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 Delta of Venus (1977)

  He stretched himself on the floor. She crouched over his face and held her dress so that it fell and covered his head. With his two hands he held her buttocks like a fruit and passed his tongue between the mounts over and over again. Now he also stroked her clitoris, which made Bijou move forwards and backwards. His tongue felt every response, every contraction. As she crouched over him, she saw his erect penis vibrate with each gasp of pleasure he uttered. There was a knock on the door. Bijou rose quickly, startled, with her lips still wet from the kisses and her hair undone. The clairvoyant answered quietly however: “I am not ready yet.” And then turned and smiled at her. She smiled back. He dressed himself quickly. Soon everything was outwardly in order. They agreed to meet again. Bijou wanted to bring her friends Leila and Elena. Would he like it? He begged her to do this. He said, “Most of the women who come here do not tempt me. They are not beautiful. But you—come whenever you want to. I’ll dance for you.” His dance for the three women took place one evening when all the clients were gone. He stripped himself, showing his gleaming golden-brown body. To his waist he tied a fake penis modeled like his own and the same color. He said, “This is a dance from my own country. We do this for the women on feast days.” In the dimly lit room, where the light shone like a small fire over his skin, he began to move his belly, making the penis wave in a most suggestive way. He jerked his body as if he were entering a woman and simulated the spasms of a man caught in the varied tonalities of an orgasm. One, two, three. The final spasm was wild, like that of a man giving up his life in the act of sex. The three women watched. At first only the fake penis dominated, but then the real one, in the heat of the dance, began to compete in length and weight. Now they both moved in rhythm with his gestures. He closed his eyes as though he had no need of the women. The effect on Bijou was powerful. She took her dress off. She began to dance around him temptingly. But he merely touched her now and then with the tip of his sex, wherever he encountered her, and continued to turn and jerk his body in space like a savage dancing against an invisible body. The teasing affected Elena, too, and she slipped her dress off and kneeled near them, just to be in the orbit of their sexual dance. She suddenly wanted to be taken until she bled, by this big, strong, firm penis dangled in front of her, as he performed a male danse du ventre, with its tantalizing motions.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  33 IF HER GOAL was to prove to herself that it was over, that they both wanted to end it, she got her chance two days after she settled in with Lamb and Abby, when Bru came looking for her at the Dynamo office, a cramped space on the second floor of a ratty building on Beach Road. She was alone in the office, taking inventory in the supply closet, when he called, “Hello ... anybody home?” Please, God ... help me live through this. Help me to be strong. “Hey,” he said, finding her as still and lifeless as one of the vacuum cleaners. He held out a bunch of peonies. She took them, her hands shaking. She was afraid to look at him, afraid if she did she’d lose it. “Hey ...” he said again, tilting up her chin. She tried to focus on the wall clock over his shoulder —4:15 P.M. He waved his hand in front of her face. “Victoria?” Okay. She could do this. She’d keep it light, as if it meant nothing, as if he meant nothing. “What happened to your nose?” she asked. She could see he’d had an accident. A Band-Aid covered the bridge of his nose, but it only made him more attractive, giving his face a mysterious, slightly dangerous look. “Hockey,” he said. She nodded, reached up, touched it. A mistake. His arms went around her. “Missed you,” he whispered. “Missed you so much.” She was all over him in the truck, tugging at his shirt, undoing the zipper of his jeans. She’d never felt this kind of lust. He pulled off the road and fell onto her, pushing her panties aside, his jeans around his knees. Her head banged against the door as he pumped her but she barely noticed. The peonies crushing beneath her released their fragrance. She would never smell peonies again without reliving this

• From Vox (1992)

  “So the problem then is that only a little sliver of the tip of my cock was going to make it in range of the footprint of a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven copy. There were ways I could straddle the machine, but this just seemed ludicrous. Finally I made a seventy-percent reduction copy of my dick, because the highest reduction setting used the whole area of the glass that my dick could reach, and so I captured something vaguely obscene-looking, even if the total overall scale was reduced. It looked like a little Quonset hut, halfway up the right side of the page. I wrote 70% REDUCTION on the copy. But obviously my plan to strum off hastily and then make the second copy had to be abandoned, because my dick wouldn’t even begin to reach over the plastic strip between me and where the glass started when it was soft. But by now I was crazed with the idea of doing something for this woman that retained some shred of playfulness to it, so she could think to herself, All in fun, all in fun, and yet which conveyed the full force of the idea that I had been alone in that office that weekend with a huge erection, thinking of her. How do I give her that sense? Actually come onto the asterisk memo? That seemed crude. Do you think that would have crossed the line?” “I think, yeah.”

