Desire

Passages

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

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was on the floor below, next to the marmoreal spare bedroom. Luc showed me in and gestured at the various opulent appointments. After I locked the door I thought he might wait outside, as Mrs Vivier so patiently had at Paul's house once, and I listened until I heard the creak of the stairs as he went back up. I leant against the door and looked at myself pityingly in the wall of mirror opposite, thinking I must say something to Luc, I couldn't just let this go on. I felt I might as well have a pee, since I was there, and did so, able to watch myself, as you sometimes can in trains, with a certain admiration. I washed my hands, and noted the mingled bottles on the basin's mosaic surround—the mother's lilac talc and cleansing lotion, the son's canister of shaving foam and Donald Duck toothbrush, caked with pink paste; I remembered it so well, your things took the place of your father's, you became a kind of couple in your turn. The dry toothbrush tasted of nylon and dead mint. At the end of the long white bath with its tall, perched and somehow vigilant brass taps was a gingham-lined clothes-basket with a lid. I rootled lightly among its contents—again the mixture of silvery slips and bras and sweatier boy's things, grimy-necked shirts, inside-out socks and underwear. There were some white Horn briefs, tiny, damp from a towel they were bundled in with. I picked them out and covered my face with them. They seemed spotless, hardly worth changing for new ones, with only a ghost of a smell. When I rolled them up they were almost hidden in my fist. I buried them at the bottom of the basket, but then some awful compulsion made me plunge my arm in for them again. Before the end of the hour we heard the pneumatic scrunching and electronic whine of a big car being parked in a small space. I saw Luc studying the window spy-glass, and saw the nose of a grey-blue Mercedes swelling towards the front door in the mirror's convex surface. As it happened I was making another attempt to tell him something about myself, but I watched his attention waver and go. "Yeah, my father's here," he said. "I think I'd better . . ."

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Oscar. Not the most romantic of names. The Grouch. The Odd Couple. Oscar Mayer, aha, at last a pun, Oscar’s meat, a phallic lunch-punch. But de la Hoya is another ball game, and my mind plays with the music of all those syllables, my toya de la boya. Delicious de la Hoya. All Day de la Hoya. Once I began to look, Oscar was everywhere. His face was plastered all over town on posters advertising an upcoming bout. I’d come up out of the subway at Times Square to find an HBO billboard with DE LA hoya emblazoned six feet high in golden letters. His fight face—no smile, concentration defining his brow—was fierce but still stunning: the same deep brown eyes, his slicked-back hair the color of asphalt wet from rain, sleek and shiny. I wondered what his fuck face was like. Framed by the wings of my legs, would he grunt and gri mace as sweat dripped from his nipples onto my chest? Or would his face remain a mystery as he bit his lower lip to keep from smiling? Cruising by a newsstand, I stopped when I saw him on the cover of Men’s Fitness. As the reigning Welterweight Cham pion of the World, he was elected “Boxer of the Year” for 1997. The article gave all his career stats (27—0,22 knockouts), which bored me, but then I started to stiffen at a photo spread of Os car’s workout tips. After throwing money at the cashier, I raced home to draw a hot bath, my favorite place to masturbate. Soaking in near scalding water, I fed myself images of Oscar working out in his gym, his chest straining to lift a military press, his hands a blur as he worked the speed bag. As I licked at the sweat streaming down my biceps, I could taste the salt of his body, each bead of water wrung from his golden brown skin. I threw the magazine off to the side, then lifted my legs to my chest, clenching my knees as I sank back and down to the bot tom of the tub. As I held my face up to the surface of the wa ter, my lower back loosened, opening my ass to Oscar’s liquid heat. When I finally emerged from the bath, I found the maga zine ruined, Oscar’s body like mine: wrinkled and puckered in the steam. I resolved to buy another one the next day for a keepsake; in the meanwhile, though, at the end of the article I found a golden glove: tvtvtv.oscardelahoya.com. I logged on, dripping at my desk, and Oscar’s home page flashed before me: a photo collage of Oscar, fighting, relaxing, smiling, sweating. I gorged myself with details from the inter

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “Better send ’em in, then.” And in they came, in a continuous stream, sometimes alone, more often in groups of two. I ate pussy steadily for the next two hours, or so they told me later. As far as I was concerned, time pretty much lost meaning. How many? I honestly don’t know. At least twenty. Twenty new pussies: twenty new smells, twenty new tastes. There were cunts so hairy that it was like eating out a broom, which was sort of a drag, and there were a few that were shaved slick and bare, which isn’t really my preference either. There were small cunts with tightly folded lips that had to be teased open with a rigid tongue tip, and big cunts with soft lips that en veloped my tongue and nose in a warm, musky embrace. Some of the women were obviously just doing it on a dare, and they would just climb on and then back off after a cursory tonguing. One women was so drunk that she kept losing her balance and falling off the bed—the second time that hap pened I sent her away. Of those that actually allowed them selves to get into it, I was able to make about two out of three come, which I thought was pretty damn good under the cir cumstances. One girl ground her pussy into my face for about ten min utes straight, stranded in the lonely territory just short of or gasm, swearing like a sailor and gasping out instructions that I followed to the letter. Despite our best efforts she was simply unable to come. “I’m just too fucking drunk,” she said finally, with endear ing honesty. She was close to tears with frustration. “Don’t take this personally....” She lifted herself up a few inches off my face and started rubbing herself. I watched through the ever-growing gap in my blindfold, fascinated, as her fingers savagely rubbed and

