Desire

Passages

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

Page 244 of 344 · 20 per page

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  She did not spend the six weeks in Las Vegas, because Las Vegas as we later knew it did not yet exactly exist. She spent the six weeks twenty miles from Las Vegas, in Boulder City, which had been built by the Bureau of Reclamation as the construction camp for Hoover Dam and in which both gambling and union membership were prohibited by law. I asked her what she had found to do for six weeks in Boulder City. She said that Jerry had given her a dog, which she walked, every day, through the identical streets lined with matching government bungalows that constituted Boulder City and on across the dam. I recall this striking me as the most intrepid story I ever heard about how someone did or did not stay in Las Vegas, a topic not entirely deficient in intrepid stories. Diana. Diana Lynn, Diana Hall. Hers is another face that springs out from the photographs taken that day. In this photograph she is holding a champagne flute and smoking a cigarette. It occurs to me as I look at her photograph that it was Diana who had made that day possible. It was Diana who had drawn me into the conversation about adoption over the New Year’s weekend on Morty’s boat. It was Diana who had talked to Blake Watson, it was Diana who had intuited how deeply I needed Quintana. It was Diana who had changed my life. S 16 ome of us feel this overpowering need for a child and some of us don’t. It had come over me quite suddenly, in my mid-twenties, when I was working for Vogue, a tidal surge. Once this surge hit I saw babies wherever I went. I followed their carriages on the street. I cut their pictures from magazines and tacked them on the wall next to my bed. I put myself to sleep by imagining them: imagining holding them, imagining the down on their heads, imagining the soft spots at their temples, imagining the way their eyes dilated when you looked at them. Until then pregnancy had been only a fear, an accident to be avoided at any cost. Until then I had felt nothing but relief at the moment each month when I started to bleed. If that moment was delayed by even a day I would leave my office at Vogue and, looking for instant reassurance that I was not pregnant, go see my doctor, a Columbia Presbyterian internist who had come to be known, because his mother-in-law had been editor in chief of Vogue and his office was always open to fretful staff members, as “the Vogue doctor.” I recall sitting in his examining room on East Sixty-seventh Street one morning waiting for the results of the most recent rabbit test I had implored him to do. He came into the room whistling, and began misting the plants on the window sill.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Really a giant. I was very happy after Allendy’s kiss. At the same time I know that Henry’s most casual kiss can shake the foundations of my body. I realized this keenly today when I saw him after five days’ separation. What a convergence of bodies. It is like a furnace when we meet. Yet day by day I realize more completely that only my body is stirred. My best moments with Henry are in bed. August When I read Henry’s ardent love letters, I am not stirred. I am not impatient to return to him. His defects stand in the foreground. Perhaps I have simply swung back to Hugo. I don’t know. I am aware of a tremendous distance between us. And it is difficult for me to write lovingly. I feel insincere. I evade the issue. I write less than I should. I have to force myself to write at all. What has happened? Hugo is surprised because I am so restless. I smoke, get up, move about. I cannot bear my own company. I have not learned yet to replace introspection by thinking. I could meditate on Spengler, for instance, but in ten minutes I am again devouring myself. As Gide says, introspection falsifies everything. Perhaps it estranges me from Henry. I need his voice and his caresses. He writes a beautiful letter about our last days in Clichy, Henry desiring me, lost without me. Yet it is impossible for me to desire him in Hugo’s presence. Hugo’s laughter, Hugo’s devotion paralyzes me. Finally I write to him, hinting at all this. But as soon as I have mailed the letter, the artificially pent-up feelings overwhelm me. I write him a mad note. The next morning I receive an enormous letter from him. The very touch of it moves me. “When you return I am going to give you one literary fuck fest—that means fucking and talking and talking and fucking. Anaïs, I am going to open your very groins. God forgive me if this letter is ever opened by mistake. I can’t help it. I want you. I love you. You’re food and drink to me, the whole bloody machinery as it were. Lying on top of you is one thing, but getting close to you is another. I feel close to you, one with you, you’re mine whether it is acknowledged or not. Every day I wait now is torture. I am counting them slowly, painfully. But make it as soon as you can. I need you. God, I want to see you in Louveciennes, see you in that golden light of the window, in your Nile green dress and your face pale, a frozen pallor as of the night of the concert. I love you as you are. I love your loins, the golden pallor, the slope of your buttocks, the warmth inside you, the juices of you. Anaïs, I love you so much, so much!

