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 Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I could hear the audience applauding the dancer in the room next door, and people moving in and out of the tables near us, but these things receded, dreamy and still. In sex there are new rules, sometimes no rules; the body takes charge. We are no longer in the quotidian sphere. Georgia’s curly hair drifted across Penny’s breasts, and my own hunger seemed to explode within. In front of me all this sweet, clean skin, and the rising bouquet of arousal, and in slow motion, a beringed hand slipping to stroke between two legs in the dim and coppery light. Then Georgia rose up from Penny for a moment and I caught Don’s eye, and he was laughing at my punch-drunk face. I looked at Jeannie and she was staring at the women right beside her, almost in her lap; I looked back at Georgia and she’d turned in the midst of the act to watch the pair of naked women embracing on the table next to us, watched by three Japanese men in suits. And I turned to look at the men gathered around the tables a few feet below us and I could see them watching me, watching them. The sexual fantasy not of going to a whore, but of being one, is quite common. There is a whore in each of us, the whore who conquers our desire by selling it, conquers our fear of abandonment by controlling the risks of all her relations. The urge to romanticize the prostitute and her life is just like the urge to imagine her as infinitely sordid or as an inevitable victim—more about us than the whore. The whore scares us, the happy whore most of all, because she doesn’t need conventional rules to survive and thrive. She makes up her own. “I don’t look like this when I go to clients,” Alex tells me toward the end of our interview, curled up cross-legged on the bare mattress in jeans and a soft flannel shirt. Her dark hair is shaggy and loose, and she wears no makeup. “When I go to clients I’m a totally different person. I do run an ad sometimes that specifically says ‘tomboy,’ and I get guys who really like that, and don’t want me to wear makeup. Still, I’ve got to get into the gym and work out and be in shape, and if I gain a little weight it’s ‘oh, no.’ I have to shave all the time, which I’d rather not do. When I work, I’m usually in full-done drag, high heels and makeup and hair done up and a little dress that shows my cleavage.

• From Another Country (1962)

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

• From Little Women (1868)

