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 Wild (2012)

  “That’s my place,” he said, and we got out. The air was cooler than it had been in Ashland. I shivered and Jonathan put his arm around me so casually it felt like he’d done it a hundred times before. We walked among the corn and the flowers under the full moon, discussing the various bands and musicians one or the other or both of us loved, recounting stories from shows we’d seen. “I’ve seen Michelle Shocked live three times,” Jonathan said. “Three times?” “One time I drove through a snowstorm for the show. There were only like ten people in the audience.” “Wow,” I said, realizing there was no way I was going to keep my pants on with a man who’d seen Michelle Shocked three times, no matter how repulsive the flesh on my hips was. “Wow,” he said back to me, his brown eyes finding mine in the dark. “Wow,” I said. “Wow,” he repeated. We’d said only one word, but I felt suddenly confused. We didn’t seem to be talking about Michelle Shocked anymore. “What kind of flowers are these?” I asked, pointing to the stalks that blossomed all around us, suddenly terrified that he was going to kiss me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to kiss him. It was that I hadn’t kissed anyone since I’d kissed Joe more than two months before, and every time I’d gone that long without kissing, I’d become sure that I’d forgotten how to do it. To delay the kiss, I asked him about his job at the farm and his job at the club, and about where he was from and who his family was, and who his last girlfriend was and how long they’d been together and why they’d broken up, and all the while he barely answered me and asked me nothing in return. It didn’t matter much to me. His hand around my shoulder felt good, and then it felt even better when he moved it to my waist and by the time we’d circled back to his tent on the platform and he turned to kiss me and I realized I still did, indeed, know how to kiss, all the things he hadn’t exactly answered or asked me fell away. “This has been really cool,” he said, and we smiled at each other in that daffy way two people who just kissed each other for the first time do. “I’m glad you came out here.” “Me too,” I said. I was intensely aware of his hands on my waist, so warm through the thin fabric of my T-shirt, skimming the top edge of my jeans. We were standing in the space between Jonathan’s car and his tent. They were the two directions I could go: either back to my bed under the eaves in the hostel in Ashland alone, or into his bed with him. “Look at the sky,” he said. “All the stars.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I’m in the Fold right now, as a matter of fact. I want first to type out my name—it’s Arnold Strine. I prefer Arno to the full Arnold. Putting my own name down is loin-girding somehow—it helps me go ahead with this. I’m thirty-five. I’m seated in an office chair whose four wide black casters roll silently over the carpeting, on the sixth floor of the MassBank building in downtown Boston. I’m looking up at a woman named Joyce, whose clothes I have rearranged somewhat, although I have not actually removed any of them. I’m looking directly at her, but she doesn’t know this. While I look I’m using a Casio CW-16 portable electronic typewriter, which is powered by four D batteries, to record what I see and think. Before I snapped my fingers to stop the flow of time in the universe, Joyce was walking across the carpeting in a gray-blue knit dress, and I was sitting behind a desk twenty or thirty feet away, transcribing a tape. I could see her hipbones under her dress, and I immediately knew it was the time to Snap in. Her pocketbook is still over her shoulder. Her pubic hair is very black and nice to look at—there is lots and lots of it. If I didn’t already know her name, I would probably now open her purse and find out her name, because it helps to know the name of a woman I undress. There is moreover something very exciting, almost moving, about taking a peek at a woman’s driver’s license without her knowing—studying the picture and wondering whether it was one that pleased her or made her unhappy when she was first given it at the DMV. But I do know this woman’s name. I’ve typed some of her tapes. The language of her dictations is looser than some of the other loan officers’—she will occasionally use a phrase like “spruce up” or “polish off” or “kick in” that you very seldom come across in the credit updates of large regional banks. One of her more recent dictations ended with something like “Kyle Roller indicated that he had been dealing with the subject since 1989. Volume since that time has been $80,000. He emphatically stated that their service was substandard. He indicated that he has put further business with them on hold because they had ‘lied like hell’ to him. He indicated he did not want his name mentioned back to the Pauley brothers. This information was returned to Joyce Collier on—” and then she said the date. As prose it is not Penelope Fitzgerald, perhaps, but you crave any tremor of life in these reports, and I will admit that I felt an arrow go through me when I heard her say “lied like hell.