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I lurched off furiously to the hotel. 8 Next day I was earlier at the Corry than usual, swimming with the lunchtime set before going east to Charles and then, alarmingly, perhaps futilely, beyond. Phil was back to work on an awkward split shift, and I would see him in the evening, over at the hotel. The shower room was crowded, so that I had to wait at the entrance with one or two others, anxious to be through and in their offices again, eyeing the more determined lingerers with a sceptically raised eyebrow. The gross-cocked Carlos cooed ‘Hey, Will’ and beckoned, so I jumped the queue and joined him under his nozzle, his rose. ‘Is very busy,’ he acknowledged, ‘but I like to see the boys.’ Here was the conscience of the Corry in a phrase. He soaped my shoulderblades in halting, appreciative arcs, slowly moving further down my back, and I began to get a hard-on. Andrews the gym instructor was across the way, austerely washing his head with coal tar soap. With his wiry, pre-war, slightly bowlegged body and his square, thin-lipped, grizzled head, he seemed to be scrubbing away in search of some lost puritanical cleanness; and as he left to dry he looked at Carlos and me with an almost regimental reproach. His place was taken by a dal-coloured Indonesian boy with strong yellow teeth, enormous hands and an exceptionally extensile cock, which, quite ordinary in size to start with, filled out lavishly with a few casual strokes of a soapy hand and was burdensomely erect a few seconds later when he grinned across the room—in response, of course, to Carlos’s frank appreciation. O the difference of man and man. Sometimes in the showers, which only epitomised and confirmed a general feeling held elsewhere, I was amazed and enlightened by the variety of the male organ. In the rank and file of men showering the cocks and balls took on the air almost of an independent species, exhibited in instructive contrasts. Here was the long, listless penis, there the curt, athletic knob or innocent rosebud of someone scarcely out of school. Carlos’s Amerindian giant swung alongside the compact form of a Chinese youth whose tiny brown willy was almost concealed in his wet pubic hair, like an exotic mushroom in a dish of seaweed. On the other side of me a young businessman displayed one of those long, dispiriting foreskins, which gather very tight about the glans and then bunch and dribble on childishly for an inch or so more.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The Park after all was only stilted countryside, its lake and trees inadequate reminders of those formative landscapes, the Yorkshire dales, the streams and watermeads of Winchester, whose influence was lost in the sexed immediacy of London life. I found myself approaching the dismal Italianate garden at the head of the lake, a balustraded terrace with flagged paths surrounding four featureless pools, a half-hearted baroque fountain (now switched off) aimed at the Serpentine below, and on the outside, backing on to the Bayswater Road, a pavilion with a rippling red roof and benches spattered with bird droppings. Deadly as this place had always seemed to me, stony and phoney amid the English greenness of the Park, it was an unfailing attraction to visitors: loving couples, solitary duck-fanciers, large European and Middle Eastern family groups taking a slothful stroll from their apartments in Bayswater and Lancaster Gate. I sauntered across it, as much to confirm how I disliked it as anything else. Some desolate little boys played together more out of duty than pleasure. Queens of a certain age strolled pointedly up and down. The sky was uniformly grey, though a glare on the white frippery of the pavilion suggested a sun that might break through. I was turning to leave when I spotted a lone Arab boy wandering along, hands in the pockets of his anorak, fairly unremarkable, yet with something about him which made me feel I must have him. I was convinced that he had noticed me, and I felt a delicious surplus of lust and satisfaction at the idea of fucking him while another boy waited for me at home. To test him out I dawdled off behind the pavilion to where some public lavatories, over-frequented by lonely middle-aged men, are tucked into the ivy-covered, pine-darkened bank of the main road. I went down the tiled steps between the tiled walls, and a hygienic, surprisingly sweet smell surrounded me. It was all very clean, and at several of the stalls under the burnished copper pipes (to which someone must attach all their pride), men were standing, raincoats shrouding from the innocent visitor or the suspicious policeman their hour-long footlings. I felt a faint revulsion—not disapproval, but a fear of one day being like that. Their heads seemed grey and loveless to me as they turned in automatic anticipation. What long investment they made for what paltry returns … Did they nod to one another, the old hands, as they took up their positions, day by day, alongside each other in whatever station in their underground cycle of conveniences they had reached? Did anything ever happen, did they, despairing of whatever it was they sought, which could surely never be sex, but at most a glimpse of something memorable, ever make do with each other?