  Jo smothered a laugh at the sudden change, and when someone gave a modest tap, opened the door with a grim aspect which was anything but hospitable. "Good afternoon. I came to get my umbrella, that is, to see how your father finds himself today," said Mr. Brooke, getting a trifle confused as his eyes went from one telltale face to the other. "It's very well, he's in the rack. I'll get him, and tell it you are here." And having jumbled her father and the umbrella well together in her reply, Jo slipped out of the room to give Meg a chance to make her speech and air her dignity. But the instant she vanished, Meg began to sidle toward the door, murmuring... "Mother will like to see you. Pray sit down, I'll call her." "Don't go. Are you afraid of me, Margaret?" and Mr. Brooke looked so hurt that Meg thought she must have done something very rude. She blushed up to the little curls on her forehead, for he had never called her Margaret before, and she was surprised to find how natural and sweet it seemed to hear him say it. Anxious to appear friendly and at her ease, she put out her hand with a confiding gesture, and said gratefully... "How can I be afraid when you have been so kind to Father? I only wish I could thank you for it." "Shall I tell you how?" asked Mr. Brooke, holding the small hand fast in both his own, and looking down at Meg with so much love in the brown eyes that her heart began to flutter, and she both longed to run away and to stop and listen. "Oh no, please don't, I'd rather not," she said, trying to withdraw her hand, and looking frightened in spite of her denial. "I won't trouble you. I only want to know if you care for me a little, Meg. I love you so much, dear," added Mr. Brooke tenderly. This was the moment for the calm, proper speech, but Meg didn't make it. She forgot every word of it, hung her head, and answered, "I don't know," so softly that John had to stoop down to catch the foolish little reply. He seemed to think it was worth the trouble, for he smiled to himself as if quite satisfied, pressed the plump hand gratefully, and said in his most persuasive tone, "Will you try and find out? I want to know so much, for I can't go to work with any heart until I learn whether I am to have my reward in the end or not." "I'm too young," faltered Meg, wondering why she was so fluttered, yet rather enjoying it. "I'll wait, and in the meantime, you could be learning to like me. Would it be a very hard lesson, dear?" "Not if I chose to learn it, but. . ." "Please choose to learn, Meg.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Just as I did with Limori, I overlooked any faults he might exhibit or any human imperfections that were present in him, having been programmed to believe that these flaws were tools that God was using to teach us. If he was crass or rude or drank too much, I thought he was doing these things in order to teach. It was astonishing, really, how easily I was able to transfer my guru-worship from Limori to Gary. She helped that along by promoting Gary to us and touting his clarity and wisdom. Gary had done what all of us aspired to do: he had reached the spiritual pinnacle we were all perpetually aspiring to. Gary’s ascension in the ranks of the group sent the message that it was possible to achieve enlightenment and that continuing to apply all the lessons we were learning would one day ensure our enlightenment as well. Gary was proof that Limori’s teaching worked; he became the embodiment of the spiritual carrot we were all reaching for. However, just as happened with Sheila before him on the first-lieutenant rung of the group hierarchy, Gary eventually fell from Limori’s grace. He and Karen were legally married in Kauai in 1994, but by early 1996 their marriage was imploding. Karen had been concerned with Gary’s excessive drinking since they had become spiritually married and, ultimately, that was one of the central issues that led to her leaving the marriage. Gary began coming to the weekly meditation meetings less frequently during this time, but without an explanation (to me, anyway). When he was not there, the rest of us sat in the circle and shared our confessions or meditated together, co-facilitating one another. I don’t know what specifically initiated the rift between Gary and Limori. My observation was that as Gary and Karen’s marriage crumbled, he began to drift out of Limori’s orbit. On the nights that he did come to the circle to facilitate, he would obliquely refer to the fact that Limori wasn’t returning his calls or that he had not talked to her in quite a while. Before the situation completely soured, he flew up to Wolf’s Den at Limori’s request to stay for a week, but returned after only a few days. His explanation was that his spirit guides had told him that Limori was using too much oil in her cooking and when he had passed this information along to her, she had not liked it and he had been asked to leave the next day. He laughed at the seemingly trivial reason that he had been sent home, but I suspected that his joking was covering up more serious problems in his relationship with our guru. Whatever the reason for the split, I was for the second time witnessing a major change in the group structure, only this time I would be more intimately involved in the outcome.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  She knew Limori’s every preference for food, wine, water, clothing fabric, hair dye and toenail polish. She was the ultimate definition of a personal assistant except that she never got paid and it was a 24/7, 365-day-a-year job. As I became more involved in Limori’s group in the early 1990s, all I ever really found out about Alice’s background was that she had grown children and an ex-husband. Limori used to tell a story of Alice arriving at Limori’s door one day saying she had left her husband and wanted to stay with Limori and serve God from then on. They had met for the first time at some point before this, but I never learned how or when or where. As far as personality goes, I never really saw one in Alice. It wasn’t that she was shy or retiring; she looked everyone directly in the eye and was not ever reluctant about sharing the painful ‘truths’ that ‘Spirit’ was channelling to her. She laughed uproariously when the situation called for it and apparently had quite a temper. Or so Limori used to tell us; I never saw it for myself. But what I noticed most about Alice was that she wasn’t there. I wanted to know more about her, at first because, as I said, I wanted her job. I was so taken with Limori and with the life of someone like Alice who served God twenty-four hours a day that I wanted to be her. I wanted the life of fulfillment and service that she had. But even when I lived with Limori for those few tumultuous months, I never got any greater sense of who Alice was. She existed only to serve. Her own personal opinions about anything were never put forward. And I realize now, it was not just her opinions that were absent; her thoughts and feelings were missing as well. I assumed during all the years I knew Alice that she had always been this way: vacant, quiet, absent, subservient. But it was only when I began to observe these exact personality traits emerge in my friend Lisa that I realized that this zombie-like countenance was a direct result of the way Limori moulded and trained people in her sway. Much, much later, while writing this book, I would come to realize that achieving this thought-less state of being was a necessity for those who served Limori in such an intimate and unrelenting way. Those who became especially close to her, those who served her every day and lived with her permanently, had to develop this way of being absent while they were present as a means of surviving what they were being put through. Alice, and later Lisa, were life-sized examples of the process that Robert Lifton calls thought stopping. The first stage of my understanding of thought stopping came by surprise and was completely unconscious.

• From Little Women (1868)

