Instinctively I headed toward the pond. We had to pass under some low-hanging trees as we neared the pond. I was helping Lola to stoop down when suddenly she slipped, dragging me with her. She made no effort to get up; instead she caught hold of me and pressed me to her, and to my complete amazement I also felt her slip her hand in my fly. She caressed me so wonderfully that in a jiffy I came in her hand. Then she took my hand and put it between her legs. She lay back completely relaxed and opened her legs wide. I bent over and kissed every hair on her cunt; I put my tongue in her navel and licked it clean. Then I lay with my head between her legs and lapped up the drool that was pouring from her. She was moaning now and clutching wildly with her hands; her hair had come completely undone and was lying over her bare abdomen. To make it short, I got it in again, and I held it a long time, for which she must have been damned grateful because she came I don’t know how many times—it was like a pack of firecrackers going off, and with it all she sunk her teeth into me, bruised my lips, clawed me, ripped my shirt and what the hell not. I was branded like a steer when I got home and took a look at myself in the mirror. It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. A month later the Niessens moved to another city, and I never saw Lola again. But I hung her sporran over the bed and I prayed to it every night. And whenever I began the Czerny stuff I would get an erection, thinking of Lola lying in the grass, thinking of her long black hair, the bun at the nape of her neck, the groans she vented and the juice that poured out of her.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The girl upstairs, for instance . . . she used to come down now and then, when the wife was giving a recital, to look after the kid. She was so obviously a simpleton that I didn’t give her any notice at first. But like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of impersonal personal cunt which she was unconsciously conscious of. The oftener she came down the more conscious she got, in her unconscious way. One night, when she was in the bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me to thinking of things. I decided to take a peep through the keyhole and see for myself what was what. Lo and behold, if she isn’t standing in front of the mirror stroking and petting her little pussy. Almost talking to it, she was. I was so excited I didn’t know what to do first. I went back into the big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her to come out. As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt of hers and the fingers strumming it like. I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in the cool of the dark. I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I tried letting my pecker mesmerize her. “Come here, you bitch,” I kept saying to myself, “come in here and spread that cunt over me.” She must have caught the message immediately, for in a jiffy she had opened the door and was groping about in the dark to find the couch. I didn’t say a word, I didn’t make a move. I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the dark like a crab. Finally she was standing beside the couch. She didn’t say a word either. She just stood there quietly and as I slid my hand up her legs she moved one foot a little to open her crotch a bit more. I don’t think I ever put my hand into such a juicy crotch in all my life. It was like paste running down her legs, and if there had been any billboards handy I could have plastered up a dozen or more. After a few moments, just as naturally as a cow lowering its head to graze, she bent over and put it in her mouth. I had my whole four fingers inside her, whipping it up to a froth. Her mouth was stuffed full and the juice pouring down her legs. Not a word out of us, as I say. Just a couple of quiet maniacs working away in the dark like gravediggers. It was a fucking Paradise and I knew it, and I was ready and willing to fuck my brains away if necessary. She was probably the best fuck I ever had.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “No, it’s okay, that’s good enough.” She sat on the bed and stared at him, her small face gone suddenly grave. Her eyes were round and dark. Her muddy black makeup looked as if it had been finger-painted on. He sat down next to her and put his hand on her thigh. She ignored it. He felt as though he was bothering a girl sitting next to him on a bus. His hand sweated on her leg and he took it away. What was wrong? Why wasn’t she pulling her dress off over her head, the way they usually did? “Do you come to places like this often?” she asked. “Not too much. Every month or so. I’m married, so it’s hard to get away.” She looked worried. She reached out with nervous quickness and picked up his hand. “What do people do now, mostly?” she asked. “What do you mean?” “I mean I’m new here. You’re only my second customer and I don’t know what I should do. Well, I know what to do, basically, but there’s all these little things, like when to take off the dress.” He felt a foolish smile running over his face. Her second customer! “But you’ve worked before.” “You mean done this before? No, I haven’t.” He looked at her, beaming greedily. “What do you do for a living?” she asked. “I’m an attorney,” he said. “Corporate law.” He was lying. He felt cut loose from himself, unmarried, un-old, because of the lie. “How old are you?” “How old do you think I am?” She smiled, and her black eye paint coiled like a snake in the corners of her eyes. “Fifty?” “You’re exactly right.” He was fifty-nine. “How about you?” “Twenty-two.” She looked as though she could be that age, but he had a strong feeling that she was lying too. “Why do you come to places like this?” She lay across the bed, her head on her hand, her legs folded restfully. “Do you not get along with your wife?” He leaned against the headboard, his naked legs open. “Oh, I love my wife. It’s a very successful marriage. And we have sex, good sex. But it’s not everything I want. She’s willing to experiment, a little, but she’s really not all that interested. It can make you feel foolish to be doing something when you know your partner isn’t an equal participant. Besides, this is an adventure for me. Something nice.” “Is it something nice?” “With you it’s going to be very nice.” “How do you know?” “What a strange question.” She crossed the bed to adjust her body against his, to put her head on his shoulder. She stroked his chest hair. “It’s not so strange.” “Well, I just know, that’s all.” They kissed. She had a harsh, stubborn kiss.