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Tonight I surrender to a craving for Henry. I want him, and I want June. It is June who will kill me, who will take Henry away from me, who will hate me. I want to be in Henry’s arms. I want June to find me there: it will be the only time she will suffer. After that it is Henry who will suffer, at her hands. I want to write her and beg her to come back, because I love her, because I want to give up Henry to her as the greatest gift I can make her. Hugo undresses me every night as if it were the first time and I a new woman for him. My feelings are in a chaos I cannot clarify, cannot order. My dreams tell me nothing except that I have a terror of being driven again to the point of suicide. One does not get healed just by living and loving, or I would be healed. Hugo heals me at times. We walked out in the fields today, under cherry trees, sat down on the grass, in the sun, talking like two very young lovers. Henry heals me, takes me up in his vital arms, his giant’s arms. And so some days I believe myself well. Hugo has gone away on a trip, and he kissed me so desperately and sorrowfully. I am surrounded by signs of him, small things which sing his habits, his defects, his divine goodness: a letter he has forgotten to mail, his worn-out underwear (because he will never buy anything for himself), his notes on work to be done, a golf ball—which reminds me that he said yesterday, “Not even golf is pleasure for me, because I prefer to be with you. It is all part of my damned work”—a toothbrush, an open jar of brilliantine, a half-smoked cigarette, his suit, his shoes. I have hardly kissed him good-bye, and the green gate is barely closed after him when I say to Emilia, “Clean my rose dress and wash my lace underwear. I may go and visit a friend for a few days.” I did not forget yesterday to be so good to Eduardo that he must have grown at least two feet. And the same evening I wanted to dissolve into Hugo’s body, to be imprisoned in his arms, in his goodness. At such a moment passion and fever seem unimportant. I cannot bear to see Hugo jealous, but he is sure of my love. He says, “I have never loved you as much, I have never been as happy with you. You are my whole life.” And I know that I love him as much as I can love him, that he is the only one who possesses me eternally. Yet for three days I have visualized life with Henry in Clichy. I say to Hugo, “Send me a telegram every day, please.” And I may not be home to read them.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  It is Fred’s role, unconsciously, to poison my happiness. He points to the inadequacies of Henry’s love. I do not deserve a half love, he says. I deserve extraordinary things. Hell, Henry’s half love is worth more to me than the whole loves of a thousand men. I imagined for a moment a world without Henry. And I swore that the day I lose Henry I will kill my vulnerability, my capacity for true love, my feelings by the most frenzied debauch. After Henry I want no more love. Just fucking, on the one hand, and solitude and work on the other. No more pain. After not seeing Henry for five days, due to a thousand obligations, I couldn’t bear it. I asked him to meet me for an hour between two engagements. We talked for a moment and then we went to the nearest hotel room. What a profound need of him. Only when I am in his arms does everything seem right. After an hour with him I could go on with my day, doing things I do not want to do, seeing people who do not interest me. A hotel room, for me, has an implication of voluptuousness, furtive, short lived. Perhaps my not seeing Henry has heightened my hunger. I masturbate often, luxuriously, without remorse or after distaste. For the first time I know what it is to eat. I have gained four pounds. I get frantically hungry, and the food I eat gives me a lingering pleasure. I never ate before in this deep carnal way. I have only three desires now, to eat, to sleep, and to fuck. The cabarets excite me. I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it. Henry does not give me all this. I have aroused his love. Curse his love. He can fuck me as no one else can, but I want more than that. I’m going to hell, to hell, to hell. Wild, wild, wild. Today I carried my mood to Henry, or what I could hold of it, for it seemed to me that it overflowed like lava, and I was sad when I saw him so quiet, serious, tender, not crazy enough. No, not as crazy as his writing. It is June who burns Henry with words. In his arms I forgot my fever for an hour. If only we could be alone for a few days. He wants me to go to Spain with him.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  The double life, double taste, double joy and misery. How you must be furrowed and ploughed by it. I know all that but I can’t do anything to prevent it. I wish indeed it were me who had to endure it. I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe any more, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance, neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abysm but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will. “While it thunders and lightnings I lie on the bed and go through wild dreams. We’re in Seville, and then in Fez, and then in Capri, and then in Havana. We’re journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and Arabic and Turkish. We are admitted everywhere and they strew our path with flowers. I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined; love, the dynamo; you, with your chameleon’s soul, giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before—consciously, wilfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience . . .” It is ironical that the deepest experience of my life has come to me when I am famished not for profundity but for pleasure. Sensualism consumes me. What is deep and serious I look at with less intensity, but it is that which fascinates Henry, the depths he has not yet lived out in love. Is this the high moment? If only June would return now, to leave in Henry and me that taste of the climax, never to be reached again, never to be annihilated. Henry said, “I want to leave a scar on the world.” I write to him how I feel about his book. Then: “There will never be darkness because in both of us there is always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  She spent the six weeks twenty miles from Las Vegas, in Boulder City, which had been built by the Bureau of Reclamation as the construction camp for Hoover Dam and in which both gambling and union membership were prohibited by law. I asked her what she had found to do for six weeks in Boulder City. She said that Jerry had given her a dog, which she walked, every day, through the identical streets lined with matching government bungalows that constituted Boulder City and on across the dam. I recall this striking me as the