  It's no use, Jo, he's got to learn that I'm able to take care of myself, and don't need anyone's apron string to hold on by." "What pepper pots you are!" sighed Jo. "How do you mean to settle this affair?" "Well, he ought to beg pardon, and believe me when I say I can't tell him what the fuss's about." "Bless you! He won't do that." "I won't go down till he does." "Now, Teddy, be sensible. Let it pass, and I'll explain what I can. You can't stay here, so what's the use of being melodramatic?" "I don't intend to stay here long, anyway. I'll slip off and take a journey somewhere, and when Grandpa misses me he'll come round fast enough." "I dare say, but you ought not to go and worry him." "Don't preach. I'll go to Washington and see Brooke. It's gay there, and I'll enjoy myself after the troubles." "What fun you'd have! I wish I could run off too," said Jo, forgetting her part of mentor in lively visions of martial life at the capital. "Come on, then! Why not? You go and surprise your father, and I'll stir up old Brooke. It would be a glorious joke. Let's do it, Jo. We'll leave a letter saying we are all right, and trot off at once. I've got money enough. It will do you good, and no harm, as you go to your father." For a moment Jo looked as if she would agree, for wild as the plan was, it just suited her. She was tired of care and confinement, longed for change, and thoughts of her father blended temptingly with the novel charms of camps and hospitals, liberty and fun. Her eyes kindled as they turned wistfully toward the window, but they fell on the old house opposite, and she shook her head with sorrowful decision. "If I was a boy, we'd run away together, and have a capital time, but as I'm a miserable girl, I must be proper and stop at home. Don't tempt me, Teddy, it's a crazy plan." "That's the fun of it," began Laurie, who had got a willful fit on him and was possessed to break out of bounds in some way. "Hold your tongue!" cried Jo, covering her ears. "'Prunes and prisms' are my doom, and I may as well make up my mind to it. I came here to moralize, not to hear things that make me skip to think of." "I know Meg would wet-blanket such a proposal, but I thought you had more spirit," began Laurie insinuatingly. "Bad boy, be quiet! Sit down and think of your own sins, don't go making me add to mine. If I get your grandpa to apologize for the shaking, will you give up running away?" asked Jo seriously. "Yes, but you won't do it," answered Laurie, who wished to make up, but felt that his outraged dignity must be appeased first.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  By 1993, a single group in the alt hierarchy had garnered 3.3 million subscribers—8 per cent of the total Usenet readership. That group was alt.sex. This might not seem like much of the market share, but given that there were tens of thousands of groups, it’s significant. And that does not include the hundreds of alt.sex subcategories—alt.sex.stories, alt.sex.spanking, alt. sex.erotica.market, alt.sex.pictures.men, alt.sex.fetish.sailor-moon and so on. It was here that people like Mo and millions of others explored their own and other’s sexuality. They shared information and fantasies. There were few rules and no taboos. This was a paradise for those like Mo, who were seeking healthy liberation, but also for others whose motivations were somewhat darker. Precisely because this electronic outpost of anything goes was so far removed, some of those communities included the kind of stuff that isn’t legal or accepted anywhere: pedophilia, bestiality, incest, rape and on and on and on and on. All imaginable forms of sexual material were heavily in demand. The good, the strange and the disgusting all played a part in pushing Internet technology forward. There was a perpetual demand for more. Not just for more of the same, but for new and improved media, and better ways to access them. The desire to get higher-quality pornographic pictures and video was nothing more or less than a desire for improved Internet technology. Faster servers, higher bandwidth, simpler file formats, easier interfaces—these were the keys to improving users’ pornographic experiences, and subsequently the foundation for the mainstreaming of the Internet. —— It is interesting to note that none of this Usenet-based trade in pornography had anything directly to do with money. The suppliers of pornography were posting stories, pictures and videos for free, motivated either by a sense of generosity or (more likely) by an expectation that others would share their collections as well. There was no premium for downloading material, other than the time and work it took to acquire it. People were spending money on hardware, software and services in order to access Usenet porn, but once connected, it was all available for free. The by-products of this massive trading in pornography were demand for more powerful computers, faster modems and especially greater bandwidth. The demand for pornography—and the technology to deliver it—was so extraordinary, so seemingly limitless, that it took on the trappings of a highly addictive drug. For the first time in history, pornography was so readily available that its out-of-control consumption could begin to be discussed as a mental disorder.