• From Vox (1992)

  Finally I made a seventy-percent reduction copy of my dick, because the highest reduction setting used the whole area of the glass that my dick could reach, and so I captured something vaguely obscene-looking, even if the total overall scale was reduced. It looked like a little Quonset hut, halfway up the right side of the page. I wrote 70% REDUCTION on the copy. But obviously my plan to strum off hastily and then make the second copy had to be abandoned, because my dick wouldn’t even begin to reach over the plastic strip between me and where the glass started when it was soft. But by now I was crazed with the idea of doing something for this woman that retained some shred of playfulness to it, so she could think to herself, All in fun, all in fun, and yet which conveyed the full force of the idea that I had been alone in that office that weekend with a huge erection, thinking of her. How do I give her that sense? Actually come onto the asterisk memo? That seemed crude. Do you think that would have crossed the line?” “I think, yeah.” “I thought so. So instead what I did was—you remember making outlines of your hands in kindergarten? You held your hand still on the page and you traced around each finger, and all the little contours of your finger joints were captured, and you would go around a few times, and each time the pencil was at a slightly different angle, so you got this aura of your hand, that was so much more accurate than you could ever draw, and all you had to do was put in the fingernails and the little wrinkles on the backs of your fingers and you really had something? Once this girl traced my hand and I traced hers at the same time—I went very slowly, which triggered her ticklishness, and she laughed hard every time my pencil made it to the place between two of her fingers, but she was brave, she stayed put. Her name was Martha. I’m pleased to have remembered that! A teacher showed us how to make a turkey, using two hands superimposed. But that wasn’t interesting, that was just a trick.

• From Vox (1992)

  I didn’t have much success with the technique, but he was this huge man, huge coarse beard, huge arms, he loved large meatball subs, with that orange grease—and he was so big and so innocent and actually quite shy that the idea of him gasping—” “His eyes squinted shut.” “Right, hunched over his male organ, though I have to say I was never quite able to picture his male organ, but the idea of him intentionally, deliberately gasping and swallowing was enough to help me toward a moment or two of pleasure myself.” “Ooo. On that very bed?” “On this very bed.” “But without the chenille bedspread.” “Without the chenille bedspread, which I notice is leaving little white pieces of fluff on my pants, mm, mm, mm, get off, you. You see, a pretentiously sexy silk bedspread from Deliques would have been more practical after all.” “Well, right, no, I can see that the things in Deliques might be sexy,” he said. “Garters and all that. They don’t do much for me—in fact, the whole Victorian flavor of a certain kind of smirky kinkiness puts me off—but still, I have to admit that when the catalogs started coming, week after week, early fall, midfall, late fall, this persistent gush of half-dressed women flowing toward me in the mail, on such expensive paper, with the bee-stung lips and all that, it did start to interest me.” “Ah, now you’re admitting it,” she said. “The male models are quite good-looking, too.” “Well, but still for me it wasn’t the lace hemi-demi-camisoles or any of that. I’ll tell you what it was, in fact. It was this one picture of a woman wearing a loose green shirt, lying on her back, with her legs in the air, crossed at the ankles, wearing a pair of tights. Not black tights. I was, I was absolutely entranced by this picture. I remember coming home from work and sitting at the kitchen table, studying this picture for about … ten minutes, reading the little description of the tights, looking at the picture again, reading, looking. She had very long legs. Now, did I have anybody I could buy these tights for? No, not really. Not at that moment. They were made of a certain kind of stitch, not chenille, not chenille. Pointelle! She was wearing these beigey-green pointelle tights.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  E cosí stando, essendo Rustico, piú che mai, nel suo disidero acceso, per lo vederla cosí bella, venue la resurrezion della carne; la quale riguardando Alibech, e maravigliatasti, disse: Rustico, quella che cosa è, che io ti veggio, che cosí si pigne in fuori, e non l' ho io? O figliuola mia, disse Rustico, questo è il diavolo, di che io t'ho parlato, e vedi tu ora: egli mi dà grandissima molestia, tanta, che io appena la posso sofferire. Allora disse la giovane. O lodato sia Iddio, ché io veggio, che io sto meglio, che non stai tu, ché io non ho cotesto diavolo io. Disse Rustico, tu di vero; ma tu hai un' altra cosa, che non l'ho io, et haila in iscambio di questo. Disse Alibech: O che? A cui Rustico disse: Hai l'inferno; e dicoti, che io mi credo, che Dio t'abbia qui mandata per la salute dell' anima mia; perciòche, se questo diavolo pur mi darà questa noia, ove tu cogli aver di me tanta pietà, e sofferire, che io in inferno il rimetta; tu mi darai grandissima consolazione, et a Dio farai grandissimo piacere, e servigio; se tu per quello fare in queste parti venuta se; che tu di. La giovane di buona fede rispose O padre mio, poscia che io ho l'inferno, sia pure quando vi piacerà mettervi il diavolo. Disse allora Rustico: Figliuola mia benedetta sia tu: andiamo dunque, e rimettiamlovi sí, che egli poscia mi lasci stare. E cosí detto, menate la giovane sopra uno de' loro letticelli, le 'nsegnò, come star si dovesse a dover incarcerare quel maladetto da Dio. La giovane, che mai piú non aveva in inferno messo diavolo alcuno, per la prima volta sentí un poco di noia; perché ella disse a Rustico.