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  You made the noise, and my clit throbbed in sympathy. The noise, not just any noise, not to be mistaken for any lesser sex cry. In the nineteenth century it was believed that the Bird of Paradise had no legs and thus could never land, that it had to fly the heavens forever in its shockingly extravagant robe of feathers. Is that why your cry sounds like some fantastic bird, because of your desperation to land and your inability to do so quite yet, from the sudden realization that the plumes of sen sation are not enough when you begin to writhe from having flown so hard for so long? Your breath came in gasps, your muscles taut as harp strings, shuddering, and I rammed into you hard, dropping gears suddenly into the kind of all-out fuck I’d wanted to give you all along. You made the noise a second time and groaned, hoarsely begging me please, please. Your throat went rigid with a soundless scream, an out raged howl tearing through you as I fucked you hard and harder, eating your clit with toothscrapes now, knuckles mashing against the entrance of your clasping hole with each stroke. Somehow you caught one enormous gulp of air, but I wasn’t ready to let you come down yet. I nudged that infa mous spot inside you with my fingertips, Morse code telling you to come for me again, again, again, tongue lashing at you as insanely as I could. You had to come again, my fingers in sisted, one more time, for me. Your fingers left my head and I knew, as surely as I knew you would only come for me again if I forced you, that you were twisting your own nipples far more cruelly than I ever would have, enchanted past the point of pain by merciless need. Come for me, I willed as I felt you tensing again, come for me. I pistoned my hand in and out of your dripping cunt, jack hammering you well beyond the point you thought you would not reach again. The first one was for the dream. The second was all mine. What came after that was yours and yours alone, until you simply could not, and lay dazed and sweat-damp in my arms. The sun was just barely up, the day bluish-gray at the cor ners of the curtains. Pulling the covers back up over you, I bent and kissed you as you lay there, spent and sleepy, eyes glazed. You stroked the side of my face and smiled a little weary smile. I kissed your palm and you blushed, looking amazingly like the pictures I’ve seen of you as a little girl. “You’re getting up now?” you mumbled, letting your eyes close again. “Yes, baby. Time for me to start the day.” “Nnnpfth. Schrec^lich. Morning people.” Your grumbles grew more distant with each syllable.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “Touch,” she says. She is looking right at him, she can see him. This is not how Allen Fein remembers past visits, not with the women staring back. There are four women seated on a carpeted platform, and all, eying him, make the same offer. “Touch,” they say. “Touch.” Well, three of the women say it. The fourth—sitting in a cheap plastic lawn chair, too wide for it, her thighs, cut in half, drooping, like her breasts, in languid arcs toward the floor—is reading a book. She’s got glasses on and is holding a page, ready to turn it, and Allen knows the motion will be slow and lazy, as weary as her posture. They are all naked, or almost so. The second woman wears a bra, the third panties, and the fourth has the book and glasses. It is the first one who is, to Allen, beautiful. He has not set foot in a peep show since boyhood, but he re calls almost everything from then. He remembers shivering so badly that his teeth chattered, his hands pressed between his legs for warmth. He’d been afraid that he might freeze to death, actually expire from excitement. And he’d often in dulged this nightmare, squandered precious viewing time on the darker fantasy of dropping dead right there in the booth. Allen remembers the old setup. The sound of a token drop ping and then the labored spin of gears. He remembers the strip of light at the bottom of the window frame as the wooden partition was drawn up into the wall. Behind thick glass— smudged and fingerprinted, always fogged with heavy breath—were the women. They danced as if they cared, mov ing to titillate the observer. The individual booths are more or less the same. It’s the windows that are different. Allen is shocked to find that the glass is gone. The women just sit on their chairs, vivid, looking back. The stage is circular and completely surrounded by the in ner wall of the booths. Many of the partitions are raised, and Allen can see men in their compartments at all angles. One middle-aged, broad-headed voyeur is clearly masturbating with vigor. Allen catches the eye of a Latino man off to the side, wearing the very same tie he is. Allen puts a hand to his chest and feels the tie pulsing along with his heart. The Latino man, such a good-looking man, turns away from Allen and makes eye contact with the woman in the bra. She stands up and walks over to the man and his hands come out through the window, penetrating the fantasy world. Allen has never seen it broached before—the world of dreams cracked open. ©