most intrepid story I ever heard about how someone did or did not stay in Las Vegas, a topic not entirely deficient in intrepid stories. Diana. Diana Lynn, Diana Hall. Hers is another face that springs out from the photographs taken that day. In this photograph she is holding a champagne flute and smoking a cigarette. It occurs to me as I look at her photograph that it was Diana who had made that day possible. It was Diana who had drawn me into the conversation about adoption over the New Year’s weekend on Morty’s boat. It was Diana who had talked to Blake Watson, it was Diana who had intuited how deeply I needed Quintana. It was Diana who had changed my life. 16 S ome of us feel this overpowering need for a child and some of us don’t. It had come over me quite suddenly, in my mid-twenties, when I was working for Vogue , a tidal surge. Once this surge hit I saw babies wherever I went. I followed their carriages on the street. I cut their pictures from magazines and tacked them on the wall next to my bed. I put myself to sleep by imagining them: imagining holding them, imagining the down on their heads, imagining the soft spots at their temples, imagining the way their eyes dilated when you looked at them. Until then pregnancy had been only a fear, an accident to be avoided at any cost. Until then I had felt nothing but relief at the moment each month when I started to bleed. If that moment was delayed by even a day I would leave my office at Vogue and, looking for instant reassurance that I was not pregnant, go see my doctor, a Columbia Presbyterian internist who had come to be known, because his mother-in-law had been editor in chief of Vogue and his office was always open to fretful staff members, as “the Vogue doctor.” I recall sitting in his examining room on East Sixty-seventh Street one morning waiting for the results of the most recent rabbit test I had implored him to do. He came into the room whistling, and began misting the plants on the window sill. The test, I prompted.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I am waiting in Allendy’s salon. I hear a woman’s voice in his office. I feel jealous. I am annoyed because I hear them laughing. He is late, too, for the first time. And I am bringing him an affectionate dream—the first time I have allowed myself to think of him physically, amorously. Perhaps I should not tell him the dream. It is giving him too much, while he . . . My bad feelings vanish when he appears. I tell him the dream. This, he realizes, is an improvement. A few months ago I would have withdrawn. He is glad of the warmth now appearing in our relationship. But he shows me how the dream betrays that my happiness comes more from his neglect of other people to give me all his attention than from the attention itself. “We come to the sensitive point again. Your unsureness, the need to be loved exclusively. There is in all your dreams a great possessiveness, too. To cling in love is bad, and it only comes from lack of confidence. Therefore when someone understands you and loves you, you are inordinately grateful.” Allendy always restores sincerity. He finds that I suppress my jealousies and my anger, turn them upon myself. He says I must express them, get rid of them. I practice a false goodness. I am not really good. I force myself to be generous, forgiving. “For a time,” says Allendy, “act as angrily as you want to.” Terrible results from this suggestion. I found coming to the surface a thousand causes for resentment against Henry, his too easy acceptance of my sacrifices, his unreasoned defense of anything that is attacked, his praise of ordinary, common women, his fear of intelligent women, his vituperations against June, the magnificent being. I awoke with a feeling that Allendy was going to kiss me during our appointment. The day seemed set for it, too, a luxuriant, tropical day. I felt languid and very sad to be parting from him. When I arrived and told him I would not be coming again, he put aside the analysis and we talked. I looked at his Moujik nose and wondered if a man like that would be sensual. I was conscious of taking my usual poses. But I felt very panicky. At the end of our talk he took my hands. I eluded him a little. I put on my hat and cape, but when I was about to leave he leaned over and said, “ Embrassez moi. ” Two impressions stand out very clearly: that I wished he had taken a good hold of me and kissed me without asking, and that the kiss was too short and chaste. Afterwards, I wanted to go back for another. It seemed to me I had been timid, and he, too, and we could have kissed better. He was distinctly handsome that day, brilliant, dreamy, interesting, and so firm. Really a giant.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  He is so much clearer to me. Towards certain women, he shows toughness and hard-boiledness; towards others, a naive romanticism. At first June appeared like an angel to him, out of her dance-hall background, and he offered her a fool’s faith (June asserts that in nine years she has had only two lovers, and until now he has believed that). I see him now as a man who can be enslaved by wonder, a man who can believe anything of woman. I see him sought out by women (this has been true of all the women he has loved seriously). It is the women who take the initiative in sexual contact. It was June who put her head on his shoulder and invited a kiss the first night they met. His toughness is external only. But like all soft people he can commit the most dastardly acts at certain moments, prompted by his own weakness, which makes him a coward. He leaves a woman in the cruelest manner because he cannot face the breaking of the connection. His sensuality, too, directs actions of the most scoundrelly nature. It is only by understanding the violence of his instincts that one can believe any man could be so ruthless. His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that, as he said about June, only angels or devils can catch the tempo of it. We have been separated for three days. It is unnatural. We had acquired small habits, sleeping together, awaking together, singing in the bathroom, adjusting our likes and dislikes to fit one another. I am so hungry for the little intimacies. And he? I feel a powerful sense of life unimaginable to either Hugo or Eduardo. My breasts are swollen. I hold my legs wide apart in love-making instead of, as before, closed. I have enjoyed sucking to the point of almost coming to a climax while doing it. I have finally eliminated my childish self. I push Hugo away from me, exacerbate his desires, his terror of losing me. I talk cynically to him, taunt him, call women to his attention. There is no room in me for sadness or regrets. Men look at me and I look at them, with my being unlocked. No more veils. I want many lovers. I am insatiable now. When I weep, I want to fuck it away.