• From Vox (1992)

  152 open the finely scratched gold top and show it to you, and I explain, hesitantly, that it, um, picks up the flux currents from intelligent, um, masturbating women, and I show you how it glows, and I point out the wavy flow lines as they move in your direction, and I say, They're somewhat fainter now, but they're definitely still there, and they really look great. Now, let's see what happens if I do this.' 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, Tor 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 con vergences 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

• From Vox (1992)

  And it was exactly what I wanted, and it started to feel so good, and I said so, and suddenly he started stroking himself incredibly fast, it was this blur, like a sewing machine, and he produced this major jet of sperm at a diagonal right into the circular spray of the water, so that it fought against all the drops and was sort of torn apart by them, and he was clamping my leg, my smooth leg, extremely tight with those perfectly water-groomed thighs, and I shifted adroitly so that the poached sperm and hot-water runoff wouldn’t pour directly into me and possibly cause trouble, but so that it still poured over me. And then he took the showerhead again, and still holding his cock and still clamping my knee very tight, he sprayed slowly across my hand and my thighs very close with the water until I closed my eyes and came, imagining I was in front of a circus audience. So that was nice.” “God of mercy, I am so jealous!” “Don’t be,” she said. “I think my offhand talk of yeast unnerved him, and his subservient streak unnerved me . Anyway, the point is, that story is connected to this very call between you and me, because when I was in the shower yesterday, and close to coming—” “Thinking about the three painters.” “No, after the three painters, when I was very close to coming, I was thinking of that time with Lawrence, as I occasionally do, I imagine him handing me my bottles of shampoo with a serious expression, or some fragment of it, anyway yesterday I thought of the Bionic Mike Transmitter that he’d described, and I started to make these very theatrical moans, like ‘oh yeah, oh yeah baby, ooh yeah, pump it deep, pump it deep, oooh yeah’ and I imagined that someone had left a Bionic Mike Transmitter in my bathroom and that random men on the expressway were driving by with their radios scanning the stations and suddenly they would pick me up, they’d hear me moaning exaggeratedly in the shower.

• From Vox (1992)

  8 leaving little white pieces of fluff on my pants, mm, mm, mm, get off, you. You see, a pretentiously sexy silk bed spread from Deliques would have been more practical after all." "Well, right, no, I can see that the things in Deliques might be sexy," he said. "Garters and all that. They don't do much for me—in fact, the whole Victorian flavor of a certain kind of smirky kinkiness puts me off—but still, I have to admit that when the catalogs started coming, week after week, early fall, midfall, late fall, this persis tent gush of half-dressed women flowing toward me in the mail, on such expensive paper, with the bee-stung lips and all that, it did start to interest me." "Ah, now you're admitting it," she said. "The male models are quite good-looking, too. " "Well, but still for me it wasn't the lace hemi-demi- camisoles or any of that. I'll tell you what it was, in fact. It was this one picture of a woman wearing a loose green shirt, lying on her back, with her legs in the air, crossed at the ankles, wearing a pair of tights. Not black tights. I was, I was absolutely entranced by this picture. I remem ber coming home from work and sitting at the kitchen table, studying this picture for about ... ten minutes, reading the little description of the tights, looking at the picture again, reading, looking. She had very long legs. Now, did I have anybody I could buy these tights for? No, not really. Not at that moment. They were made of a certain kind of stitch, not chenille, not chenille. Poin-