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  The door of one stall was open. I could hear a steady tinkle penetrating the ice cold water in the bowl of the toilet. She stood facing the tank as I peeked in, the toilet seat up, her magnificent naked ass exposed like an epiphany. Her leather pants were down around her knees as she straddled the toilet bowl. Ms. Thing was peeing standing up as if using a men’s urinal—a woman after my heart. As she finished, without turning around she said, “Don’t just stand there, come in here and lock the door behind you.” Standing directly behind this insanely beautiful woman with her pants down around her legs, I slammed the door shut, dropping my shoulder pack and flowers on the floor. Seizing her from behind, I wrapped myself around her like a depraved fiend. One of my hands fondled a breast quite warm to the touch. Arousal swept over me like a wildfire threatening to burn me alive unless I found something wet to put the fire out. While brutally swirling a pouty pierced nipple between my fingertips, my other hand went between her legs, dip ping caramel fingers in between creamy thighs, sliding inside her hot, slippery wet cunt. My fingers manipulated her in flamed, pulsing clit sheathed in silky moist splendor, causing her to grind her bare ass into my crotch in a very demanding manner. Balling my hand into a nice grip, I gently buried my knuck les deeper inside her flooding sex, deftly and steadily, stuffing myself so far into her that she whimpered, saturating my hand with soft heat. Her hands were spread out in front of her against the wall behind the tank as if under arrest. With her legs spread open over the bowl, I reached for the fateful pink rose. As I glided it across her divine ass, a trail of goose bumps appeared, inciting more of her groans. Tenderly sticking the tip of the long stem of the flower in between her cheeks, I guided the rose down ward as if arranging it within the confines of her beautiful juicy ass turned exotic vase, thorns pricking her tender skin in its trail. She sucked in bits of air between clenched teeth before moaning sensuously as I continued to slowly slide the flower in between her buttocks until the bottom of the stem appeared from her ass. When I carefully pulled the stem down from un derneath her, the rose snuggled tightly between her ass cheeks. This rocked her, making her quiver and forcing her to whim per a little louder. I grabbed her mouth to muffle her. When she succumbed to silence, I licked the back of her neck with cat curls of my tongue. She tasted like salt, body lotion, and al mond soap, making me wonder what her other wonders tasted like. My licking turned into fevered sucking, which caused her entire body to slide around in my arms as if beg-

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “Yes,” I whispered, surprised that nothing about this make- believe conversation was repulsive or frightening. I was in my head where I’d been so many times before, only now there was another voice in my fantasy. “Alice, have you ever come from a kiss?” “No.” “That’s what I’m going to do to you now. I’m going to make you come from kissing you. Would you like that?” Bill asked. “If you kiss me for that long, your lips will be sore.” “I don’t care. I want to rub my lips on yours. Wet and slip pery. And so, so soft. Can you feel it?” “Yes,” I said, and I could. “I’m unbuttoning your blouse and pushing it off your shoulders so I can kiss your breasts. So I can suck on your nip ples,” he said. “Your lips are like feathers on my skin. Bill, are you hard?” I’d been trained to ask this question often to gauge whether the call was working; if a man wasn’t hard after a few minutes, something was wrong. “I’m very hard,” he said, and I segued into the next stage of the conversation. “Are you touching yourself, Bill?” “Yes, I’m rubbing myself while I imagine kissing you. I want to keep on kissing you. Alice, tell me how it feels.” “Wonderful. Our lips are so wet they glide against each other.” “Uh-huh,” he murmured. “And your tongue darts out—oh—it’s hard—like your cock.” It was my voice, but it was Alice who was thinking up the words. “Oh ...” His breathing had changed. From the tapes Candy had played for me, I was familiar

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Mr Latin America and I glanced at each other and then found it proper to look around the lofty bar, with its concealed lighting, reproductions of Old Masters and vulgarly gathered blinds half down against the westering sun. Across the road were the boles of the great trees in the square into whose upper branches I had so often gazed; and that did remind me of Phil, and how I must not take long over this drink. ‘Perfectly revolting,’ I pronounced after taking a sip. ‘If that’s what cunnilingus tastes like, I think I’ve done well to stay away from it.’ ‘You like?’ said my new friend. I nodded, as if to say it was nice enough. ‘You are staying in this hotel?’ ‘No—no, I’ve just come in for a drink. After my swimming.’ ‘Oh you like swimming. I am a very bad swimmer.’ I smiled politely; perhaps in his country, which I believed to be poor and old-fashioned, there were few swimming-pools. Even in Italy there were few: hence the fondness of the language children for hours of bombing and showering. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ he asked. ‘No, no,’ I said, actually slightly shocked at his naive forwardness. I let a minute or more pass in silence, but had to grin when Simon started humming Tristan. I wasn’t sure what to do. The boy was undoubtedly a find. I swivelled on my stool so that we were sitting with our legs apart and knee to knee. He looked frankly at my crotch before meeting my gaze and we smiled enquiringly at each other as he ran his finger up the back of my hand where it dangled from the bar. ‘If you come to my room, I will show you something very interesting,’ he said. ‘Do you want to finish your drink?’ ‘Um—no.’ I started to reach in my pocket for change, but he stopped me with a firm hand. ‘Number 205,’ he said curtly to Simon. ‘I must have got the name of that one wrong,’ said Simon perplexedly as I followed my conquest—my conqueror?—out. Room 205 was a small but grand suite—a sitting-room with a flower arrangement in front of a mirror, a gloomy bedroom looking on an inner well, and a neon-bright bathroom with a roaring extractor fan. The thick double-glazing on the front gave the rooms a strange feeling of remoteness. I walked around in them for a bit before Gabriel—as he was fetchingly called—said, ‘Hey, Will, look at this,’ and flung open a suitcase on the bed.