• From Vox (1992)

  “So I painted it when I moved in,” she said. “I painted it a color called Paper Lantern—and I put on two coats. Someone said, ‘You know that you’re painting over metallic wallpaper, that’s going to come through-hoo,’ but I just couldn’t make myself steam off all that old paper—the design would imprint itself in my psyche if I did that, it would rise up when I’m eighty years old, on my death bed. So I just painted it over, with two heavy coats. And the first year it was fine. But then we had that killer summer, and somehow the humidity sweated the metallic pattern back out, so that now you can make out the split-rail fence and the wagon wheel. But it’s very faint. Now in fact I kind of like it. But I really should repaint it. So in the shower I had this image of painting the hall wall with a roller. What a waste of time. And then I thought, wait, I have the money, this time I’ll hire people to paint it for me. And so three painters materialized, and then suddenly there was a large hole in the wall, about three feet off the floor, big enough so that I could fit through so that my legs were standing in the front hall and yet my head and upper body were in the living room. The hole was finished off and lined with sheepskin. I had nothing on. My hands were resting on two full paint cans. But the strange thing was the cans of paint were warm . There was one painter doing the living room, and the other two were doing the hall, where my lower body was. The painter I could see didn’t seem to notice me. He was painting a wall with his back to me. The painters in the hall were using rollers, but they were those little detail rollers that you use for trim work, that are about three inches wide, the darlingest little rollers, that can go everywhere . Somehow I knew that one of these hall painters was mistakenly using the wrong color, it’s a color I used in the living room, called Opulent Opal—apparently he’d taken the wrong can of paint from his truck. Very careless. The other one was more conscientious—he was using the glossy Paper Lantern on the trim. These are Sherwin Williams’s paint names, not mine, by the way. Anyway I called out, ‘Ah, people, sirs? Please be sure to use the right color! There is a potential for confusion!’ But they were talking and they didn’t hear me.

• From Vox (1992)

  25 to feel what you'd expect, sad, happy, resigned, horny, some combination of all of them, and I felt suddenly that I'd been virtuous for long enough and probably should definitely masturbate, and I thought wait, let's not just have a perfunctory masturbation session, Abby, let's do something just a little bit special tonight, to round out a special day, right? So I brought out a copy of Forum that I rather bravely bought one day a while ago. But I'd read all the stories and all the letters and it just wasn't work ing. So I started looking at the ads, really almost for the first time. And there was this headline: ANYTIME AT ALL. " "MAKE IT HAPPEN. " "That's right. And I like the sound of the pauses in long-distance conversations—the cassette hiss sound. And yet I didn't really want to talk to anyone I knew. So that's more or less why I called. Now I've answered your questions, now you tell me something." "Do you want to hear something true, or something imaginary?" "First true, then imaginary," she said. "Once," he said, "I was listening to the stereo with the headphones on, I was about sixteen, and the stereo re ceiver was on the floor of a little room off the living room, I don't know why it was on the floor, I guess because my father was repainting the living room—that must have been it—and the headphone cord was quite short, but I was very interested in learning how to dance. It was winter, it was maybe eight o'clock at night, very

• From Vox (1992)