• From Vox (1992)

  To the naked eye they seem identical.’ She said, ‘Just one moment,’ and I heard her flipping through the catalog, and I made a last valiant attempt to stroke myself off, because the idea of her looking carefully at those pictures of women in those tiny weightless panties, with the darkness of pubic hair visible right there through the material, at the very same time I was looking at those same cuppable curves of pubic hair on my end, should have been enough to make me shoot instantly, but I don’t know, she sounded so well-meaning, and I knew that there was a very good chance that she would not like to know that I was there trying to … I mean, she didn’t want to work at a job where men called her and ordered a few items of merchandise just so they could … right? That wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all in taking the job, or possibly wasn’t, at least, so even when she said, finally, ‘Well, the nadja pants ride a little lower on the hip, which is a statement that any normal jacker-offer should be able to come to easily, because what does it imply? It implies her own hip, it implies that the nadja panties have ridden her own hip . But even then I could not achieve and maintain. So I said, ‘Oh well, no, thanks, I’ll see how the tights go over and then order the minimes later.’ And a week afterward, I was the owner of a pair of tights. I still have them, unopened. Give me your address and I’ll be glad to forward them to you.” “Why don’t you give them to Jill?” she asked. “Oh, a million reasons. But that’s not quite the end. I hung up from making the order and instantly I got hard again, naturally, and I thought for a second, and I hit the redial button, and a different woman answered, with a much lower and smarter voice, with some name like Vulva, and I said, ‘Vulva, I have what may sound like an unorthodox question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. But what I’m curious about is, well, of the men who order from your catalog, do you think some of them are in a subtle or maybe not-so-subtle way obscene phone callers?’ She laughed and she said, ‘That’s a good question.’ And then there was a long pause, a very long pause. I said, ‘Hello?’ And right there I knew I’d blown it—I knew the tone of my hello, that slight reediness in my voice that betrayed sexual tension, blew away the potential rapport I might have had with Vulva.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Perhaps my presence was interrupting an orgy that would resume the second I left and even now eight doors concealed eight erect penises. Someone with a convict’s patience had drilled a dime-size hole in one of the marble slabs in Main Hall. I’d sit on the toilet, suddenly remember the hole was here, between this stall and the next, look up and see a black pupil glossy, quivering. If the eye persisted in its liquid restlessness, at once thoroughly anonymous and shockingly vulnerable, I’d look back toward this live camera, this unseen seer. I stood up to expose my erection. I posed a bit self-consciously, turning halfway toward my audience while still keeping my feet forward in the usual position so as not to arouse suspicion in anyone outside glancing at the floor. His lashes squeezed shut for a second as he blinked. The effect through the judas was of a carnivorous plant swallowing a black, trembling life. The soul and intelligence usually attributed to the eyes had been annulled by this extreme close-up: nothing left but motility. “The quick,” I thought, as in the phrase, “The quick and the dead.” Then I exploded, he flushed and shot out of his booth, the door to the hall sighed shut behind him, and I was alone with the faintly blue light filtering down through overhead frosted glass onto white porcelain and with the sound of the leaking toilet and a paw full of come, which I licked clean and swallowed like a savage or a cat. If I’d had the courage, I would have advised my anthropology class that primitive man believes in the conservation of energy through the recycling of bodily fluids. I was a Buddhist, or would have been if I could have given up this hankering after a penis attached to two furry legs below and one Cyclopean eye above, as black and wobbly as black-currant jelly. Because of my Buddhist longing for peace, I’d decided to study Chinese. Wherever I went—fraternity house, dorm room, student union, dinner party, toilet—I had my handmade flashcards with me. Chinese character on one side, on the other its pronunciation and correct tone above the definition, or rather dated definitions, since meanings shifted over the centuries. We were just a handful of students clustering three nights a week around our conversation teacher in the one lit classroom in an otherwise dark building. The stairs creaked. Our teacher, an ageless Chinese woman in a dark blue lusterless silk dress, asked me in Mandarin to run out and see if it was a strange “nose person” ( bi ren )—and in that instant we kids, all Caucasian, learned that’s what the Chinese called us because of our big noses. Our teacher clapped a hand over her mouth under her own suitably snub nose and blushed. We called her the “straight lady,” because she could have been drawn entirely in straight lines, her pageboy and bangs, her eye slits and thin wrists, her breastless body.