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  To begin with, it was largely Lola’s fault. Lola was my first piano teacher. Lola Niessen. It was a ridiculous name and typical of the neighborhood we were living in then. It sounded like a stinking bloater, or a wormy cunt. To tell the truth, Lola was not exactly a beauty. She looked somewhat like a Kalmuck or a Chinook, with sallow complexion and bilious-looking eyes. She had a few warts and wens, not to speak of the mustache. What excited me, however, was her hairiness; she had wonderful long fine black hair which she arranged in ascending and descending buns on her Mongolian skull. At the nape of the neck she curled it up in a serpentine knot. She was always late in coming, being a conscientious idiot, and by the time she arrived I was always a bit enervated from masturbating. As soon as she took the stool beside me, however, I became excited again, what with the stinking perfume she soused her armpits with. In the summer she wore loose sleeves and I could see the tufts of hair under her arms. The sight of it drove me wild. I imagined her as having hair all over, even in her navel. And what I wanted to do was to roll in it, bury my teeth in it. I could have eaten Lola’s hair as a delicacy, if there had been a bit of flesh attached to it. Anyway she was hairy, that’s what I want to say, and being hairy as a gorilla she got my mind off the music and on to her cunt. I was so damned eager to see that cunt of hers that finally one day I bribed her little brother to let me have a peep at her while she was in the bath. It was even more wonderful than I had imagined: she had a shag that reached from the navel to the crotch, an enormous thick tuft, a sporran, rich as a hand-woven rug. When she went over it with the powder puff I thought I would faint. The next time she came for the lesson I left a couple of buttons open on my fly. She didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. The following time I left my whole fly open. This time she caught on. She said, “I think you’ve forgotten something, Henry.” I looked at her, red as a beet, and I asked her blandly what? She pretended to look away while pointing to it with her left hand. Her hand came so close that I couldn’t resist grabbing it and pushing it in my fly. She got up quickly, looking pale and frightened. By this time my prick was out of my fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and I reached up under her dress to get at that hand-woven rug I had seen through the keyhole.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  “Yes, let’s get back to the shore,” I said, and I start to pull away from her. “Oh don’t leave me,” she says, clutching me tighter. “Don’t leave me, I’ll drown.” Just then Francie comes running down to the water. “Hurry,” says Agnes, “hurry . . . I’ll drown.” Francie was a good sort, I must say. She certainly wasn’t a Catholic and if she had any morals they were of the reptilian order. She was one of those girls who are born to fuck. She had no aims, no great desires, showed no jealousy, held no grievances, was constantly cheerful and not at all unintelligent. At nights when we were sitting on the porch in the dark talking to the guests she would come over and sit on my lap with nothing on underneath her dress and I would slip it into her as she laughed and talked to the others. I think she would have brazened it out before the Pope if she had been given a chance. Back in the city, when I called on her at her home, she pulled the same stunt off in front of her mother whose sight, fortunately, was growing dim. If we went dancing and she got too hot in the pants she would drag me to a telephone booth and, queer girl that she was, she’d actually talk to some one, some one like Agnes, for example while pulling off the trick. She seemed to get a special pleasure out of doing it under people’s noses; she said there was more fun in it if you didn’t think about it too hard. In the crowded subway, coming home from the beach, say, she’d slip her dress around so that the slit was in the middle and take my hand and put it right on her cunt. If the train was tightly packed and we were safely wedged in a corner she’d take my cock out of my fly and hold it in her two hands, as though it were a bird. Sometimes she’d get playful and hang her bag on it, as though to prove that there wasn’t the least danger. Another thing about her was that she didn’t pretend that I was the only guy she had on the string. Whether she told me everything I don’t know, but she certainly told me plenty. She told me about her affairs laughingly, while she was climbing over me or when I had it in her, or just when I was about to come. She would tell me how they went about it, how big they were or how small, what they said when they got excited and so on and so forth, giving me every possible detail, just as though I were going to write a textbook on the subject. She didn’t seem to have the least feeling of sacredness about her own body or her feelings or anything connected with herself.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Playing the piano was just one long vicarious fuck for me. I had to wait another two years before I would get my end in again, as they say, and then it wasn’t so good because I got a beautiful dose with it, and besides it wasn’t in the grass and it wasn’t summer, and there was no heat in it but just a cold mechanical fuck for a buck in a dirty little hotel room, the bastard trying to pretend she was coming and not coming any more than Christmas was coming. And maybe it wasn’t her that gave me the clap, but her pal in the next room who was laying up with my friend Simmons. It was like this—I had finished so quick with my mechanical fuck that I thought I’d go in and see how it was going with my friend Simmons. Lo and behold, they were still at it, and they were going strong. She was a Czech, his girl, and a bit sappy; she hadn’t been at it very long, apparently, and she used to forget herself and enjoy the act. Watching her hand it out, I decided to wait and have a go at her myself. And so I did. And before the week was out I had a discharge, and after that I figured it would be blueballs or rocks in the groin. Another year or so and I was giving lessons myself, and as luck would have it, the mother of the girl I’m teaching is a slut, a tramp and a trollop if ever there was one. She was living with a nigger, as I later found out. Seems she couldn’t get a prick big enough to satisfy her. Anyway, every time I started to go home she’d hold me up at the door and rub it up against me. I was afraid of starting in with her because rumor had it that she was full of syph, but what the hell are you going to do when a hot bitch like that plasters her cunt up against you and slips her tongue halfway down your throat. I used to fuck her standing up in the vestibule, which wasn’t so difficult because she was light and I could hold her in my hands like a doll. And like that I’m holding her one night when suddenly I hear a key being fitted into the lock, and she hears it too and she’s frightened stiff. There’s nowhere to go. Fortunately there’s a portiere hanging at the doorway and I hide behind that. Then I hear her black buck kissing her and saying how are yer, honey? and she’s saying how she had been waiting up for him and better come right upstairs because she can’t wait and so on.