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 282 of 344 · 20 per page

• 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)

  One-thirty in the afternoon. I’d go to class, and I’d start drawing in the margin of my notebook, and I’d draw a little curve, and I’d think, hm, a curve, and then I’d turn it into a breast, and I’d make it a bit larger, and then I’d make another one, and then I’d draw a pair of hands holding the breasts from behind—that was always an idea that interested me, that I’d be sitting in some class or auditorium, dimly lit, an architectural history lecture, with slides, and a person sitting behind me would reach his hands forward and take hold of my breasts, pulling me back against the chair. So by the time I’d drawn those hands and those large breasts I really had to come, and I’d walk briskly back to my brown marble shower. I read something about river gods that excited me, too. Really, back then I’d put out for any body of water at all—a pool or a bath or a pond, or an ocean. We rented a house on the Carolina coast for several summers, this was when I was in junior high school, and I’d go swimming in the ocean, and as soon as I was in the water I’d want to dither, I’d swim far out and I’d think of the tons and tons of water underneath my legs, but of course I couldn’t because there were lots of people swimming, so I’d come in the shower—oh, and that was an especially good kind of shower too because it was outdoors, in this wooden shed, and I had this freezing cold bathing suit on, which I would take off in the shower , and because the suit was cold my nipples were erect, as in your wet T-shirt contest, and I was stripping in the warm shower water, I’d slowly strip off this cold bathing suit, very pleasant to have the warm mingle with the cold, so that sometimes I could feel cold rinsing down my legs and sometimes warm, and I could hold the suit open and let the water fill it so that warm was just pouring out around my legs, that was nice, so my skin was all confused and very aware of itself, with the steam rising—oh, and there was a little metal mirror, I guess it was a shaving mirror, in this shower enclosure, which would get steamed up, even though I was outside. It was on the left wall as you faced the showerhead, which in this case was quite low. And after I’d taken off my swimsuit I’d hang it up on the nail next to the shaving mirror, and the sight of it all crumpled and dangling there was exciting, because it implied my complete full nudity, and when the shaving mirror got steamed up, I used to draw a pair of breasts on it in the fog with my fingers.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Now he and I were the only people awake in the whole glittering after-party house, surrounded by wheezing and gibbering penguins. I was sitting stunned by drink on a broken-down couch on a landing at the head of the grand staircase. Someone had passed out beside me. “Do you mind if I join you?” Mick asked. It was almost as though we’d had an appointment. Several times during dinner he’d caught my eye with his usual curiosity. His black hair had just been cut very short and I had the strongest urge to run my hand through it and before I’d thought twice I’d done it and suddenly his mouth was pressed to mine and we were rolling in each other’s arms and our hands were blindly tearing at shirts to open them and to feel that skin. Mick’s mouth tasted of crème de menthe. His hand had wormed its way down my trousers and was on my cock and I was thinking, We’ll become lovers we’ll live together forever I love him why were there no signs. He looked and acted like a ferret and now his hand became one; my hand stroked his stomach, so taut from all his sit-ups a dropped dime would have bounced on it and I thought, Does he love me too much, will he become a nuisance always underfoot in the fraternity house, this is probably a mistake. And then we’d half undressed each other, my cummerbund was cast on the floor, my studs had popped, and shifting streams of red and yellow light and heat flowed up from my legs through my chest and blazed across my closed eyes. “We’re crazy,” I whispered in his ear, “the other guys …” He pulled back and looked at me quizzically and then his tongue, muscular as a snail’s foot, was washing my face, the tip probing my nostril, now licking inside the arch above my eyelids and a second later back on my tongue and I was grateful for the ferocity of his desire because I felt borne up by it, just as though I were flying on the back of a stork—yes, one of those babies the stork wings down to its parents. His hand, calloused from all his commando workouts, closed over mine and led me into the room he shared with three other guys. Not a tender squeeze, just the practical pressure of horniness. His roommates were asleep, snoring or groaning only a few feet away from us. We finished undressing in a flash. Mick was standing naked beside me, smooth torso, furry legs, as though he were still wearing hip-length black stockings but had peeled off the matching tops. Then he slid in bed beside me and took liberties, we took and took liberties touching each other all over in all those secret places our eyes had glanced at obliquely in the fraternity shower room.