• From Vox (1992)

  129 soaked, and so was Lawrence, who was also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and so was everyone around us, including the performers. There was some Venezuelan act in which a woman spun hard balls around very fast on long strings while two men played percussion behind her, and the balls smacked against the floorboards in interesting rhythms around her legs, and she was stream ing with sweat, and quite beautiful, but in a way that I thought was vaguely like me, and suddenly the two men would stop hitting the drums and she would freeze and make this kind of trilling scream, a beautiful strange wild sound. She was just covered with sweat, she looked really wild, and the two men behind her were exceedingly good-looking, wearing wide-brimmed black hats with chin straps, and I momentarily wanted to be her, and while they were taking their bows I adapted my time- tested striptease fantasy, and I thought that I was this woman in the black spangles, and I was spinning these balls very fast, faster than she could, so they were a blur, so fast that somehow, like in a cartoon fight when it's just a blur from which things, pieces of clothing, fly outward, somehow my whole outfit was torn in pieces from my body, and flung out into the audience, so that when the drumming stopped and I froze suddenly and made my trilling scream, I was totally naked, and all these pieces of my costume were still floating aloft in all directions, and each man who caught some damp shred of costume was overpowered and took his place in line to fuck me, and

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Only a retired English officer makes me get really hard.” Suddenly he turned sad, sat on his bed, and hugged his knees, again as an actress might, this time for a meditative head shot staring into the setting sun beside a lake. His speech rhythms were unpredictable and snagged deep into my mind. “You see, we were dirt poor, real white trash. River rats—that’s what they call people who live so far down the hill they’re washed out every time it floods. We were river rats. William … Everett … Hunton, what a hoot …” He buried his face between his knees for a second. “Some day when we’re sisters I’ll tell you my real name, but if you snitch on me I’ll pull your braids and dip them in the inkwell.” He was up and laughing again. “Champagne, I feel in the mood for champagne.” He twirled the two bottles ready and waiting in an ice bucket. “Where is that girl? Isn’t she fabulous! So glamorous! I can’t believe she likes me. I suppose you think it’s all frightfully lesbian, you horrid cynic!” And again he was back at my side, this time kissing me. His mouth was wet and sweet from the full red mouthwash he was always swigging. I felt a floral rapture springing up inside me, as though a huge sunflower were about to poke out of my mouth, my entrails about to turn into soft ropes of wisteria, my cock into a red-hot poker. Everything in me rose up to greet him, and Willy grabbed my pants and shook my erection as if it were a hand: “Average, as you say.” He bit my ear. “Sorry, doll, I don’t go for pencil meat. I’m a hopeless size queen.” He seemed delighted to have demonstrated his power over me. Buffeted by his own witticisms and sexual splashiness, he was smiling a really huge smile. I saw in him the wide-eyed boy I sometimes impersonated, which made me concede the field to him. He was so much better at it, so much more appealing. I could still feel in my palms the girth of his tight, muscled, turned waist as he’d wriggled out of my arms a minute ago, exactly as though he’d been a small but powerful fish, a rosy trout breaking through the ice with the thrust of his tail. Then Annie came in and she and William flattered each other about their appearance and kissed, standing, for a long time as I sat and looked on—crotch-height, child-height. They were certainly aware of me and were posing for me. I left the young lovers after they’d assured me how much they adored me. They had even laughingly asked me to be the best man. Outside, it was dark already although only four o’clock, and fresh snow was falling in the quadrangle. I could hear typewriters clattering and see genies of steam lifting off the heated shower windows in the dorms.

• From Vox (1992)

  136 that way. But the thing was, I kept a faint racy undertone going in the conversation. For instance, I'd say, 'What do you think those ham-radio buffs really talked about? Do you think some of them were secretly gay, and they left their wives asleep and crept down to their finished basements in the middle of the night to have long con versations with friends in New Zealand or wherever?' He said, 'I suppose it's a possibility.' And about the drive-ins I said things like, 'It must be much more comfortable and private in drive-ins now, because you can close the window completely, you don't have that metal thing hanging there with the tinny sound, covered with yellow chipped paint, like a chaperone, you're not attached to anything around you, it's much more like being in a car on the expressway.' He said he didn't know exactly how drive-ins supplied the FM sound, because he hadn't been to a drive-in since he was eight years old, but he said that technically speaking it was an easy problem to solve, for instance there was a thing advertised in the back of Pop ular Science that picks up any sound in the room and broadcasts it to FM radios within several hundred yards, it's called a Bionic Mike Transmitter. I said, 'Ooo, a Bionic Mike Transmitter!' He said, 'Oh sure, it's this device that you can leave in this room, for instance, and it will broadcast any sound in the room to any nearby FM radio, if it's correctly tuned.' He said, 'Of course it's advertised with a big warning about how it's not meant for illegal surveillance. But probably that's what it's used