• From Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  I was also concentrating with every fibre in my being; I wanted to see the things in my inner vision that Limori saw and I wanted to understand the same messages that she received from God. I wanted to fit in and I wanted Limori’s approval, and therefore God’s approval, so I concentrated with every cell, every breath and every thought, trying to understand what was going on within the room, within the people in the room, including me, and outside the room. What was God saying? What was He trying to teach us at that moment? What was the higher purpose of this workshop for Susan? How could I use this moment to change, to improve, to become a better spiritual student? All I wanted was to learn to communicate with God. In that moment, I absolutely believed that this was the way I could learn to do that. This was God in action. I believed that Limori was helping Susan by confronting her in this way and using the spiritual tools available to her to offer Susan guidance and wisdom and an opportunity to grow. Even though I was not the subject of this workshop, I wanted to pay attention to everything that was going on so that I could be the best spiritual student possible. Limori opened her eyes and began to probe Susan further. “What, specifically, were your judgments?” “Well, that Alexandra was getting better treatment than I was.” “So you were comparing yourself to her?” “Yes, I guess I was.” “You guess? Or you were?” “I was,” Susan agreed. “Yes, I was comparing myself to her.” “Is the bedroom you have not good enough for you? Is sharing a room with Alice not good enough for Princess Susan?” Limori’s sneering tone when she said Princess made it clear to all of us that this was not a compliment. Susan attempted to defend herself, “No! It’s fine. I like sharing the room with Alice and we’ve become closer by doing so . . .“ Limori interrupted, “Then why the judgment? Why worry about where Alexandra or anyone is sleeping? Why is it any of your business where God has you sleep? If He asked me to sleep in the road I would do so. If He asked me to leave this house and take only the clothes on my back and let go of all these things [she hissed the word, giving it all sorts of evil meaning] I would do that without question. I would go barefoot and sleep in Stanley Park if that was what He asked me to do. No questions. No judgments. This is what God wants, so I do it.” She paused and her gaze, which had been drilling into Susan, relaxed a bit and she looked over at Gary. “Is what I’m being told correct?” she asked him. Gary closed his eyes and tuned in for twenty or thirty seconds. “Yes,” he said, without opening them.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Bonobos are so near to me and yet so different, but I believe absolutely in bonobian erotic pleasure, in the complexity of their response and desire. I think bonobos share, with humans, elephants, and cetaceans, a sexual consciousness—an ability to choose sex both for its immediate and its more lasting consequences. They make plain the twin faces of sex: tranquilizer and amphetamine. Sex as meditation, as a trance, melting the self away. Sex as a kick, a psychic cattle prod, solidifying the self and those around us. Bonobos lust. Augustine believed the real punishment given to Adam and Eve wasn’t nakedness or shame, but lust. The nakedness and the shame followed the libido, as it were; they were part and parcel to the God-given agony of sexual desire. Punishment it certainly can seem at times—and punishment it was for Augustine, who suffered miserably from recalcitrant desire. If sexuality is a body, then desire is its blood. Born with predispositions, shaped by the environment, the sexual individual is a palimpsest with many sets of writing one atop the other. The things that contain enormous importance in moments of sexual contact—those things that we desire and can’t explain—are the fruit of tiny moments, they are acts unbidden in childhood, dreams never remembered, bodies barely seen. A perfume, a sound, the shape of a leg, eventually becomes the arousing potential of hair or leather or shiny black shoes, the urge to feel the riding crop, to encircle a tiny waist or embrace large buttocks. An idea never spoken, a deed secretly done, becomes hunger—for lingerie or cotton rope, hunger to be entered or tickled, whispered to or beaten senseless or kissed for hours. Once given to us, these dreams can’t be given back. One of the good questions Alfred Kinsey asked in the 1940s had to do with the “non-sexual sources of erotic response” of preadolescent and adolescent boys. The list generated was long and instructive, and included sitting in class, punishment, accidents, fast elevators, sitting in church, fear of intruders, tests, getting home late, big fires, marching soldiers, band music, harsh words, losing one’s balance, a long flight of stairs, the national anthem, money, dreams of giants and wild animals, and much, much more. Was there anything not on the list? Could there be? I wonder how much of a kick the boys got from thinking up things to tell the interviewer.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  The broad plain of sexual desire rises unbidden, of its own separate, uncontrollable accord, and it surprises, disconcerts, and sometimes pleases the person in whom it rises. Roland Barthes caught himself scrutinizing his lover’s body, and, fascinated with his own scrutiny, sought to know “the cause of my desire … I am like those children who take a clock apart in order to find out what time is.” But such obsession is only partly about the other’s body. It is more, and more importantly, about the other, the maddening, fascinating opacity of the other who can’t be forgotten even for a moment. The aroused state hurts and pleases at once, and the degree of painful frustration rises exactly in accord with the degree of deepening pleasure. When we are aroused, the ego wrestles the superego to the ground, and while they’re fighting the mute and mindless id runs the show. Hormones, genetics, pheromones, who cares? I just want that—or this. I want it so much I can barely think of anything else, I want it here, now, any way I can. Another’s appetite can destroy us. Hunger makes us into food, a thing, something to be devoured, even if the hunger is for love. Too much desire makes desire’s fulfillment impossible, because desire itself becomes the goal and the conclusion. I had a lover years ago who seemed insatiable. It wasn’t sex he couldn’t get enough of, but nearness, and sex was the only way he thought that could happen. He kissed me as though he were willing to chew through my skin to get inside me, own me, to be not alone. When I left him I felt eaten up, and I hated it. At that time I was caught up in romantic ideals and thought I should want to be adored. But when he approached me with such single-mindedness, I couldn’t breathe. With him, I wanted less desire, far less, not more.