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her hand, that was still bare of its glove and white with cold, she slid into the gap at the front of my jacket; her knee she laid heavily against my own. When the brougham swayed I felt her lips, her fingers, her thigh come ever more heavy, ever more hot, ever more close upon me, until I longed to squirm beneath the pressing of her, and cry out. But she gave me no word, no kiss or caress; and in my awe and my innocence I only sat steady, as she seemed to wish. That cab-ride from the Thames to Brixton was, in consequence, the most wonderful and most terrible journey I have ever made.At last, however, we felt the carriage turn, then slow, and finally stop, and heard the driver thump upon the roof with the butt of his whip to tell us we were home: we were so quiet, perhaps he thought we slumbered.I remember a little of our entry into Mrs Dendy’s - the fumbling at the door with the latch-key, the mounting of the darkened stairs, our passage through that still and sleeping house. I remember pausing on the landing beneath the skylight, where the stars showed very small and bright, and silently pressing my lips to Kitty’s ear as she bent to unlock our chamber door; I remember how she leaned against it when she had it shut fast behind us, and gave a sigh, and reached for me again, and pulled me to her. I remember that she wouldn’t let me raise a taper to the gas-jet - but made us stumble to the bedroom through the darkness.And I remember, very clearly, all that happened there.The room was bitter cold - so cold it seemed an outrage to take our dresses off and bare our flesh; but an outrage, too, to some more urgent instinct to keep them on. I had been clumsy in the change-room of the theatre, but I was not clumsy now. I stripped quickly to my drawers and chemise, then heard Kitty cursing over the buttons of her gown, and stepped to help her.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I removed all the clothes from the tall wicker laundry hamper that stood under the bathroom window and piled them on her bed and got inside the hamper with a wrinkly dark-gray linen shirt of hers tied loosely over my face; though I was in something of a fetal position, and though I could not see all that well through the linen, I could at least get some notion of what was going on as she proceeded with her bath. I used my glasses to Unfold; at once her hand tightened on the red washcloth and lots of water fell along her arm. Then nothing much happened for a long time. She wiped beads of sweat off her forehead with the washcloth several times, and she sighed a total of three long sighs. There were splashes whose nature I couldn’t determine. She shaved her legs for a while. She ran some more hot water and stirred it around. Once or twice she whispered aloud, going over fragments of remembered conversation, as far as I could tell. She did what looked to be a set of leg lifts. When the pain in my knees became too acute I Dropped, climbed out, and took a break downstairs, finishing the article on the Canadian lakes. I sang the Beatles song “Here, There and Everywhere,” walking around in her living room. I left my clothes in a little mound on her coffee table and went back upstairs and stuffed myself back in her hamper with the linen shirt over my head; I knew good things were going to happen. After ten or fifteen minutes she stood, letting the water pour off her, and toweled herself. I was on alert to push up my glasses at any second if she decided to throw the towel into the hamper, but she didn’t. After she dried her hair, she put the towel around her shoulders, and then she planted her hands on the edge of the bathtub and knelt with one leg in the bathwater and one outside on the floor. “Ooh that’s so cold,” she said, when her vadge touched the rounded edge of the tub.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The new ridem lawn-mower had to go back, of course. But because David had already used it, it was now officially a used lawn-mower. The guy at the dealer quoted her a derisorily low buyback price, and out of defiance she told him to forget it and walked out. Fortunately, when she told her mother that she had finally kicked David out, her mother promptly came through with a check for three thousand dollars. Money worries eased for the moment, she hired the neighbor kid to mow the rest of the lawn using the new green ridem mower. His name was Kev. She watched him from various windows as he jounced around on her lawn. He had ostentatiously deliberate rips in the legs of his jeans from which his brown knees protruded, and he was wearing brown work boots. His shirt was off. He was wiry; he had that adolescent ability to bend at the waist and not produce a little bloomp of waist fat. The small side muscles in his upper arms had a sort of a sideways S shape that called out to her. They were the muscles he would use if he were supporting his own weight over her.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  But I didn’t want to come yet with Michelle—I was curious about whether she had any sexual plans herself. To be honest, my feelings had been a little hurt that she had not brought home the story I had written for her to keep forever—although I consoled myself by thinking that maybe she was just being considerate in reburying it, not wanting to interfere with some top-secret interlover dropoff. I did feel a little rejected, and I was hoping to restore my cheer by watching her do something all by herself that would serve as real concrete proof that I had gotten to her in an actively crotchy sense. Just a bath was not enough. Kneeling by the edge of the tub, I spotted something dark in the water near her feet. Her toes were curled around it. When I put my head very close to the surface of the lavishly chlorinated water, steadying myself on one of her knees, I determined that the object was, as I had of course hoped but hadn’t really allowed myself to expect, a large black realistic rubber dildo. She was bathing with her rubber dildo—oh poetry! She was relaxing, letting her eyes close, not thinking about that single-minded submarine cruising around out of sight, beyond her bent knees, but because it was unquestionably there in the water with her, it was working under her thoughts and keeping her just on the edge of conscious arousal. It was time to take some chances with her.