• From The Decameron (1353)

  There was then, by chance, in the harbour of the city a vessel laden with merchandise and bound for Chiarenza[116] in Roumelia; whereof two young Genoese were masters, who had already hoisted sail to depart as soon as the wind should be fair. Marato, having agreed with them, took order how he should on the ensuing night be received aboard their ship with the lady; and this done, as soon as it was dark, having inwardly determined what he should do, he secretly betook himself, with certain of his trustiest friends, whom he had enlisted for the purpose, to the house of Pericone, who nowise mistrusted him. There he hid himself, according to the ordinance appointed between them, and after a part of the night had passed, he admitted his companions and repaired with them to the chamber where Pericone lay with the lady. Having opened the door, they slew Pericone, as he slept, and took the lady, who was now awake and in tears, threatening her with death, if she made any outcry; after which they made off, unobserved, with great part of Pericone's most precious things and betook themselves in haste to the sea-shore, where Marato and the lady embarked without delay on board the ship, whilst his companions returned whence they came. [Footnote 116: The modern Klarentza in the north-west of the Morea, which latter province formed part of Roumelia under the Turkish domination.] The sailors, having a fair wind and a fresh, made sail and set out on their voyage, whilst the princess sore and bitterly bewailed both her former and that her second misadventure; but Marato, with that Saint Waxeth-in-hand, which God hath given us [men,] proceeded to comfort her after such a fashion that she soon grew familiar with him and forgetting Pericone, began to feel at her ease, when fortune, as if not content with the past tribulations wherewith it had visited her, prepared her a new affliction; for that, she being, as we have already more than once said, exceeding fair of favour and of very engaging manners, the two young men, the masters of the ship, became so passionately enamoured of her that, forgetting all else, they studied only to serve and pleasure her, being still on their guard lest Marato should get wind of the cause. Each becoming aware of the other's passion, they privily took counsel together thereof, and agreed to join in getting the lady for themselves and enjoy her in common, as if love should suffer this, as do merchandise and gain.

• From Vox (1992)

  138 olive oil and he said, 'Now, where does this go?' I said, 'Well, where would you like it to go?' And he said, 'I don't know.' So I said, 'Well sometimes, after I get my legs waxed, the day after, they're still a little tender, and I've found that olive oil really helps them feel better.' Which wasn't true, they feel fine the day after, but any way." "Erotic license." "Exactly. He said, 'But that would be terribly messy!' I said, 'So I'll stand in the bathtub.' And he said, 'But won't it be cold and clammy?' So I turned the bottle of oil on its side and put it in the microwave for twenty seconds. He felt it and he shook his head and said, 'I think it needs a full minute.' So we leaned on the counter, looking at the microwave, while it heated the oil. When the five beeps beeped, Lawrence took it out, and we went to the bathroom together. I stood in the bathtub and pulled my shorts up high on my legs, and very solemnly he poured a little pool of olive oil on his fingers and rubbed it just above my knee." "He was kneeling himself?" "Yes. The bathtub wasn't really wet anymore—I mean it was still humid from both the showers, but we didn't have the water running or anything. He said, 'You're very smooth.' I said, 'Thank you.' A rather powerful smell of olive oil surrounded us, and I began to feel quite Mediterranean and Bacchic, and honestly somewhat like a mushroom being lightly sautéed. He stared at his