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  deep brown eyes, his slicked-back hair the color of asphalt wet from rain, sleek and shiny. I wondered what his fuck face was like. Framed by the wings of my legs, would he grunt and gri mace as sweat dripped from his nipples onto my chest? Or would his face remain a mystery as he bit his lower lip to keep from smiling? Cruising by a newsstand, I stopped when I saw him on the cover of Men’s Fitness. As the reigning Welterweight Cham pion of the World, he was elected “Boxer of the Year” for 1997. The article gave all his career stats (27—0,22 knockouts), which bored me, but then I started to stiffen at a photo spread of Os car’s workout tips. After throwing money at the cashier, I raced home to draw a hot bath, my favorite place to masturbate. Soaking in near scalding water, I fed myself images of Oscar working out in his gym, his chest straining to lift a military press, his hands a blur as he worked the speed bag. As I licked at the sweat streaming down my biceps, I could taste the salt of his body, each bead of water wrung from his golden brown skin. I threw the magazine off to the side, then lifted my legs to my chest, clenching my knees as I sank back and down to the bot tom of the tub. As I held my face up to the surface of the wa ter, my lower back loosened, opening my ass to Oscar’s liquid heat. When I finally emerged from the bath, I found the maga zine ruined, Oscar’s body like mine: wrinkled and puckered in the steam. I resolved to buy another one the next day for a keepsake; in the meanwhile, though, at the end of the article I found a golden glove: tvtvtv.oscardelahoya.com. I logged on, dripping at my desk, and Oscar’s home page flashed before me: a photo collage of Oscar, fighting, relaxing, smiling, sweating. I gorged myself with details from the inter

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Is it possible to want what we already have? We all share a fundamental need for security, which propels us toward committed relationships in the first place; but we have an equally strong need for adventure and excitement. Modern romance promises that it’s possible to meet these two distinct sets of needs in one place. Still, I’m not convinced. Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all? It’s hard to generate excitement, anticipation, and lust with the same person you look to for comfort and stability, but it’s not impossible. I invite you to think about ways you might introduce risk to safety, mystery to the familiar, and novelty to the enduring. On the way, we will address how the modern ideology of love sometimes collides with the forces of desire. Love flourishes in an atmosphere of closeness, mutuality, and equality. We seek to know our beloved, to keep him near, to contract the distance between us. We care about those we love, worry about them, and feel responsible for them. For some of us, love and desire are inseparable. But for many others, emotional intimacy inhibits erotic expression. The caring, protective elements that foster love often block the unselfconsciousness that fuels erotic pleasure. My belief, reinforced by twenty years of practice, is that in the course of establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging. This mix-up is a bad omen for sex. To sustain an élan toward the other, there must be a synapse to cross. Eroticism requires separateness. In other words, eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to commune with the one we love, we must be able to tolerate this void and its pall of uncertainties. With this paradox to chew on, consider another: desire is often accompanied by feelings that would seem to cramp love’s style. Aggression, jealousy, and discord come to mind, for starters. I will explore the cultural pressures that shape domesticated sex, making it fair, equal, and safe, but also producing many bored couples. I’d like to suggest that we might have more exciting, playful, even frivolous sex if we were less constrained by our cultural penchant for democracy in the bedroom. To buttress this notion, I take the reader on a detour into social history. We’ll see that contemporary couples invest more in love than ever before; yet, in a cruel twist of fate it is this very model of love and marriage that is behind the exponential rise in the divorce rate.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I had only lost track of him for a minute or two, but when I looked over again Z. had disappeared. He must have gone to the bathroom, I thought, and immediately I stopped dancing. I shouted to N. that I was going to piss, at which he nodded, and I left him without a thought for how odd it was, to leave him there alone, how transparent it must have been, I would think of it only later. I moved as quickly as I could, twisting through the crowd, finding openings between the groups of drinkers; I wasn’t so drunk, I thought. I had almost reached an open space near the entrance when I stumbled into a man’s back. He turned quickly, muscular and affronted, but smiled when I held up both hands in apology, Izvinyavaite, pardon me, suzhalyavam, I’m sorry, and he put a large hand on my shoulder and squeezed, friendly and forgiving, welcoming me into the camaraderie of happy drinking. And then in the dimness ahead there was a sudden rectangle of porcelain light as a door opened and I was in a large bright room, tiled and clean. There were three urinals along one wall, and a man was stepping away from one of them, zipping himself up. Z. was still there, I saw with relief, I wasn’t too late, and I stepped up beside him, breaking that distributive propriety of men’s bathrooms, a guard against unchecked glances, against desire. He looked over and saw it was me and smiled, a little blurrily, I thought, he was drunker than I was, or drunker than I felt, and then he faced forward again. I didn’t face forward, though I could have, I could still have seen what I wanted to see. I let my eyes track down his front, following the line of buttons down his shirt, which was ridiculous in the fluorescent light, a kind of garish violet. Even in my excitement I admired the neatness of it, the buttons perfectly aligned, and I thought for the first time in many years