• From Wild (2012)

  [image file=image_rsrc2VM.jpg] Christine’s husband, Jeff, made me a sandwich while I showered. When I emerged from the bathroom, it was sitting on a plate, sliced diagonally and rimmed by blue corn tortilla chips and a pickle. “If you’d like to add more meat to it, feel free,” Jeff said, pushing a platter of cold cuts toward me from his seat across the table. He was handsome and chubby, his dark hair wavy and gray at the temples. An attorney, Christine had told me during the short walk from the restaurant to their cabin. They lived in San Francisco, but they spent the first week of July here each year. “Maybe just a few more slices, thanks,” I said, reaching for the turkey with fake nonchalance. “It’s organic, in case that matters to you,” said Christine. “And humanely raised. We’ve gone in that direction as much as we possibly can. You forgot the cheese,” she scolded Jeff, and went to the refrigerator to retrieve it. “Would you like some dill Havarti on your sandwich, Cheryl?” “I’m fine. Thanks,” I said to be polite, but she sliced some anyway and brought it to me, and I ate it so fast she went back to the counter and sliced more without saying anything about it. She reached into the chip bag and put another handful on my plate, then cracked open a can of root beer and set it before me. If she’d emptied the contents of the entire refrigerator, I’d have eaten every last thing. “Thank you,” I said every time she placed another item on the table. Beyond the kitchen, I could see Jeff and Christine’s two daughters through the sliding-glass door. They were sitting on the deck in twin Adirondack chairs, browsing copies of Seventeen and People with their headphones in their ears. “How old are they?” I asked, nodding in their direction. “Sixteen and almost eighteen,” said Christine. “They’re going into their sophomore and senior years.” They sensed us looking at them and glanced up. I waved, and they waved shyly back at me before returning to their magazines. “I’d love it if they did something like you’re doing. If they could be as brave and strong as you,” said Christine. “But maybe not that brave, actually. I think it would scare me to have one of them out there like you are. Aren’t you scared, all by yourself?”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I walked out, not long ago, at eight-thirty on a clear, fragrant spring morning. Gnats were stirring in the still sunshine and no one else was about. I was still sleepy, thinking only of the morning paper and a cup of tea as I walked down a path between apartments. Suddenly in the hush of the day I could hear the repeated moans of a woman through a curtained, half-open window. Her voice was breathy, catching in her throat, climbing higher in tone and louder in volume. I stood rooted to the path for a few seconds, saw the open window next to me with thin white curtains fluttering in the slight breeze, and then walked on, hearing how quickly she was racing toward her finish. I couldn’t help but imagine her, what she looked like, what she was doing, whether she was one of the neighbors I nodded at when I picked up my mail. Her guttural, meaningless sounds infected me with desire like a virus caught from the air. I could barely walk a straight line to the sidewalk. The way water ends thirst, and food ends hunger, sex ends arousal. For now, at least, because it will inevitably return. People I see every day without reaction will suddenly change, their appearance will have new meaning, their walk, smile, smell will signal me as surely as a baboon’s buttocks signal her mate. Perhaps I have a crush, all at once; certainly this shift in awareness carries enormous weight. Perhaps I’m merely … horny. Horny means a million things: It means wanting sweat, but also skin, to touch and be touched, anywhere, to suck and lick, be penetrated, to feel a finger slip between my shirt buttons, and then in between my breasts. Feeling horny is like being pregnant with desire, restless and premonitory, swollen. Predatory, as though I were hunting. I begin to act unseemly, I get reckless, attentive to every person with whom I have the most casual contact. The smallest of meetings shivers with imagined meaning. Alone in this state I get restless, and watch television, and every show seems laden with entendre, each character on the screen speaking directly to me.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  “To submit to lust is to declare a panic, a state of body emergency,” Susie Bright writes. She is trying to explain the illogical urge with which she left one lover for another, against what might be called better judgment. Desire can be a pure frenzy of neurotransmitters, like acid in the drinking water, voodoo, hypnosis, a curse. I know exactly what Susie means; I’m still embarrassed by a brief affair I had many years ago with someone whose company I couldn’t stand but who nevertheless drew me sexually like a drug I had to have, a monkey on my back. Can judgment, rational thought, or foresight affect us, once panic has hold? And can anyone outside, looking in, fully appreciate the frenzy involved? That we can just control our sexual selves is one of those maddening pronouncements with which Americans are raised, a pronouncement often delivered with smarmy self-righteousness. Promiscuity is a mental illness; “sex addicts” seek treatment. (A gay male friend tells me that a men’s sex addict group he attends is his best pickup spot.) One of the most widely censured of behaviors—passionate sex with total strangers—is perhaps the most common fantasy shared by men and women alike. Sexual jealousy is almost as violent a state as sexual desire; both are composed mostly of misery, with flecks of rage and grief mixed in. Both are about possession of another, of the other. Both are obsessive, racking, potentially lethal; they are Shiva alive in our groin, hard enough to break lives, murder, wage war, destroy empires. In his book Smut, Murray Davis talks about the slippage involved in arousal, the way we just wake up already in it. “Erotic reality is entered so gradually that the unwary may find themselves entering it against their will … as if by some gravitational force: the closer they get, the stronger the pull, as though the very space around the object of their desire were curved in an Einsteinian way.” There may be something to this sublimation thing, after all; when I want sex, it tends to get in the way of empire-building. And everything else. If I were a baboon, I would wear a red and swollen flag on my ass and stink of sex to all around me. Sometimes I swear I can smell it on myself.