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Lou reserved special scorn for boys who whispered to their lovers on the way to a midnight movie, “I’ve still got your babies inside me.” “Don’t they know those babies are dead spunk festering up their filthy bungholes!” A real boy, someone skinny and under twelve who walked around with his mouth open, sent Lou into raptures. One sweaty afternoon in Chicago we rode the elevated and sat behind a boy of eleven or so in shorts and T-shirt. The boy stared out the window and wagged his right leg against his stationary left leg, in a ceaseless, thoughtless way. A hard little erection could be seen pressed flat against his tummy in his white shorts. Unconsciously he kept batting at the erection with the back of his right hand, now to one side of it, now to the other, as though despite trial and error he had yet to find the exact spot. His skin had no pores, no bulges, and no sheen—it was as mat and consistent as face powder, except it looked cool, firm, and alive. It drank the light as soil drinks water. His shoulders and thin arms hung limply down with sublime inconsequence, though his shoulder blades looked too knotty under the cotton, as if they were about to hatch wings. The same fine, nearly invisible gold down that covered his cheeks, and had collected in a haze just below the line of his light brown hair, dusted his nape in a precise pattern, the shape of a cursive letter M, rising on either side and dipping in the center toward his spine. If the down had been molten it would have roared as it rose to descend that glistening chute. “Yes,” Lou insisted, “ if it made a sound.” He sank into a silence then sighed: “ If it were gold … just look at that nape.” Lou spoke as loudly as if we were conversing in a language all our own. I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that I was or am dismissive or even critical of anything Lou was saying. His vision of sex, of boys, and of poetry, even (as I was to discover) of drugs, was my first and strongest encounter with a pure theory of beauty. I’d always heard sensible down-to-earth values praised, but they were the only kind I’d ever observed, and the repeated endorsements seemed redundant. Now at last I’d met the man everyone had warned me against. I realized he’d never love me. Not that there was anything so wrong with me, but we didn’t form a couple he would have considered sexy. We were companionable, but I was too big and educated to be the boy, and too much younger to be the man. For a week or ten days, Lou tried to turn me into the man, but I was too affectionate in a puppy-dog way.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He had an aesthetic of religion (Catholic orthodoxy over corny Protestant cultism), an aesthetic of psychoanalysis (Freud, not that seedy Jung), an aesthetic of drugs (the deadly nightshade of heroin rather than the “loco weed” of marijuana; “Pot’s for people who want to feel funny, like those cows that get high on loco weed and run into electric fences”). One night toward the end of August I was sleeping upstairs in my mother’s apartment. I’d waited for his call all evening and I’d called him several times without success. Now Lou wanted to see me. He breathed noisily and said with a thick tongue, “Bunny, I need—” and then the receiver must have fallen out of his grasp, since I could hear him still mumbling to himself. I hurried downstairs in the elevator. I rang his doorbell again and again, and even knocked, but I didn’t want to create a scene. His neighbors had already complained to the management. At last he opened the door. A centimeter of cigarette smoked in his hand. Behind him in shoals of faint light, the wreck of his furniture was heaped up. He walked with the floating gait of someone moved by tides, not the will. “Lou, honey, what’s wrong?” I asked him. I followed him into the bedroom. His black cat was gorging itself on an overturned carton of chop suey Lou must have ordered in. I watched the cat swallow lump after lump of glutinous vegetables pooling on the carpet. Its working throat was reflected by the mirror that had fallen off the hook. The mirror had cracked in half but stayed upright. Glasses of rum and Coke stood empty or half full on every flat surface. The impression was of a middle-class apartment where a tribe of bums had been squatting for weeks. The fluorescent tube in the bathroom and the television screen, empty picture rolling, provided the only light. “Bunny,” he said as he collapsed on the unmade bed, “you’ve got to get me—” static on the line, but for a moment I thought he actually said, “a high colonic irrigation.” At last I realized he had said a “high colonic irrigation,” whatever that meant. In pained snatches he explained that when he shot up (heroin? he didn’t say), his digestive tract would sometimes “stall” as a result of his having lost so many yards of gut. The only way to restore peristalsis was to find someone with the archaic equipment necessary (small smile) for this disagreeable therapy (still smaller). It was one in the morning, but in a controlled panic I strummed the Yellow Pages. The first two numbers didn’t respond but the third yielded a sleazy male voice filtered through Lord Calvert and Kools, a minor Mafia voice. Fortunately Gerald, the doorman, had gone off duty and the lobby was unattended. It was drizzling. Lou was as hard to get into a taxi as a colt—he was all stiff legs, melting torso, and sharp elbows.