• From Another Country (1962)

  When he stepped down from the stand there was this blonde girl, very plainly dressed, standing looking at him. “What’s on your mind, baby?” he asked her. Everybody was busy all around them, preparing to make it to the party. It was spring and the air was charged. “What’s on your mind?” she countered, but it was clear that she simply had not known what else to say. She had said enough. She was from the South. And something leaped in Rufus as he stared at her damp, colorless face, the face of the Southern poor white, and her straight, pale hair. She was considerably older than he, over thirty probably, and her body was too thin. Just the same, it abruptly became the most exciting body he had gazed on in a long time. “Honeychild,” he said and gave her his crooked grin, “ain’t you a long ways from home?” “I sure am,” she said, “and I ain’t never going back there.” He laughed and she laughed. “Well, Miss Anne,” he said, “if we both got the same thing on our mind, let’s make it to that party.” And he took her arm, deliberately allowing the back of his hand to touch one of her breasts, and he said, “Your name’s not really Anne, is it?” “No,” she said, “it’s Leona.” “Leona?” And he smiled again. His smile could be very effective. “That’s a pretty name.” “What’s yours?” “Me? I’m Rufus Scott.” He wondered what she was dong in this joint, in Harlem. She didn’t seem at all the type to be interested in jazz, still less did she seem to be in the habit of going to strange bars alone. She carried a light spring coat, her long hair was simply brushed back and held with some pins, she wore very little lipstick and no other make-up at all. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll pile into a cab.” “Are you sure it’s all right if I come?” He sucked his teeth. “If it wasn’t all right, I wouldn’t ask you. If I say it’s all right, it’s all right.” “Well,” she said with a short laugh, “all right, then.” They moved with the crowd, which, with many interruptions, much talking and laughing and much erotic confusion, poured into the streets. It was three o’clock in the morning and gala people all around them were glittering and whistling and using up all the taxicabs.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “I’ll add some warm if it’s gotten cold,” Adele would say. Then: “It’s not that I hate those magazines, it’s just that they didn’t do anything for me.” “You know what I wish?” I would say. “I wish you would wash right here at the door.” “You do, do you,” Adele would say. She would think. “Let me see you for a second.” Up until then, I would have been leaning so that my body was out of her sight-line. I would shift so that one of my knees was against the door, and one was just outside the door-frame. I would be sitting on my feet. All I would have on would be a pair of venerable 1984 red Calvin Klein underpants that had gone loose around the leg. I would pull one leg-hole sideways over my dick-bundle so that I was free to shake my yokel a little for her as it stiffened. “Will you wash your breasts for me while I activate this?” I would ask. “You know that I’m not opening this door,” she would say firmly. “The chain stays on.” “I know,” I would say. She would relax then, because she would see that we were both content to play by the same rules. “You’d be interested in seeing me wash my breasts?” she would ask. She would run her tongue over her lips. I would see her eyes go down my chest to my handful of dick. The speed of my fist-shuttle would say yes. “Here’s a suggestion,” I would then offer, abandoning my cockwork to raise a finger. “Don’t waste the bath, since it’s already there. Sit in the bath for a minute or two, wash the lower part of your body or whatever, do half the job, not that it needs it. And then get something … do you have anything that can hold some water?” I would look around my room doubtfully and spot an ice bucket. “The ice bucket!” I would cry. “Perfect. You could get your ice bucket and fill it with some of that warm bathwater and bring it over here and wash your breasts for me. You could dunk the washcloth in the bucket and hang your breasts over it and squeeze that warm water all over them. I want to see that so much. Please? I’ll just wait here patiently stroking my cock.” I would give her a querying look. “Do you have an ice bucket?” She would crane her head momentarily. “Yes, oddly enough I happen to have an ice bucket. Tell you what. If I’m not back here in, oh, ten minutes, it means that I’m shy and I don’t want to wash my breasts for you, in which case you’ve got plenty of magazines to tide you over. That’s one thing I want to get clear, by the way. My body isn’t exactly like the ones in those magazines.”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I was too crumpled in the hamper even to think of doing anything physical with my richard, but all I wanted in any event was the sight I was seeing; the sight of her leaning forward on her hands and rocking the weight of her hips down against the edge of the tub. “Where is that cock?” she said. “I want to see that cock.” She fished around in the water and pulled out the dildo and looked at it. She dipped it several times in the water and pulled it out, shaking it each time, evidently liking the way it glistened. Then she worked herself down the edge of the tub and suctioned the black dick onto the tiled shower wall at about her eye level. She moved her face over it, kissing it in the most wonderfully fetishistic way, and biting on it. “You like when I suck that big dick, don’t you?” she said. She put two fingers down on the edge of the tub and rocked forward on them, so that her clit was straddled. She let the head of the rubberdick pass over her closed eyelids, and then she stood up a little, one leg still in the bathtub and one out, and stroked her slit very fast while she circled the wall-mounted dick with her nipples. When she had straightened her legs completely, she was able to lean herself against the tile wall with the rubberdick between her legs and move its resilience over her clit-lump. Her forehead and nipples touched the cold green tile. She kissed the towel on her shoulders once. I was dying with visual happiness.