• From Little Women (1868)

  Bhaer was Nick Bottom, and Tina was Titania, a perfect little fairy in his arms. To see them dance was 'quite a landscape', to use a Teddyism. I had a very happy New Year, after all, and when I thought it over in my room, I felt as if I was getting on a little in spite of my many failures, for I'm cheerful all the time now, work with a will, and take more interest in other people than I used to, which is satisfactory. Bless you all! Ever your loving... Jo CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR FRIEND Though very happy in the social atmosphere about her, and very busy with the daily work that earned her bread and made it sweeter for the effort, Jo still found time for literary labors. The purpose which now took possession of her was a natural one to a poor and ambitious girl, but the means she took to gain her end were not the best. She saw that money conferred power, money and power, therefore, she resolved to have, not to be used for herself alone, but for those whom she loved more than life. The dream of filling home with comforts, giving Beth everything she wanted, from strawberries in winter to an organ in her bedroom, going abroad herself, and always having more than enough, so that she might indulge in the luxury of charity, had been for years Jo's most cherished castle in the air. The prize-story experience had seemed to open a way which might, after long traveling and much uphill work, lead to this delightful chateau en Espagne. But the novel disaster quenched her courage for a time, for public opinion is a giant which has frightened stouter-hearted Jacks on bigger beanstalks than hers. Like that immortal hero, she reposed awhile after the first attempt, which resulted in a tumble and the least lovely of the giant's treasures, if I remember rightly. But the 'up again and take another' spirit was as strong in Jo as in Jack, so she scrambled up on the shady side this time and got more booty, but nearly left behind her what was far more precious than the moneybags. She took to writing sensation stories, for in those dark ages, even all-perfect America read rubbish. She told no one, but concocted a 'thrilling tale', and boldly carried it herself to Mr. Dashwood, editor of the Weekly Volcano. She had never read Sartor Resartus, but she had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners.

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  “I’m dressed in this way I never normally dress, I’m playing the whore, the slut, the nympho, whatever, and I can have fun with that, but they don’t realize it’s just a role. I like role-playing with friends, too, sometimes, but they know who the real me is. I think most guys love the whole garter-belts-and-stockings thing, they want you all done up, looking slutty and sucking their dick on all fours.” Prostitution inevitably comes back to desire. When I interviewed Jackie Daniels, and she talked about how some men just love women, that prostitutes needn’t be beautiful, she added, “You could be a sex worker. Easily.” And I was flattered, in an odd way. Could I, really? And on the other hand, when I talked to Alex, sitting cross-legged on a bare double mattress in an empty apartment, I realized how attractive I found her and thought: I could pay her for sex. Two hundred dollars, one hour, what the hell, it’s only money, and as soon as I imagine it my lust expands outward, and as soon as I feel the desire, I feel embarrassed about my body, anxiety about my performance, fear of rejection. The fact that I know so clearly that for her it would be just work is both a relief and a sorrow. All our fears and fantasies about whores center around the fact that they know us in a certain way, a professional way that is disconcerting. I wonder how many of these same confused feelings, these human feelings, are shared by every young businessman, every balding, potbellied CEO who buys Alex’s time. And how she calms their fears. The genital dance of sex work demystifies the spiritual image of sex, and, at the same time, remystifies. Sex work has the potential to tease the true anxiety men feel about women, the anxiety they hide in brutality or simply bravado, tease it up to the surface to be transformed into something else—desire, affection, rest, wonder. The original “harlots” were sacred women who worked in temples, a widespread practice in the ancient world. Temple prostitutes had sex with visitors in exchange for donations to the temple and as a way of both gaining and giving spiritual merit. If we respect myth and the living power of cultural history in any way, we have to bemoan the loss of the sacred harlot; we have to mourn her translation into the pitiful whore of modern myths. The degrading of prostitutes is a direct comment on the degradation of the concept of the Goddess and the ancient celebration of the power of women.