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “I’d change mine to yours.” We carried home bags of groceries, went for a ride in the suburbs, snuggled up to watch television. Maria enjoyed the world, the world’s charms, without paying the world’s price. She simply refused to see our homosexuality or age difference as a problem. She wouldn’t discuss it. She started with the idea that bohemians were exempt from the ordinary rules. We went to a lesbian bar together. Maria entered the Volley Ball arrayed in black: a black trench coat over black jeans and a man’s black shirt. Her delicate white skin looked as raunchy as Elvis Presley’s flickering image on television. We watched the women dancing together while three old Negro men in the band, faces petrified into indifference, tooted and banged. A butch entered squiring a blonde whore tottering along on spike heels under dairy whip hair, her chubby hand rising again and again to tuck a stray wisp back into the creamy dome. On the wall was a sign, flyblown and fading, that read: “Hard Times Party Tonight.” Maria explained that the sign suggested a costume party and was a dodge around the law that forbade women to wear more than three articles of men’s dress—jeans, boots, and a T-shirt, say. A few businessmen, whose fantasies ran to lesbian couples, sat around the bar, eyes glued to the dance floor. A bouncer kept them away from the women—look but don’t touch! The one toilet was unavailable for a whole half hour at a stretch. Two women had barricaded themselves inside and were necking. Most of the women addressed each other with names drawn from children’s books (“Piglet,” “Eeyore,” and “Pooh” were favorites) or by men’s nicknames (“Andy” and “Tony” seemed popular). Maria’s apartment smelled of oil paint and turpentine. Her father had carved a grandfather clock for her in his basement shop at home. The Salvation Army couch Maria had upholstered in crisp blue-and-white bed ticking. She would sit on a high stool, dressed in a white smock, a cigarette burning in her hand like incense before an idol. I posed for her, but she said I wasn’t a good model. She spent most of her time modeling in clay two nude female figures whose linking arms and legs formed the oval frame of a mirror. She clung to me when I left. She said, “You’ve spoiled me with your visit. How can I go back to my spinster’s life?” “I’ll write you every day and get back down here in a week or two, three at the most.” I wanted to marry Maria and avoid the solitude and suffering everyone had told me homosexuality would bring. I thought marriage would define my nebulous feelings toward her; if I were married, I’d be a husband. Yet something kept me from answering her letters. I resolved every morning to write her; but every night I went to bed without having mailed off a letter. Her letters dropped regularly into my box.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  20 My son, be guided by your father’s [God-given] commandment (instruction) And do not b reject the teaching of your mother; [Eph 6:1–3 ] 21 Bind them continually upon your heart (in your thoughts), And tie them around your neck. [Prov 3:3 ; 7:3 ] 22 When you walk about, they (the godly teachings of your parents) will guide you; When you sleep, they will keep watch over you; And when you awake, they will talk to you. 23 For the commandment is a lamp, and the teaching [of the law] is light, And reproofs (rebukes) for discipline are the way of life, [Ps 19:8 ; 119:105 ] 24 To keep you from the evil woman, From [the flattery of] the smooth tongue of an immoral woman. 25 Do not desire (lust after) her beauty in your heart, Nor let her capture you with her eyelashes. 26 For on account of a prostitute one is reduced to a piece of bread [to be eaten up], And the immoral woman hunts [with a hook] the precious life [of a man]. 27 Can a man take fire to his chest And his clothes not be burned? 28 Or can a man walk on hot coals And his feet not be scorched? 29 So is the one who goes in to his neighbor’s wife; Whoever touches her will not be found innocent or go unpunished. 30 People do not despise a thief if he steals To satisfy himself when he is hungry; 31 But when he is found, he must repay seven times [what he stole]; He must give all the property of his house [if necessary to meet his fine]. 32 But whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks common sense and sound judgment and an understanding [of moral principles]; He who would destroy his soul does it. 33 Wounds and disgrace he will find, And his reproach (blame) will not be blotted out. 34 For jealousy enrages the [wronged] husband; He will not spare [the guilty one] on the day of vengeance. 35 He will not accept any ransom [offered to buy him off from demanding full punishment]; Nor will he be satisfied though you offer him many gifts (bribes). Proverbs 7 The Wiles of the Prostitute 1 M Y SON , keep my words And treasure my commandments within you [so they are readily available to guide you]. 2 Keep my commandments and live, And keep my teaching and law as the apple of your eye. 3 Bind them [securely] on your fingers; Write them on the tablet of your heart. 4 Say to [skillful and godly] wisdom, “You are my sister,” And regard understanding and intelligent insight as your intimate friends; 5 That they may keep you from the immoral woman, From the foreigner [who does not observe God’s laws and] who flatters with her [smooth] words. 6 For at the window of my house I looked out through my lattice.