• From Wild (2012)

  I was a horny old bastard too, I thought, while Stevie Ray the dog licked my knee methodically and the other Stevie Ray launched into a smoking rendition of “Pride and Joy.” The place on my leg where Spider had touched me seemed to pulse. I wished he’d do it again, though I knew that was ludicrous. A laminated card with a cross on it dangled from the stem of the rearview mirror, alongside a faded Christmas-tree-shaped air freshener, and when it spun around I saw that on the other side there was a photograph of a little boy. “Is that your son?” I asked Lou when the song ended, pointing to the mirror. “That’s my little Luke,” she said, reaching to tap it. “Is he going to be in the wedding?” I asked, but she made no reply. She only turned the music down low and I knew instantly that I’d said the wrong thing. “He died five years ago, when he was eight,” said Lou, a few moments later. “I’m so sorry,” I said. I leaned forward and patted her shoulder. “He was riding his bike and he was hit by a truck,” she said plainly. “He wasn’t killed right away. He held on for a week in the hospital. None of the doctors could believe it, that he didn’t die instantly.” “He was a tough little motherfucker,” said Spider. “He sure was,” said Lou. “Just like his mom,” Dave said, grabbing Lou’s knee. “I’m so very sorry,” I said again. “I know you are,” said Lou before she turned the music up loud. We drove without talking, listening to Vaughan’s electric guitar wail its way through “Texas Flood,” my heart clenching at the sound of it. A few minutes later Lou shouted, “Here’s your junction.” She pulled over and shut the engine off and looked at Dave. “Why don’t you boys take Stevie Ray for a leak?” They all got out with me and stood around lighting up cigarettes while I pulled my pack out of the trunk. Dave and Spider led Stevie Ray into the trees by the side of the road and Lou and I stood in a patch of shade near the car while I buckled Monster on. She asked me if I had kids, how old I was, if I was married or ever had been. No, twenty-six, no, yes, I told her. She said, “You’re pretty, so you’ll be okay whatever you do. Me, people always just gotta go on the fact that I’m good-hearted. I never did have the looks.” “That’s not true,” I said. “I think you’re pretty.” “You do?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said, though pretty wasn’t precisely how I would have described her.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Ah, I see. Kevin? You don’t mind, do you? Of course not. In fact, you know what? I’d love to see a little dribble of piss come out of that big friendly cock. I bet that would help Sylvie relax.” Marian moved one of her feet out where Kevin could see it. “Let her hold your cock and jerk on it a little and then point it straight at my feet and push and let go. I bet you can do it.” “Really?” said Kevin. He held his dick for Sylvie to aim it. “Of course!” said Marian. “Okay,” he said. Sylvie gripped the base of his cock and Kevin’s stomach muscles tightened and he pressed his lips together and forced out a curve of hot piss that momentarily reached Marian’s foot. “That’s the way!” said Marian. “How did it feel?” “Felt good,” said Kevin. “Kind of burny.” He wiped the tip of his dick with his palm. “Of course it did,” Marian said. “Now, Sylvie? You know how badly you need to let it go. You know what’s up my ass. How could you possibly be shy?” Again she tapped the flowers against Sylvie’s cunt. “Push and piss it out for me.” Sylvie gave it a second try. She pushed very hard. After a moment, her tiny urethra opened and a clear spurt flared out. The flow stopped almost immediately. “Good!” said Marian. “More!” “But,” Sylvie objected, “I’m pushing so hard I’m afraid something else might happen.” She stood up. “I really need to use the bathroom—I’m not kidding.” “Oh, but I want to see that, too,” said Marian. “I want to see everything you can do.” “Gross, no way!” said Sylvie. Kevin decided that it was time for him to intercede. “I really don’t think she can do that,” he said. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind at all if she did, but …”

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “You want this ass?” she asked the dildo and seemed to get an affirmative answer, for she turned away from it with her hands on the edge of the tub, wiggling her ass back and forth in front of it. The suction base lost suction and the cock fell suddenly onto a scallop-shell soap dish. “Aw, did I shock you, honey?” she said. “Am I going too fast for you?” She dipped it in the bathwater again, shook it off, and, straddling the tub, stuck it back on the edge of the tub and sucked it. “See how easy it is to get you hard again?” she said. She stood over it, pulling up on her pubic hair so that she could see her clit, and she said to the dildo, “You ready to fuck this nice clean cunt? Because I sure am ready for you. I bet you are. Are you big and stiff enough to fill this hungry cunt?” She bent her knees until its rubber head found her, and then she sat down hard on it. She fucked it bouncingly