• From Another Country (1962)

  It gave him an instant to locate himself. For he, too, was trembling slightly. “What made you come North?” he asked. He wondered if he should proposition her or wait for her to proposition him. He couldn’t beg. But perhaps she could. The hairs of his groin began to itch slightly. The terrible muscle at the base of his belly began to grow hot and hard. The elevator came to a halt, the doors opened, and they walked a long corridor toward a half-open door. She said, “I guess I just couldn’t take it down there any more. I was married but then I broke up with my husband and they took away my kid—they wouldn’t even let me see him—and I got to thinking that rather than sit down there and go crazy, I’d try to make a new life for myself up here.” Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble. But he shook the suggestion off. He wouldn’t be around long enough to be bugged by her story. He just wanted her for tonight. He knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. Straight ahead of them, in the large living room which ended in open French doors and a balcony, more than a hundred people milled about, some in evening dress, some in slacks and sweaters. High above their heads hung an enormous silver ball which reflected unexpected parts of the room and managed its own unloving comment on the people in it. The room was so active with coming and going, so bright with jewelry and glasses and cigarettes, that the heavy ball seemed almost to be alive. His host—whom he did not really know very well—was nowhere in sight. To the right of them were three rooms, the first of which was piled high with wraps and overcoats. The horn of Charlie Parker, coming over the hi-fi, dominated all the voices in the room. “Put your coat down,” he told Leona, “and I’ll try to find out if I know anybody in this joint.” “Oh,” she said, “I’m sure you know them all.” “Go on, now,” he said, smiling, and pushing her gently into the room, “do like I tell you.” While she was putting away her coat—and powdering her nose, probably—he remembered that he had promised to call Vivaldo. He wandered through the house, looking for a relatively isolated telephone, and found one in the kitchen. He dialed Vivaldo’s number. “Hello, baby. How’re you?” “Oh, all right, I guess. What’s happening? I thought you were going to call me sooner. I’d just about given you up.” “Well, I only just made it up here.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  (“Panties” is a word to be avoided, I feel.) But French braids, in which three sporting dolphins dip smoothly under one another and surface in a continuous elegant entrainment, are the most beautiful and impressive results of this sense of dorsal space. As soon as I saw Joyce’s braid I knew that it was time to stop time. I needed to feel her solid braid, and her head beneath it, in my palm. So, just as she started walking again, I snapped my fingers. This is my latest method of entering the Fold, and one of the simpler I have been able to develop (much more straightforward than my earlier mathematical-formula technique, or the sewn calluses, for instance, both of which I will get into later). She didn’t hear the snap, only I did—the universe halts at some indeterminate point just before my middle finger swats against the base of my thumb. I got out my Casio typewriter and scooted over here to her on my chair. (I didn’t scoot backwards, I scooted frontwards, which isn’t easy to do over carpeting, because it is hard to get the proper traction. I wanted to keep my eyes on her.) She was in mid-stride. I reached forward and put my hands on her hipbones. It felt as if there were cashmere or something fancy in the wool, and it was good to feel her hipbones through that soft material, and to see my hands angling to follow the incurve of her waist, which the dress had to an extent hidden. Sometimes when I first touch a woman in the Fold I tense up my arms until they vibrate, so that the shape of whatever is under my palms keeps on being sent through my nerves as new information. I never know exactly what I will do during a Drop. To get her dress out of the way, I lifted its soft hem up over her hips and gathered it into two wingy bunches and tied a big soft knot with them. It had seemed as if she had a tiny potbelly with the dress on (this can be a sexy touch, I think, on some women), but if she had, it disappeared or lost definition as soon as I pulled her panty-hose and underpants down as far as I could get them, which wasn’t that far because her legs were walkingly apart. (Also, before I pulled down her pantyhose, which is a smoky-blue color, I touched an oval of her skin through a run in the darker part high on her thigh.) And then I was given this sight that I have before me now, of her pubic hair.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Rhody and I had sex that evening—not outré toothbrush-driven avocado sex, but not all that bad sex either. While I was fucking into her slowly from behind, she began to come, muff-finger flying. I still had a ways to go. I never liked coming after she did, because I could not convince myself that she was still interested. Hastily I fished one of the rocker-switches out of my pants pocket (fortunately my pants were right there on the bed) and envisioned a spinning hourglass while I tripped it. There was a smarting spark against my palm as time’s fuse blew. I pulled out and looked at the alluringly open negative shape in Rhody’s vadge where my cock had just happily been—it didn’t close on itself as it would have out of the Fold. I went and stood in the other room, looking through the frame of the open door at what she looked like as she was fucking me. Her glasses were on. Folds of the sheet were clutched in her hands. Though she was supporting her weight on her elbows and knees, her breasts weren’t hanging straight down, as they would have been if she had posed herself in this position, but were shaped on the fly, the centers of gravity looming forward, because we had been slapping against each other quite hard and she had just begun a drive back onto my richard. She was looking down past her breasts at her own thighs or perhaps at my ballions swinging just below her tuft. Her face was very flushed, in part because her head was held down the way it was—there was a vein in her forehead that I could clearly see. My girlfriend! I pulled off my condom, disliking the wrinkly sounds it made as I mastur-worked myself. The coolness of the open air on my richard made it remember how good it was to be hard. I lay next to her on the bed, looking at her slung-forward drones and flushed face, and I imagined her imagining sucking her piano teacher’s languid elutriator, or thinking about somebody or -bodies a great deal sexier to her than I was doing something nice and kinky, and in my anxiousness to catch up with her I almost went too far and came all alone—I clenched once in a false-dawn sort of pre-orgasm, which is a spasm (if I may be pardoned for an inelegant simile) very similar to the false flush-moment that can occur in a toilet tank if you don’t hold the handle down quite long enough for the mechanism to confirm your unambivalent wish for it to go through a full flush cycle. I let my cock settle down for a minute, and then began driving up the grade again. It was now so mindlessly hard that the sensation of a pinchingly new condom being unrolled down its length was a matter of complete indifference to it. I pointed myself back inside Rhody and pressed the rocker-switch and, slapping against her as if there had been no break in the action, came just when she did. I felt a little guilty about having thus engineered a simultaneous orgasm (and what if by some mischance she found the second condom later?) and I lay there in the otherwise happy post-coital calm, seriously weighing whether I should just go ahead and tell her my entire history of time-perversion.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Her embarrassment was, it seemed to me, directed forward, at the man working the card machine—a spindly nice-mannered ugly man who shaved too far down on the sides of his beard. But she knew that someone was behind her as well, and she could be considering that my eyes were on the freckles of her shoulder, and she might be able to feel them moving down her arm to read the title of the book again, Naked Beneath My Clothes—a fact that, because she held the book, was being asserted not as a general truth but as a truth specifically about her and her alone, prefixed by an “I am.” I very much wanted to see her naked beneath her clothes. And of course I could have easily enough. Yet I hesitated to drop into the Fold to remove all those layers, since I would have trouble remembering how they hung with such artful sloppiness over one another when it was time to dress her back up. (She wasn’t, thank God, wearing those leggings that terminate in a bit of lace!) Every curve and movement of her body cried out, “I’m extremely single at the moment and I’m available tonight to have a drink or two with a nice man who will listen to me and make me laugh.” I knew that she was feeling that this interval in the checkout line was her last chance to meet someone, and I knew that I was at least a better catch than the library staffer with the unsightly beard.