• From Vox (1992)

  55 reation? No. I've never been to Rome. I spend my va cation money in more important ways." "Like this call." "That's right. Now tell me, though, really, when your mother pointed out that statue, was it faintly arousing?" "I don't think it really was," she said. "It was just interesting, an interesting sexual fact, like something in Ripley's. I'm not, by the way, to get back to your story for a second, I'm not wearing a black undershirt under my shirt." "What are you wearing under your shirt?" "A bra." "What kind of bra?" "A nothing bra. A normal, white bra bra." "Oooo!" "It's shrunk slightly in the wash but it was my last clean one." "It's always impressive to me that bras have to be washed like other clothes. Does it clip on the front or on the back?" "The back." "Shouldn't it come off?" "I don't think so," she said. "Oh, I can hear in your voice the sound of you frown ing and pulling in your chin to look down at them! Oh boy." "Hah hah!" "The idea of women looking down at their own breasts 56 drives me nutso. They do it while they're walking. Some walk with their arms sort of hovering in front of their breasts, or awkwardly crossed in front of them, or they pretend to hold the strap of their pocketbook so their hands are bent in front of them, or they pretend to be adjusting their watch, or their bracelets, and the fact that even fully clothed the helpless obviousness of their breasts is embarrassing to them drives me absolutely nutso." "They see you staring, with your eyes sproinging out of your skull, of course they're embarrassed." "No, I'm very discreet. And this is only in certain moods, of course. Once I got into a wild state just stand ing at a bus stop. It was rush hour, and there were all these women driving to work, and they would drive by, and I would get this flash, this briefest of glimpses, of the wide shoulder strap of their safety belt crossing their breasts. That thick, densely woven material, pulling itself tight right between them. That's all I could see, hun dreds of times, different colors of dresses, shirts, blouses, over and over, every bra size and Lycra-cotton balance imaginable, like frames of a movie. By the time the bus came, I was literally unsteady, I could barely get the fare in the machine. What's that noise?" "Nothing. I was just changing the phone to the other 77 ear. "Oh," he said. "Did you see that thing about the Chi nese kid who suffered an episode of spontaneous human combustion?"

• 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)

  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)