for a little while and then got off of it and went to get a mirror and propped it up so she could watch her rubberman going in and out. She fucked it some more. In the haze of the shirt of hers that I was wearing I watched her finger orbit her clit-folds until I was ready to weep at the lyricism of it. Was Michelle this nasty on a regular basis? Maybe not. She’d really had to grope to find the dildo in her dresser in the first place. This was not an everyday sort of autofuck for her, I didn’t think. My UPS truck might have had something to do with it. I kept perfectly still, hardly breathing, while she came closer and closer to coming. She would stop suddenlyjust before she came, fucking slowly up and down on the dildo some more, then frigging for a while. She started making some incredible clenched-teeth noises, followed by pheasanty sounds so superb that I was surprised I had been able to live without them. Her little finger went into her asshole and she squinted, cleared for takeoff. She started saying, “Oh fuck this cunt, baby, fuck it, fuck this cunt,” over and over. Then her face wrenched itself into a squinting accelerated grimace and I pushed up on my glasses, stopping her right in the middle of her dildorgasm.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  There was the startlingly realistic hand-painted slightly curving Arno Van Dilden Heavydick, with movable balls and suction-cup base; there was the Swiss-made TorqueMaja Desnuda, with its twelve special “power-frig” torque settings; there was the mixeresque Oster plug-in coil model with its little cabinet of attachments; but she was missing the forty-dollar, four-foot-long, double-headed Royal Welsh Fusilier with dual slidable foreskins—it was on back order, to be shipped in several days. At first Marian was irritated, wanting to have all four artifacts to try one after another, but then she found that the ones she had at hand were more than enough to get her through the next forty-eight hours. She became especially fond of the fast-humming and refreshingly un-penile Oster. She pirated the surge protector from her neglected PC and plugged it in below the plug from her washing machine (safety first), and plugged the clit-knobbed Oster into it, and, using it, came with mystical intensity sitting naked on the cold lid of the washing machine with the door to the nearby garage wide open, looking down at her trembling titfat, as all her bras and underpants spun around in damp darkness underneath her. And when the clock radio woke her at six-thirty on weekdays, she unplugged it from its extension cord and plugged in the Oster in its place, relishing the illusion that time could be stopped while she started the day right with a brisk coil-driven clasm. She took a vacation day on the day the back-ordered vibrator was due to arrive. When the UPS truck hadn’t shown by almost one o’clock and when Marian, already on her third pair of underpants, found herself holding a mother-of-pearl hand mirror up to one of her nipples and watching the aureole get wrinkly backward and then trying to push her nipple through a buttonhole of her linen shirt, she decided it was time to do something—to mow the lawn, which did need mowing. She changed to a full loose gypsy skirt with nothing underneath and a ribbed black camisole with no bra and drove the mower out of the garage into the yard with her freshly batteried Van Dilden resting in her lap. She hopped off in the middle of the front yard, and in full view of the world (though too fast for anyone to see really what she was up to), with her back to the road, she licked the vibe’s inch-and-a-half suction-cup base and stuck it firmly on the seat of the idling green machine and turned its little switch on. She regarded it trembling there on the seat, this enchantingly obscene blurred tube of realism shaken simultaneously by its internal mini-motor and the macro-motor of the ridem, and her slype ached to feel it push her open. She slapped it once; it flinched a little to the side but didn’t unsuction itself. She wanted to mow now; she wanted to mow that fucking lawn like she had never mowed it before.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  At the time, however, I simply grabbed at the idea as a pragmatic expedient. I was desperate to get to work on something— anything—to convince myself that I still had a future. I expected this new book to follow the somewhat skeptical line of its predecessors. God, of course, did not exist, but I would show that each generation of believers was driven to invent him anew. God was thus simply a projection of human need; “he” mirrored the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. Jews, Christians, and Muslims had all produced the same kind of God because they had similar desires and insecurities, but increasingly, in the clear light of rational modernity, people were learning how to do without this divine prop. That was my idea at the outset, but even then I expected some surprises. By this time I had enough experience to know that the finished work was always different from my