  And I stand next to you, so you can see the Mmmm-Detector as I hold it a foot or so from your face, and then I lower it and slowly pass it a few inches in front of each breast, and the pattern makes these complicated shifts. And I say, ‘But as you may be able to see, I’m getting other readings, interference fringes,’ and I hold the thing up and I walk slowly to the walls of your hall, where there is a faint rural, pattern showing through the paint, and I say, ‘For instance, the walls, very curious,’ and I shake my head in perplexity, and then I follow the flow lines to a drawer in the kitchen, filled with silverware—very odd—and I follow it into the bathroom, and you follow me in, and I lean into the shower and move the Mmmm-Detector past the fixtures, the drain, the shampoo bottles—beautiful color changes and convergences of flow waves—and I shake my head and I say, ‘Gosh, I’ve never seen anything as rich as this,’ and I follow its lead into the bedroom, and you follow me, and I say, ‘Wow, very high flux levels in here,’ and I pass it over your chenille bedspread and I say, ‘Your feet must have been here and here,’ pointing to two places quite far apart on the bed, and I know that everything I’m doing is forward, is really inexcusable, but in a way you’re curious, and I’m just relaying facts, and I sense your willingness to have this happen, and I push the Mmmm-Detector into the pillow and then reach under it and find your disintegrating copy of Forum , and I sit down on the bed and page through it slowly, holding the device to each page, until I reach a certain page, and I peer very closely at the sensor, and then I hold it close to the button on your pants, and I inspect it again, and I look up smiling, and I hold the magazine out to you, pointing at something on the page, and I say, ‘You were reading this sentence, this phrase right here in this sentence, when I buzzed your apartment.’ ” “And,” she said, “I take the Forum and read what you’re pointing at, and you’re pretty close, it’s not exactly the right phrase, but you’ve found the right paragraph, anyway. And I don’t know quite what to do. I probably should be calling the cops, because you seem to know all this stuff about me, but on the other hand, there you are, and I am still feeling all puffy down below, and you have a certain amount of charm, and an intriguing pocket watch, and so I offer you a, a what?

• From White Oleander (1999)