  We finished undressing in a flash. Mick was standing naked beside me, smooth torso, furry legs, as though he were still wearing hip-length black stockings but had peeled off the matching tops. Then he slid in bed beside me and took liberties, we took and took liberties touching each other all over in all those secret places our eyes had glanced at obliquely in the fraternity shower room. Now my fingertips found that long muscle that ran from the anus up to the base of the penis—this second submerged penis, the father penis, sheathed by the body itself. And his fingers were digging into my buttocks as though he hoped to push me into him, blend two willing but separate entities, less separate now that his mouth was on my ear, thundering breath into me. Certainly my thoughts were inflating and floating upward. Now he was straddling my chest and his cock was sliding over my lips. A second later he’d swung around and we were sucking each other, lying on our sides, Romulus and Remus before the wolf arrived to nurse them. In the hall light that came in through the open door I could see the red veins in his translucent scrotum, autumn leaf, and I looked up the crack of his ass. My mind reeled in a drunk waltz back and forth between my cock and his, between getting and spending. Then he said, “Why don’t you stick it in me.” I said, “Okay …,” with a trace of hesitation. “I’ve never done this before,” he said. “Neither have I,” I lied. “But maybe it’s done like this,” and I folded his strong legs back, plowing into them as a lineman digs into his opponent’s shoulder. His calves hooked over my shoulders. His legs, long and firm in their black stockings of fur, felt cool. He was like a trick bottle that must be turned at a queer angle for it to pour, but then it pours freely. Since he had been built to stand perfectly still at attention under a general’s glance, he knew how to take orders, even silent ones. For once he wasn’t keeping up his stream of self-encouraging comments. Nor was he smiling. When I started to enter him, he said “Jesus Christ” out loud and grimaced with pain. The closest roommate stirred. I pulled out and he dashed for the toilet. I followed him. He sat on the toilet, door open, and said in a loud voice, “You’re really a pain in the ass,” and smiled that big unveiled smile. I stood there while he winced and talked and looked down into the toilet to see if anything had come out. His body had been tanned so often it retained a permanent swimsuit line.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He had other guides to cock size—big hands, big feet, big nose, fleshy ears, early balding (“Due to an excess of male hormones”), big thumb-to-palm ratio. He favored tropical people over those from temperate climes, though he’d discovered that as one approached the poles, cocks become larger again (“Nothing like a big Swede”). Short thick ones (“But beercan thick”) he preferred to very thin long ones. “But you, I don’t think you’d know what to do with a truly big dick except throw it over your shoulder, burp it, and weep. Are you Irish?” “Yes.” “I knew it, you Irish boys all have small mouths and small dicks, the worst of both worlds. Why,” and he rolled his bulging eyes up to heaven, “do I always keep running into Irish boys? Punishment for being a Lit—tle—Bit—Pig—gy in my last life, you think?” When the new semester started I had my own room in a boardinghouse and I was free from all supervision for the first time in my life. I’d moved out of the fraternity house, although I continued to take my meals there. Indeed, I continued to juggle all these elements—fraternity brothers, Beats, Chinese, and my anonymous, half-seen lovers. I painted everything in my room white except the old desk I’d bought at a junk store, which had a tiny escritoire that folded out and a small oval mirror placed high above my head on a ladder-back of carved black pegs that inscribed the wall with an abacus of shadows. There I did my homework; everything else in my life was so chaotic that I needed to receive good grades. I covered the bed with a white blanket bordered in whitest, widest ribbon and I’d lie on it and watch the sunlight singing to itself out of that small Irish mouth of a mirror. I met a pretty Korean (“Forget Koreans,” William hissed angrily, “it’s clit size”) who lived next door. Whenever the mechanical world frustrated him—if his bike jammed or the laundry machine swallowed his coins, or his key snapped off in a lock—he’d ring my bell, trudge in, take off his clothes, fold them neatly on my white wooden chair, and lie face down on my white bed. He’d take it like a man, bite the pillow if I hurt him, and nothing had ever felt quite so good as those small taut muscles under that chamois-soft skin, the color of cinnamon when it’s sprinkled on cappuccino. That’s my way of saying that a low fire, a pilot light, burned under that glove-smooth skin, and that he smelled excitingly of that foul fermented cabbage the Koreans like to snack on. The minute it was over he’d dress and leave, his eyebrows raised in painful doubt as though he didn’t quite understand what had just happened. He had the whitest teeth.