original proposal. And I was also determined not to fall into the trap of making the book merely a clever, shallow rebuttal of God’s existence. That would be not only boring and predictable, but also inappropriate. This could not be a wholly cerebral book, because images of God had, surely, much to tell us about the pathos of human aspiration. Nobody thought much of the idea, however, and it was a long time before my new agent found a publisher. “It can’t be done,” said one of the editors who saw my synopsis. “It’s impossible to condense such a huge idea into a single volume.” “Who’s going to read it?” asked another. “Religious people won’t want to hear that their God is on a par with the gods of other faiths, and unbelievers won’t be interested.” “It’s so religious!” sighed a friend who worked in one of the houses that had rejected the book. “Karen, don’t write this book now! You need to do something more mainstream.” More secular, she meant. “You read English at college. Perhaps you could do something literary? A new biography of Fanny Burney or George Eliot.” “What about a travel book?” Charlotte asked. “You enjoyed the travel you did with the Israelis, didn’t you? Why not go on a journey to somewhere important. Japan, for instance. What about a look at modern Japan?” Anything, it seemed, would be better than God.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I climbed out of the hamper, very slowly because I was stiff. I studied her climax-face from every angle, trying to record its transient extremity in my memory. I held her perky little finger, which was still hooked in her ane. I rested my ear on the edge of the tub about three inches from her open boat and stared at the finger that was bestirring itself around her bright-pink pumped-up nerve; and beyond it at the very soft inner skin stretched tight around my fellow American, my fellow rubber hider-in-her-house. I loved what I saw. I licked her knuckles; I tapped my dick against her breasts to see how they quivered; I straddled the tub just as she was straddling it, facing her, and beat my richard savagely until I was almost there. When I was ready I stood and said, “Let me be there with you, honey, you’re so sexy, please let me come on your face,” in a strange almost singsong pleading voice, and without waiting for an answer from her I let all of my burning bechamel jump out onto her tightly closed eyes, unable to resist doing so even though I knew that I would probably regret it afterward—not least because it would be so much trouble to get all of it off her eyelashes and eyebrows. When I was done I sat down on the tub for a second to rest. “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t crazy about the way my come looked on her closed eyes, but the beauty of her ecstatic expression survived it; in fact the existence of the outcome of my orgasm on her still-coming face seemed entirely irrelevant, as it should have. I turned time on for the tiniest fraction of a second, so that she would have a tactile flash of the sensation of liquid warmth, in case it would add a novel touch to her clasm, and then I spent a good ten minutes tamping and gently rinsing every sign of my sperm off of her. I put her dirty clothes back in her hamper. I took a last look around to be sure I had left everything in order. I stood behind her and flashed time on again for a second or two to be sure that, post-orgasm, she didn’t suspect that she had had company, and when I was convinced that she felt safe and unviolated I went downstairs and got dressed and let myself quietly out. It hadn’t really happened.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Maybe every single woman I have stripped, if she knew me, if she could know now what my thoughts had been as I unzipped her dress and undid her bra, would want me to have stripped her and sucked her breasts and understood her body as it truly deserved to be understood. Rhody, however, didn’t view it that way. When I tried the idea out on her (on the plane home from our beach vacation), she was interested at first, and then later she turned against it, using awful and, in my opinion, off-base words like “necrophilia” to characterize it. Let me say that I am not a necrophile. The notion has no appeal. Liaisons among the undead are fashionable, but I don’t have a drop of vampiric blood in me. (I did, however, once put a pair of “nipple nooses” on the famous Anne Rice at Barnes & Noble some years ago, when I was at the height of my mechanical-pencil Fold-phase. I clicked time on for a minute or two so she would have a chance to feel them while she signed my copy of her book, which was going to be a birthday present for somebody. Then I removed them. If she noticed anything, she was extremely cool about it and didn’t let on.) The Fermata allows something to occur that is the exact opposite of the necrophilic ideal: it allows me enough time to take in a particular lived second of one woman’s life, the incremental outcome of so many decisions and misfortunes and delights and griefs, while she is in the very midst of fleetingly bringing it into being. The ability to investigate all aspects of her careless aliveness, where her clothes stretch, her body’s textures, her expression, her smells, the way she happens to be standing or moving, as they are fused in a single total instantaneous female delta-self, is the great lure of the Fold. The Fold allows me to do sexual justice to times when she is fully conscious, but not in the least self-conscious; “stalls,” Hopkins might have called them, in the daily fluidity of her life whose specific complex of qualities would have otherwise gone unseen by anyone—unphotographed, uncelebrated, unvalued, unloved.