of my father dressing me as a boy, teaching me about this line, the gig line, he called it, buttons and buckle forming an order that was more than vanity, that signaled some deeper righteousness. The memory came in a flash before I let myself look at his cock, pale in his hand and pissing a pale line against the porcelain, nothing extraordinary, not small or particularly large, a handsome cock, and I felt my own stiffen a little when I saw that with his index finger he was rubbing just slightly the underside of the head, where he held the foreskin back, an unconscious gesture, probably, though it must have sent a small current of pleasure alongside the pleasure of pissing. I knew I was acting badly, that I was looking too brazenly and for too long, that I shouldn’t have looked at all. I would be ashamed later but I wasn’t ashamed now, I kept watching as the stream weakened and became intermittent, let him know, I said to myself, he already knows, let him see it. He let go of the head to pull the foreskin all the way back and shake himself before he pinched the base and drew his fingers up the shaft, stretching himself out to his full length and flicking off the drop of urine that hung at the tip. He did this two or three times and then stopped, leaving his cock dangling for a moment, in which I felt my excitement mount and become unbearable, he must be letting me look, I thought, it might be a kind of invitation, before he tucked himself away and drew up his fly.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Some of America’s best features—the belief in democracy, equality, consensus-building, compromise, fairness, and mutual tolerance—can, when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, result in very boring sex. Sexual desire and good citizenship don’t play by the same rules. And while enlightened egalitarianism represents one of the greatest advances of modern society, it can exact a toll in the erotic realm. Elizabeth spent twenty years shepherding Vito from the machismo traditions of southern Italy to the postfeminist equality of suburban New York. When he says, “I think we’re partnering better,” in a voice that still sounds like Don Vito Corleone’s, I know just how much cultural transformation has taken place. Elizabeth is a woman in her mid-forties who describes herself as “hyperresponsible.” She’s a school psychologist who oversees the well-being of more than 400 elementary school children in addition to being in charge of most things in her own home. “I’ve always done the right thing. I’ve always been very task-oriented. I’ll make a list and keep it. In some ways it’s always worked. And I’ve always been in relationships where being the coordinator, competent and in control, was my designated job. There didn’t seem to be any time when I could just let myself go, feel free and giddy and maybe even a little irresponsible” Elizabeth pauses and smiles shyly. “Then I met Vito and discovered just how much I’m drawn to sexual submission. It may not fit the way I always thought of myself, or the way others thought of me, but it’s the truth.” “Because sex is a place where you can safely lose control?” I ask. “Yes.” “It is the one area where you don’t have to make any decisions, where you don’t have to feel responsible for anyone else.” “For me it’s like a vacation,” she explains. “I don’t have to wear makeup; I don’t have to answer the phone; I don’t have to be in charge. It’s like being on a wonderful, distant island, far away from my ordinary life. I can just step out of my world and be somebody else, sexy and a little wild.” Elizabeth wants to be manhandled, told what to do—as if, through her erotic self, she can correct an imbalance in her life and replenish something vital. She delights in the abandon that comes with the sense of powerlessness. And I would add that she also gets a charge from playing in the forbidden zone of inequality. “When he comes on to me forcefully, it makes me feel sexy. It heightens the tension. Like he wants me so much he just can’t help himself,” Elizabeth says. Vito, quick to respond, adds, “She can’t help herself, either. When she gives in, I know I’m irresistible.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "He is a fucking cunt," I agreed, and Mark Lyle gave a big bright laugh. He had a wide sun-tanned face and a large mouth with one or two spots by it that he should have left alone. When we'd more or less finished, he patted his thigh and asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I blushed and said no. "Mind if I do?" he said, with surely unnecessary courtesy. Actually I was terribly worried about him meeting an early death from lung-cancer; but I was overcome by the glamour and intimacy of the occasion. I watched him raptly as he smoked an Embassy to the filter. Each frown, each wincing inhalation, the way he balanced the smoke between his open lips and then as it escaped drew it back up his nose, the two or three different fingerings he essayed, all were written on my mind like a first exercise in sexual attraction. I thought Mark Lyle was the most handsome man I'd ever seen. Later that summer I saw him again. The friendship I had envisaged had not blossomed. Indeed he'd vanished altogether for about three weeks, leaving me full of forlorn agitation. Then one evening I was rambling homewards from the Blewits side of the common through the long dry grass when I saw his unmistakable mane of fair hair. He was sitting on a bench with his back to me, and I dithered for several minutes just a few yards behind him. He wasn't aware there was anyone there. Occasionally he lifted what looked like a beer-can to his lips. I looped round and came back in front, pretending to notice him at the last moment. Following our convention I said nothing, but sat down beside him and waited. He can only have been fourteen, but he was managing to grow real sideburns, a more gingery colour than the rest of his hair. He was wearing a Cream on Tour T-shirt, and tight high-waisted shiny brown trousers with generous flares. You could see the stub of his cock very clearly. "I wondered if you'd been flying that kite again?" I said at length. "I should think it's a jolly good one." Mark Lyle tilted the last of the beer into his mouth, swirled it round and swallowed it, then belched so that I could smell it. He seemed to have forgotten about the Old Spice. "I'm fucking pissed, man," he said, and dropping the can on the ground stamped on it violently two or three times. Again the conflict of excitement and distress. In a way this was the opportunity I needed to put my redemptive impulse into operation, but when it came to it I wasn't at all sure of myself. It was one of my mother's phrases I used: "There can't be any need for that." He looked ahead and laughed mirthlessly. "Yeah, fuck off now, there's a good little fucker."