• 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.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  But if intimacy itself has such potential for violence—here understood as denial and exclusion—then it might be more useful to consider Murray’s struggles with queer identity in terms of the exclusions for various breaches of racial conduct that respectability mandated within Black communities. More specifically, we might read the generalized Black female subject of her 1947 manifesto as a kind of stand-in for Murray’s own struggles with the gender politics of Black communities. This leads to two questions that I want to spend the final section of this chapter answering: What does it mean if “the salvific wish, with its attempts to repress and discipline Black intimate conduct [by] limiting that conduct to patterns of respectability” becomes a site for the repression of Black intimacy and subjectivity? And, more importantly, how do Black female race leaders negotiate these exclusionary and repressive cultural politics? Irreconcilable Differences: Toward Multiracial PeculiarityBested by the recalcitrance of social discourses on sex and gender, Pauli Murray turned her attention to the question of racial identity. As mentioned earlier, she published Proud Shoes in 1956, the first of two autobiographies. Her historical impulse to set the record straight as it related to issues of Black participation in the Civil War and her own American origins fits within the range of impulses that have characterized race women’s turn to autobiography, including a need to revise “official,” exclusionist historical narratives; a desire to theorize about race and gender identity as they relate to Black female subjectivity; and an opportunity to explore forms of embodied discourse that might allow them to counter the sexual silences demanded by the politics of respectability and the culture of dissemblance. However, the text also had a more immediate aim: to recuperate Murray’s public image after she became a target of the Red Scare. In 1952, Murray applied for a job as “research assistant to the Director of the Codification of Laws of Liberia,” “the program President Truman initiated to provide technical assistance to underdeveloped nations.”66 Participation in this project was at the heart of Murray’s own emergent understanding of African American racial identity. In the unpublished prologue to Proud Shoes, Murray wrote that she was drawn to Liberia because it had cultural traditions that drew upon both American and African roots. Thus, the research position would offer a chance to study how African Americans who had expatriated to Liberia dealt with the challenge of both losing and regaining elements of their African heritage.67 For Murray, Liberia was evidence not of Black or African resistance to failed American idealism, but rather evidence of Black Americans fundamental affinity for their American homeland.68 In the introduction to the 1978 edition of Proud Shoes, Murray noted that despite a sojourn to Ghana in the ensuing years between the book’s first publication, she remained firm in her “conviction that [she] was of the New World, irrevocably bound to the destiny of [her] native America.”69

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  2 “Your navel is a round goblet Which never lacks mixed wine. Your belly is like a heap of wheat Surrounded with lilies. 3 “Your two breasts are like two fawns, The twins of a gazelle. 4 “Your neck is like a tower of ivory, Your eyes the [sparkling] pools of Heshbon By the gate of Bath-rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon Which looks toward Damascus. 5 “Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel, And the flowing hair of your head like purple threads; I, the king, am held captive by your a tresses. 6 “How beautiful and how delightful you are, My love, with all your delights! 7 “Your stature is like that of a palm tree And your breasts like its clusters [of dates]. 8 “I said, ‘I will climb the palm tree; I will grasp its branches. Let your breasts be like clusters of the grapevine, And the fragrance of your breath like apples, 9 ‘And your kisses like the best wine!’ ” (The Shulammite Bride) “I t goes down smoothly and sweetly for my beloved, Gliding gently over his lips while he sleeps. The Union of Love 10 “I am my beloved’s, And his desire is for me. [John 10:28 ] 11 “Come, my beloved, let us go out into the country, Let us spend the night in the villages. [Luke 14:33 ] 12 “Let us go out early to the vineyards; Let us see whether the vine has budded And its blossoms have opened, And whether the pomegranates have flowered. There I will give you my love. 13 “The mandrakes give forth fragrance, And over our doors are all [kinds of] choice fruits, Both new and old, Which I have saved up for you, my beloved. Song of Solomon 8 The Lovers Speak 1 “O H, THAT you were like a brother to me, Who nursed at the breasts of my mother. If I found you out of doors, I would kiss you; No one would blame me or despise me, either. [Ps 143:6 ] 2 “I would lead you and bring you Into the house of my mother, who used to instruct me; I would give you spiced wine to drink from the juice of my pomegranates. 3 “Let his left hand be under my head And his right hand embrace me.” [Ex 19:4 ; Deut 33:27 ] (The Bridegroom) 4 “I command you to take an oath, O daughters of Jerusalem, That you do not rouse nor awaken my love Until she pleases.” (The Chorus) 5 “Who is this coming up from the wilderness Leaning upon her beloved?” (The Shulammite Bride) “U nder the apple tree I awakened you [to my love]; There your mother was in labor with you, There she was in labor and gave you birth.