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And then I dipped my face to hers, and shut my eyes.Her mouth was chill, at first, then very warm - the only warm thing, it seemed to me, in the whole of the frozen city; and when she took her lips away - as she did, after a moment, to give a quick, anxious glance towards our hunched and nodding driver - my own felt wet and sore and naked in the bitter December breezes, as if her kiss had flayed them.She drew me into the shadow of the carriage, where we were hidden from sight. Here we stepped together, and kissed again: I placed my arms about her shoulders, and felt her own hands shake upon my back. From lip to ankle, and through all the fussy layers of our coats and gowns, I felt her body stiff against my own - felt the pounding, very rapid, where we joined at the breast; and the pulse and the heat and the cleaving, where we pressed together at the hips.We stood like this for a minute, maybe longer; then the carriage gave a creak as the driver shifted in his seat, and Kitty stepped quickly away. I could not take my hands from her, but she seized my wrists and kissed my fingers and gave a kind of nervous laugh, and a whisper: ‘You will kiss the life out of me!’She moved into the carriage, and I clambered in behind her, trembling and giddy and half-blind, I think, with agitation and desire. Then the door was closed; the driver called to his pony, and the cab gave a jerk and a slither. The frozen river was left behind us - dull, in comparison with this new miracle!We sat side by side. She put her hands to my face again, and I shivered, so that my jaws jumped beneath her fingers. But she didn’t kiss me again: rather, she leaned against me with her face upon my neck, so that her mouth was out of reach of mine, but hot against the skin below my ear.

• From Wild (2012)

  “I’m still working,” he said, flicking the ash of his cigarette into a planter. “But I’ll be off in a bit. My trailer’s just across the way, if you wanna come over and party. I can get a whole bottle of that pinot gris you liked.” “Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve got to get up early and hike in the morning.” He took another drag of his cigarette, the end burning brightly. I’d watched him a bit after he’d brought me the wine. I guessed he was thirty. He looked good in his jeans. Why shouldn’t I go with him? “Well, you’ve got time to think about it, if you change your mind,” he said. “I’ve got to hike nineteen miles tomorrow,” I replied, as if that meant anything to him. “You could sleep at my place,” he said. “I’d give you my bed. I could sleep on the couch, if you wanted. I bet a bed would feel good after you’ve been sleeping on the ground.” “I’m all set up over there.” I gestured toward the meadow. I walked back to my camp feeling queasy, equal parts flustered and flattered by his interest, a shot of bald desire quaking through me. The women had zipped themselves into their tents for the night by the time I returned, but Brent was still awake, standing in the dark, gazing up at the stars. “Beautiful, huh?” I whispered, gazing up with him. As I did so, it occurred to me that I’d not cried once since I’d set foot on the trail. How could that be? After all the crying I’d done, it seemed impossible that it was true, but it was. I almost burst into tears with the realization, but I laughed instead. “What’s so funny?” Brent asked. “Nothing.” I looked at my watch. It was 10:15. “I’m usually sound asleep by now.” “Me too,” said Brent. “But I’m wide awake tonight.” “It’s ’cause we’re so excited to be in town,” he said. We both laughed. I’d been savoring the company of the women all day, grateful for the kinds of conversation that I’d seldom had since starting the PCT, but it was Brent I felt oddly the closest to, if only because he felt familiar. As I stood next to him, I realized he reminded me of my brother, who, in spite of our distance, I loved more than anyone. “We should make a wish,” I said to Brent. “Don’t you have to wait till you see a shooting star?” he asked. “Traditionally, yes. But we can make up new rules,” I said. “Like, I want boots that don’t hurt my feet.” “You’re not supposed to say it out loud!” he said, exasperated. “It’s like blowing out your birthday candles. You can’t tell anyone what your wish is. Now it’s not going to come true. Your feet are totally fucked.” “Not necessarily,” I said indignantly, though I felt sick with the knowledge that he was right.