• From Another Country (1962)

  But he disliked him intensely now. “No, come on, now, what are we really celebrating? Or maybe I should say what are Richard and Cass celebrating?” “Richard’s novel. It’s published. It’ll be in all the bookstores Monday.” “Oh, Vivaldo,” she said, “that’s wonderful. He must feel wonderful. A real, honest-to-God published writer.” “Yes,” he said, “one of our boys made it.” He was touched by her enthusiasm. And he was aware, at the same time, that she had also been speaking for the benefit of the elevator man. “It must be wonderful for Cass, too,” she said. “And for you, he’s your friend.” She looked at him. “When are you going to bring out your novel?” This question, and even more her way of asking it, seemed to contain implications he scarcely dared to trust. “One of these days,” he muttered; and he blushed. The elevator stopped and they walked into a corridor. Richard’s door was to the left of them. “It looks like I’ve got my hands full right now.” “What do you mean? It’s not working the way you want it to?” “The novel, you mean?” “Yes.” Then, as they faced each other before the door, “What did you think I meant?” “Oh, that’s what I thought you meant, all right.” He thought, Now listen, don’t spoil it, don’t rush it, you stupid bastard, don’t spoil it. “It’s just that it’s not exactly what I meant.” “What did you mean?” She was smiling. “I meant—I hoped I’m going to have my hands full now, with you.” She called part of her smile back, but she still looked amused. She watched him. “You know—dinners and lunches and—walks—and movies and things—with you. With you.” He dropped his eyes. “You know what I mean?” Then, in the warm, electrical silence, he raised his eyes to hers, and he said, “You know what I mean.” “Well,” she said, “let’s talk about it after lunch, okay?” She turned from him and faced the door. He did not move. She looked at him with her eyes very wide. “Aren’t you going to ring the bell?” “Sure.” They watched each other. Ida reached out and touched him on the cheek. He grabbed her hand and held it for a moment against his face. Very gently, she pulled her hand away. “You are the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said, “you are. Go on and ring that bell, I’m hungry.” He laughed and pressed the button. They heard the sour buzzing inside the apartment, then confusion, a slammed door, and footsteps. He took one of Ida’s hands in both of his. “I want to be with you,” he said. “I want you to be with me.