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I settled back, pulling the musty multi-coloured crochet of the shawls around me, already fetishising them as remote kin of Luc's own bedspread, familiar, unnoticed trappings that he sprawled and stirred amongst, thinking of elsewhere. I dreamt we were at Mr Croy's. Luc was lying naked on the table, surrounded by five or six men, some in naval uniform, a couple in cheap suits with their huge cocks jutting sideways and already seeping into the taut cloth. I was somehow amongst them but also outside and above their casually concentrated circle, as if I were writing the story of the dream and setting them in motion. I seemed to catch and share the haunting, forgotten dynamic of group sex, jealous and democratic at once. And Luc was ready for the ritual, lifting his head slightly, moistening his dry upper lip with a nervous tongue-tip. But to my bafflement all the men did was inspect him, closely but politely, as if they might have him but hadn't decided, and didn't want to mark him and be obliged to pay. Or almost like doctors, whose interest was scientific and excited by other invisible symptoms. I saw them push his legs apart, run their hands lightly, testingly up and down his thighs, and over his chest and stomach. One of them weighed his balls noncommittally in the palm of his hand, while another slipped back his foreskin and pinched open the little goldfish mouth of his swollen cock-head. They turned him over and one of them pressed his cheeks apart while the rest appraised his other hidden orifice; I saw it clench and gape with anticipation and delay. I was in the bathroom, confused by the back corridors of Mr Croy's, the pantries and stairways overhung by dripping cisterns. I knew I wanted to get back to the main room—I had left it with the repressed anxiety with which one leaves luggage briefly unattended or asks a stranger to keep one's place in a long and hungry queue. I trotted round in confusion, sometimes hearing a shout or a slap from behind locked doors, through walls. I caught just a glimpse of Mr Croy himself, in a curtained back parlour—gross, brilliantined, with a gin and tonic, listening to "Beggars in Spats". A sense of misery and wasted money began to weigh in my chest.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  His mother got hold of me first, and took me into the dining-room. She hoped I didn't mind coming to the house, it seemed better discipline than sending Luc across town to me—and then she knew where he was. I was already imagining the squeaking board that gave away her presence at the door. She went on with a number of blunt and incoherent instructions, which I barely took in—I was pretending I hadn't seen him, just at the moment I entered the hall, behind his mother's back, skidding through to the kitchen, a towel round his neck, a glimpse of his bare heels, a vision of his undomestic size and energy. She left me in the darkly panelled room, among the family portraits. I waited a minute under their humourless gaze, one above the other, prudent, black-bosomed, as if they had all been painted in widowhood. Feeling faintly culpable and unfit for responsibility, I went to the long window and looked out on the garden, a high-walled strip that ended in a canal with swans idling past and a little angular gazebo above the water, where I pictured Luc smoking or waiting for a tryst. Mrs Altidore's work was less evident in this room, just a kind of tasselled runner on the sideboard. Then I pulled out a chair and discovered the terrible industry of the seat. There were footsteps, no voices, crossing the hall, and their brief hanging back to let the other enter first showed me they were both nervous too. Mother and son, side by side: I sensed the treaty between them and the unresolved cross-purposes. "This is Luc," she said. "Mr Manners." He was pushing back his hair and his hand was damp when he shook mine. "Hello." "Hello!" How old-fashionedly keen I was. And he nodded, so that his hair fell forward again. Through the coming hour I would see that tumbling forelock dry from bronze to gold, and get to know the different ways he mastered it, the indolent sweep, the brainstorming grapple, the barely effectual toss, and how long the intervals were of forward slither and lustrous collapse. But for the moment, when we were left alone, I didn't altogether look at him; my eyes fixed uncomprehendingly on the sideboard, a hideous epergne, a sugar dredger, a tantalus of brandy.