• From Wild (2012)

  “There’s another guy up ahead named Greg,” I said. “I met him a couple of days ago and he said he’d still be there.” My insides leapt when I spoke Greg’s name, for no other reason than he was the only person I knew on the trail. “We’ve been following him for a good stretch, so it’ll be nice to finally meet him,” said Albert. “There’s another couple a fellas behind us. Most likely they’ll be along any time,” he said, and turned to look down the trail in the direction that we’d come from. “Two kids named Doug and Tom, about the same age as y’all. They started not long before you did, a touch south.” I waved Albert and Matt off and sat for a few minutes pondering the existence of Doug and Tom, and then I rose and spent the next several hours hiking harder than ever, with the single-minded goal that they would not catch up to me before I reached Kennedy Meadows. I was dying to meet them, of course—but I wanted to meet them as the woman who’d left them in her dust instead of the woman they’d overtaken. Like Greg, Albert and Matt had started hiking at the Mexican border and were by now well seasoned, logging twenty-some miles each day. But Doug and Tom were different. Like me, they’d started only recently on the PCT—not long before you did, Albert had said, and just a touch south. His words replayed themselves in my mind, as if replaying them would wring more meaning and specificity from them. As if by them I could discern how fast or slow I was traveling in comparison to Doug and Tom. As if the answer to that question held the key to my success or failure at this—the hardest thing I’d ever done. I stopped in my tracks when that thought came into my mind, that hiking the PCT was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Immediately, I amended the thought. Watching my mother die and having to live without her, that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Leaving Paul and destroying our marriage and life as I knew it for the simple and inexplicable reason that I felt I had to—that had been hard as well. But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard. It was strange but true. And perhaps I’d known it in some way from the very beginning. Perhaps the impulse to purchase the PCT guidebook months before had been a primal grab for a cure, for the thread of my life that had been severed.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  “Since we’re letting our hair down,” Adele would say, “can I ask you something?” I would see one of her eyes peering in at me. Because she would be leaning from behind the door, it would be impossible for me to tell for sure what she was or was not wearing. I would have a strong suspicion that she had a towel wrapped around under her arms, and I would be glad if she did, because it was such a marvelously simple extension of the towel’s utility (despite its visual overuse in made-for-TV movies), relying on the slightly moist post-shower plush of the towel and the swell of the Jams to keep the folded-under corner from slipping and freeing the entire wrap: its very tightness kept it tight. I would put my face close to the door as well, and she and I would regard each other eye to eye. “What’s your question?” I would say. She would ask, “Is the washcloth you handed me just now the one that was sort of hanging on the edge of the bed when your magazines were all spread out in here?” I would admit that it was. Adele would blink carefully. “Why was it on the bed that way? What were you planning to do with it?” I would tell her that I had been planning to shoot onto it. “Or maybe I would have bundled my penis in it and muffled the explosion,” I would say. I would reveal to her that my orgasms were almost always better when shot into cotton than into tissue paper. Then I would add: “I would have rinsed the washcloth out afterward. I don’t think whoever does the room when I check out should have to deal with that sort of relic.” She would tell me that I was a considerate person. I would lower my voice to a whisper and tell her how much I wanted to see her ass. “That may or may not happen,” she would say. I would ask her what she had been planning to do with the washcloth in her bath. “Wash with it,” she would say. She would now be kneeling very close to the door. She was, I would verify, wearing a white towel. My face would be so close to hers that I would be able to hear every detail of her breathing, and yet we would not comfortably be able to kiss. She would be smiling, pleased that I was so obviously hers. I would be able to smell her lipstick. She would finally say, “I suppose I should take my bath now. The water is going to get cold.” “You’ve had the bath ready this whole time?” I would say, distressed. “I had no idea. And here I’ve been stuffing all of this month’s pornography through the door at you.”