  King 5. “That was in my drinking days,” she said. “‘Can white mate in one move?’” he repeated out of the Bobby Fischer book. “One move?” she said, tickling his nose with a strand of her hair. “That doesn’t sound too exciting.” White knight to king’s bishop 6. I rode the delicately carved knight into place. “Mate.” But they were kissing and then she told the boys to go to bed when they were done and led Uncle Ray back to her bedroom. ALL NIGHT LONG as I lay in my sleeping bag with its bucking broncos and lariats, I heard their headboard smacking the wall, their laughter. And I wondered whether real daughters were jealous of their mothers and fathers, if it made them sick to see their fathers kiss their mothers, squeeze their breasts. I squeezed my own small breast, hot from the sleeping bag, and imagined how it might feel to another hand, imagined having a body like Starr’s. She was almost a different species with her narrow waist, her breasts round as grapefruit, her bottom round like that too. I imagined taking off my clothes and having a man like Uncle Ray look at me the way he looked at her. God, it was so hot. I opened the zipper of the sleeping bag, lay on top of the hot flannel. And she didn’t even hide it, she wasn’t that Christian. Always the shortest of shorts, the tightest of tops. You could see where her jeans crept up inside her labia. I wanted someone to want me that way, touch me the way Uncle Ray did her, like Barry and my mother. I wished Carolee were there. She would make funny comments about the headboard or joke about Uncle Ray having a heart attack—he was almost fifty, for Christ’s sake, lucky if he didn’t die with his boots on. He met Starr at the club when she was still waitressing, and what kind of sleazy guys went to places like that anyway. But Carolee was never home at night anymore. She climbed out the window as soon as Starr said good night and went to meet her friends in the wash. She never invited me to come with her. It hurt my feelings, but I didn’t like her friends much—girls with mean laughter and boys with shaved heads, awkward and boasting. I stroked my hands under my nightgown and felt the different skins against my fingertips—the hair on my legs, the smoothness between my thighs, and the slippery, fragrant skin of my private parts. I felt the folds, the peak, and thought of rough hands with missing fingers tracing all the secret places. On the other side of the pressboard wall, the headboard banged. MY MOTHER sent me a reading list that summer with four hundred books on it, Colette and Chinua Achebe and Mishima, Dostoyevsky and Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  After not seeing Henry for five days, due to a thousand obligations, I couldn’t bear it. I asked him to meet me for an hour between two engagements. We talked for a moment and then we went to the nearest hotel room. What a profound need of him. Only when I am in his arms does everything seem right. After an hour with him I could go on with my day, doing things I do not want to do, seeing people who do not interest me. A hotel room, for me, has an implication of voluptuousness, furtive, short lived. Perhaps my not seeing Henry has heightened my hunger. I masturbate often, luxuriously, without remorse or after distaste. For the first time I know what it is to eat. I have gained four pounds. I get frantically hungry, and the food I eat gives me a lingering pleasure. I never ate before in this deep carnal way. I have only three desires now, to eat, to sleep, and to fuck. The cabarets excite me. I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it. Henry does not give me all this. I have aroused his love. Curse his love. He can fuck me as no one else can, but I want more than that. I’m going to hell, to hell, to hell. Wild, wild, wild. Today I carried my mood to Henry, or what I could hold of it, for it seemed to me that it overflowed like lava, and I was sad when I saw him so quiet, serious, tender, not crazy enough. No, not as crazy as his writing. It is June who burns Henry with words. In his arms I forgot my fever for an hour. If only we could be alone for a few days. He wants me to go to Spain with him. There, will he throw off his gentleness and be crazy? Is it always to be the same? One does not meet the match to one’s state of being, one’s phase, one’s mood, never. We are all sitting on seesaws. What Henry is tired of, I am hungry for, with a brand-new, fresh, vigorous hunger. What he wants of me, I am not in the mood to give. What opposition in our own rhythms. Henry, my love, I don’t want to hear any more about angels, souls, love, no more profundities. An hour with Henry. He says, “Anaïs, you overwhelm me. You arouse the strangest sensations. When I left you last time, I adored you.” We sit on the edge of his bed. I put my head on his shoulder. He kisses my hair.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The other boys watched to see what would happen. I hitched Caitlin high on my hip, looked back at the playground, how far away it was, the swings opposing, like a machine in a factory, the product hurled down the slides. Did I want to? The fat boy bit his lower lip, chapped, unkissed. He was blushing under his light tan, trying so hard to look tough. Suck his dick for half a bag? If anyone had suggested this before, I would have been disgusted. But now my lips could remember holding Ray’s column of vein, jerk, and pulse, soft skin of the head, the salty come. I looked at the fat boy and wondered how it would feel. Caitlin burrowed herself in my neck, trying to make farts, wet and buzzing, against my skin, laughing to herself. I didn’t know these boys, I would never see them again. The pot made me brave, curious at how far I would go, as if I was somebody else, someone Olivia would be proud of. “Somebody’s got to hold Caitlin. You can’t put her down, she’ll run off in a second.” “Al’s got four little brothers.” I gave her to the quiet boy with short cropped hair and straggly beard, followed the fat boy back into the bushes behind the bathrooms. He unbuckled his pants, pushed them down over his hips. I knelt on a bed of pine needles, like a supplicant, like a sinner. Not like a lover. He leaned against the rough stucco wall of the bathroom as I prayed with him in my mouth, his hands in my hair. Just like Miss America. With Ray it was never like this. Then it was one pleasure after another, mouths, hands, the richness of skin, every surprise. This was the opposite of sex. I felt nothing for this boy, for his body moving. It felt like working. It cut the heart out of making love, turned it into something no more exciting than brushing your teeth. When the boy was done, I spat out the bitter come, wiped my mouth on my shirt. I thought he would walk away, but he gave me his hand, pulled me up. “My name’s Conrad,” he said. He was a foreign taste in my mouth, a scent in my hair. He gave me the half-bag of pot. “If you ever want anything, I’m always around.” “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said as we walked back to the car and I collected Caitlin. My first trick, I thought, trying out the sound of it. THROUGH the kitchen window, I watched Olivia emerge from her house, cinnamon and beige silk, hair sleeked back. I was peeling apple slices for Justin and Caitlin’s snack.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I confess that Hugo has to use Vaseline. Then I realize the full significance of this confession, and I am overwhelmed. Last night in my sleep I touched Hugo’s penis as I learned to touch Henry’s. I caressed it and pressed it in my hand. In my half-sleep I thought it was Henry. When Hugo became excited and began to take me, I awakened fully and was deeply disappointed. My desire died. I love Hugo passionlessly, but tenderness is a strong tie, too. I will never leave him while he wants me. I believe that this passion for Henry will be burned out. It is for the men who are not primarily physical that I am the essential woman, men like Hugo, Eduardo, even Allendy. Henry can do without me. Yet it is extraordinary to see how I have changed him, how he has become whole, how he rarely attacks windmills and rails illogically now. It is I who cannot live altogether without Henry. I have changed, too. I feel restless, spirited, adventurous. To be absolutely truthful, I hope secretly to meet someone else, to go on living as I am living, sensually. I have erotic imaginings. I do not want solitude, introspection, work. I want pleasure. These days I occupy myself with frivolities. I serve the goddess of beauty, hoping she may grant me gifts. I work for a dazzling skin, vibrant hair, good health. True, I have no new clothes, because of Henry, but that doesn’t matter. I have dyed and altered and rearranged things. On Monday I’m going to risk an operation which will forever efface the humorous tilt of my nose. After a night together, Henry and I couldn’t separate. I had promised to go home Sunday and spend the evening with Eduardo. But Henry said he would come to Louveciennes with me, whatever happened. I shall never forget that day and night. The maids were out; we had the house to ourselves. Henry explored it and enjoyed it to the utmost. When he threw himself on our big soft bed, the voluptuousness of it affected him. I joined him, and he penetrated me swiftly, hungrily. We talked, read together, danced, listened to guitar recordings. He read bits of the purple journal. If he felt the fairy-taleness of the place, I began to feel a kind of ensor-cellement, too, in which Henry was an extraordinary being, a saint, a stupendous master of words, with a dazzling mind. I am astonished by his sensitiveness. He wept as he watched me listening to the records; and he refused to read on in the journal, upset by its too intimate revelations—Henry, who holds nothing sacred. Eduardo came at four o’clock and we let him ring the bell.