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And then the Spanish girls, the voices in the woodwork, murmuring and shrieking in what felt like derision as I sat in Frits's lap in the armchair and slipped my hand inside his denim shirt and jiggled backwards and forwards on him until he had a big fat hard-on. "Yes," he said, "I began to know that the life of being in an office all day, every day, was not for me. I then needed to take time to find out what it was that I really wanted to do. I wanted to read good literature, and travel around the place. I had to get out of the mouse-market, Edward. I lifted the bedclothes a little and looked at his sleeping body in the greyish light, slumped, hairy, held in, it almost seemed, by a long brown hairless scar, the plump bud of his cock shifting and stiffening as he rose himself into the light of early dreams. Chapter 10 "Hello." "Hello? Matt?" "Matt's not here, I'm afraid." A thoughtful pause. "Oh yes." The line went dead. I carried on sorting out the orders, clipped pink slips on which products were tactfully referred to by number. A good sprawl of post awaited me each afternoon on the floor of the porch—the business letters addressed to Matt, and occasional envelopes for a certain Wim Vermeulen, which I set aside and which aroused my curiosity more. I supposed he must be one of his old lovers or partners, or perhaps the previous occupant. Something kept me from opening them—I wondered raffishly if it might be thieves' honour. The letters from Matt's subscribers were often several sheets long, full of secret enthusiasm and not easy to read. "I can't thank you enough for introducing me to young Casey Hopper," one of them began. "What a 'doll'! I've quite fallen for him. It's such a pleasure to find a lad of that age who really likes to take it from an older—and bigger—man. And Casey, I am pleased to say, is certainly well set-up himself. He has such a pleading look as he lies there spread out, when his arms and legs are tied to the bedposts and I can gaze at his secret treasure. Sometimes it is 'all over' then, before anything else has happened. "Perhaps I should tell you a bit about myself. I used to be in the agribusiness in Ghent, where I have lived all my life. I am sixty-seven by the way, and have retired now, so I have plenty of time on my hands, and will certainly be getting in touch with you again. I like young men, eighteen to twenty-five or so, well-built, with short hair. I do not like boys with obviously dyed hair or who are effeminate in any way and wear ear-rings or jewellery. As you can imagine Casey Hopper tops my bill!

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Yeah . . . Yeah . . ."—a concentrating tongue peeped and havered. "Oh boy. Here comes Big Boy. Just look at that . . . Looks like they're going boating again." I squinted through, somehow convinced that without the binoculars I wouldn't be able to see a thing, though there of course Sibylle and Patrick were, encumbered with paddles and a bailer and boxy pink life-jackets. "Now where's your little friend, I wonder? He'll probably stay indoors to do his reading, and you won't see him at all, which will be your fault." I gave Matt a blow in the ribs—just like the boys fighting, I saw—and he cackled and said, "No, hold on, who do we have here?" And Luc was back again, awkward on the steps, as if unable to give help when it was expected of him. "If I was young . . . Luc," said Matt, "I'd be getting a bit jealous of Big Boy and the girl." When I got the glasses at last though, and caught the pair as they scuffed out on to the beach, there was an angry firmness about them. They looked unlikely to enjoy themselves. I took off my specs and twiddled the focus to my shorter sight. The lenses were powerful, ocean-sweepers proved perhaps in some war-time conning-tower, treasured later for their ability to capture shorebirds' markings and charming movements. The heavy casing was chipped, the leather was frayed and in the paint the name DHONDT was roughly scratched. Half an hour raced and drifted by before Luc appeared again. Then things began to unfold with a canny momentum of their own. He came on to the porch and I had the field-glasses on him: he was starlingly clean and close, palpable but also stylised in the flowing depthless picture-plane. When I shifted my position the picture twitched uncaringly to various greenery, a nodding sapling's top, and I had to run the glasses down and across in a worried blur to find him strolling over the lawn, just beneath me it seemed, like a figure in the flattened foreground of a Japanese print. I didn't dare open the blinds further, and the picture was hazily occluded above and below by the unfocused slats. They gave an edge of mystery to the brilliant image they framed.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He said, "My mother's going to bring some coffee," the voice light and mildly interrogative, the accent educated. Then I looked. He was lean and broad-shouldered in an old blue shirt; and I liked his big flattish backside as he walked past me, though his loose cotton trousers gave nothing else away. He was as tall as me (I could imagine him saying he was taller, and a laughing challenge, back to back). Did he understand that I was weighing and measuring him like this, or possibly envisage the tingle of desire that ran up my back when I saw his brown bare insteps between turn-up and low-cut moccasin? It was hard to know if something vain and mistrustful in his look was more than the ordinary wariness of a boy with his teacher, or of people starting cold at knowing each other. To me of course he wasn't quite new, though when he took his place on the far side of the table and waited for me to begin I could hardly keep from telling him how different he was from his picture, how much odder and better. In his father's generation his features might have been thought ugly or exaggerated, though now they had come into fashion and could be admitted as wonderful in their own way; he must have taken from his father the long nose and high cheekbones which gave him the air of a blond Aztec. His eyes were narrow and colourless—his mother's lost look given a new caution and sharpness; while his long mouth seemed burdened with involuntary expressiveness, the thick lips opening, when later I twisted a smile out of him, to show strong sexy canines and high gums. His upper lip was almost too heavy, a puckering outward curl, with no downward dimple in the fingermark beneath the nose, where it had a straight edge, as if finished off impatiently with a palette-knife. There was something engrossing, even slightly repellent, about the whole feature.