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I thought he had betrayed me. He swears not. It does not matter. I hated him because I loved him as I have never loved anyone. I stand at the door when he comes in, hands on my hips. I look out of a savage self. Henry approaches, dazed, and does not recognize me until he comes very near and I smile and speak to him. He cannot believe it. He thinks I have gone mad. Then before he has quite awakened I take him to my room. There, on the grate in the fireplace, is a large photograph of John and his letters. They are burning. I smile. Henry sits on the couch. “You frighten me, Anaïs,” he says. “You are so different, and so strange. So dramatic.” I sit on the floor between his knees. “I hate you, Henry. That story about [Osborn’s girl friend] Jeanne . . . You lied to me.” He answers me so gently that I believe him. And if I do not believe him, it does not matter. All the treacheries in the world do not matter. John is burnt away. The present is magnificent. Henry asks me to undress. Everything is shed but the black lace mantilla. He asks me to keep it on and lies on the bed, watching me. I stand before the mirror, shedding carnations, earrings. He looks through the lace at my body. The next day I run about the house cooking. Suddenly I love cooking, for Henry. I cook richly, with infinite care. I enjoy seeing him eat, eating with him. We sit in the garden, in our pajamas, drunk on the air, the caresses of the swaying trees, the songs of birds, attentive dogs licking our hands. Henry’s desire is always coursing. I am ploughed, open. At night, books, talk, passion. As he pours his passion into me I feel that I become beautiful. I show him a hundred faces. He watches me. It all passes like a procession, up to this morning’s climax, before he leaves me, when he sees a burnt face, heavy, sensual, Moorish. There was a storm last night. Marble-sized hail. Sea fury of the trees. Henry sits in an armchair and asks, “Are we going to read Spengler now?” He sits purring like a cat. He has the yawn of a tiger, all the jungle cries of contentment. His voice vibrates in his stomach. I have put my head there and listened, as against an organ. I am lying on the bed. I wear a lace dress, nothing else, because it gives him pleasure to look at me. “Now,” he says, “you look like an Ingres.” I cannot bear the space between us. I sit on the floor. He caresses my hair. He gives me winged kisses on the eyes. He is all tenderness, thoughtfulness. Sensuality was exhausted in the afternoon.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Where just his smell and voice and the blue ropes of vein in his arms was enough, those sleepy blue eyes now sparkling under silver lids, that criminal smile. He pulled a sad face. “Astrid. Beauty girl. This is gift from my heart.” Sergei’s heart. That empty corridor, that unaired room. Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got. If I were a good girl, I would be insulted, I would kick him out. I would ignore his smile, and shape of him inside his jeans. But he knew me. He smelled my desire. I felt myself slipping toward the windows, pulled by thin air. He hooked the chain around my neck. Then he took my hand and put it on his groin, warm, I could feel him getting hard under my hand. It was obscene, and it excited me to feel him there, a man I wanted like falling. He leaned down and kissed me the way I wanted to be kissed, hard and tasting of last night’s booze- up. He unzipped my polyester shirt, pulled it over my head, took my skirt off and threw it onto Yvonne’s bed. His hands waking me up, I’d been sleeping, I hadn’t even known it, it had been so long. Then he stopped, and I opened my eyes. He was looking at my scars. Tracing the Morse code of dog bite on my arms and legs with his fingertips, then the bullet scars, shoulder, chest, and hip, measuring their depth with his thumb, calculating their age and severity. “Who does this to you?” How could I begin to explain who did it to me. I would have to start with the date of my birth. I glanced at the door, still open, we could hear the TV. “Is this an exhibition or what?” He shut it noiselessly, unbuttoned his shirt and hung it on the chair, pulled off his pants. His body white as milk, blue-veined, it was frightening, lean and dense as marble. It took my breath away. How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer. He knew how to touch me, knew what I liked. I wasn’t surprised. I was a bad girl, lying down for the father again. His mouth on my breasts, his hands over my bottom, up between my legs. There was no poetry about us humping on the yellow chenille bedspread on the floor. He hauled me into the positions he liked, my legs over his shoulders, riding me like a Cossack. Standing up with his arms linked to hold my weight as he thrust into me.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “You ask contradictory and impossible things. You want to know what dreams, what impulses, what desires June has. You’ll never know, not from her. No, she couldn’t tell you. But do you realize what joy I took in my telling her what our feelings were, in that special language? Because I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding. I dazzled June because when we sat down together the wonder of the moment didn’t just make me drunk; I lived it with the consciousness of the poet, not the consciousness of the dead-formula-making psychoanalysts. We went to the edge, with our two imaginations. And you beat your head against the wall of our world, and you want me to tear all the veils. You want to force delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuous sensations into something you can seize on. You do not ask it of Dostoevsky. You thank God for the living chaos. Why, then, do you want to know more about June?” June has no ideas, no fantasies of her own. They are given to her by others, who are inspired by her being. Hugo says angrily that she is an empty box and that I am the full box. But who wants the ideas, the fantasies, the contents, if the box is beautiful and inspiring? I am inspired by June the empty box. To think of her in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living. The world has never been as empty for me since I have known her. June supplies the beautiful incandescent flesh, the fulgurant voice, the abysmal eyes, the drugged gestures, the presence, the body, the incarnate image of our imaginings. What are we? Only the creators. She is. I get letters from Henry every other day. I answer him immediately. I gave him my typewriter, and I write by hand. I think of him day and night. I dream of an extraordinary extra life I am going to lead someday, which may even fill another and special diary. Last night, after reading Henry’s novel, I couldn’t sleep. It was midnight. Hugo was sleeping. I wanted to get up and go to my writing room and write Henry about his first novel. But I would have awakened Hugo. There are two doors to open, and they creak. Hugo was so exhausted when he went to bed. I lay very still and forced myself to sleep, with phrases rushing through my head like a cyclone. I thought that I would remember them in the morning. But I couldn’t remember, not even half. If Hugo did not have to go to work, I could have awakened him, and he could have slept

• From Henry and June (1986)

  At this I laughed. “But, Henry, you do give a goddamn, and besides I can wait. It is you who are behind time and must be given a chance to catch up.” I told him a little of the storm I had been through in the past days. I felt like someone condemned to die and then suddenly paroled. It didn’t seem to matter any more how often June might take Henry back. At this moment he and I were indissolubly married. The fusion of our bodies that followed was almost extraneous—for the first time, only a symbol, a gesture. A fusion so swift that it seemed to take place in space, and the movements of the body followed at a slower pace. I have written thirty pages about June in an intense and wholly imaginative manner, the best I have done so far. It is good to see all the laboratory experiments culminate in a lyrical outburst. Last night I deeply enjoyed myself at the Grand Guignol: the convulsions of a woman tempted by passion, lying naked on a black velvet couch. A lusty woman takes her pajamas down. I felt tremendous sexual excitement. Hugo and I visited another house, where the women were uglier than those at 32 rue Blondel. The room was lined with mirrors. The women moved like a herd of passive animals, two by two, turning to the phonograph music. Beforehand, I had been roused to high expectations. I could not believe the ugliness of the women as they came in. In my head, the dance of the naked women was still a beautiful and voluptuous orgy. As I saw the sagging breasts with their large brown leather tips, the bluish legs, the protruding stomachs, smiles with teeth missing, and that brutish mass of flesh turning lifelessly, like wooden horses of a merry-go-round, my feelings collapsed. Not even pity. Just cool observation. Again we see monotonous poses, and in between, when most uncalled for, the women kissed each other dispassionately, sexlessly. Hips, valleyed buttocks, the mysterious darkness between the legs—all exposed so meaninglessly that it took Hugo and me two days to separate the association of my body, my legs, my breasts from that troupe of turning animals. What I would like is to join them for one night, to walk naked into the room with them, to look at the men and women sitting there and to see their reaction when I appear, I and my halo of illusion. Cruelty to Eduardo. When he has elaborated a plan of intellectual domination of his pain, I sit very near him on the couch and make him read Henry’s writing, which he hates. He says I am breeding a little giant. I see him looking at my more aggressive breasts. I see him turn pale and rush away on an earlier train. Today I almost lost my mind craving Henry. I cannot live three days without him.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  She fluttered her eyelids, dazzled by the radiance of the face bearing down on her, and finally, in a toneless voice, she said: ‘No, I have no lover. I ... love you. ...’ He relaxed his hold and began pulling off his dinner jacket and waistcoat; his tie whistled through the air and ended up round the neck of Lea’s bust — up on the mantelpiece. Meanwhile, he never moved away from her, and kept her, wedged between his knees, where she sat on the chaise-longue. When she saw him half-naked, she asked, with a note of sadness: 4Do you really want to? ... Do you? ...’ He did not answer, carried away by the thought of his approaching pleasure and the consuming desire to take her again. She gave way and served her young lover like a good mistress, with devout solicitude. Nevertheless, she anticipated with a sort of terror the moment of her own undoing; she endured Cheri as she might a torture, warding him off with strengthless hands, and holding him fast between strong knees. Finally, she seized him by the arm, uttered a feeble cry, and foundered in the deep abyss, whence love emerges pale and in silence, regretful of death. They remained enfolded in their close embrace and no words troubled the prolonged silence of their return to life. The upper part of his body had slipped down and he lay across Lea’s thigh, his pendent head, with eyes closed, resting upon the sheets as if he had been stabbed to death over the body of his mistress. She, meanwhile, partly turned away from him, bore almost the full weight of this unsparing body. She breathed softly but unevenly. Her left arm ached, crushed beneath her, Cheri could feel the back of his neck growing numb. Both were waiting, concentrated and motionless, for the abating tempest of their pleasure to recede.