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 288 of 344 · 20 per page

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  What I thought was, fuck you, Mingo. How many books have you written, big sexy looking guy? You’ve got a problem with reading? You can kiss my ass. Miraculously, I got the job. Every day I saw him in the graduate writing workshop Andy stared so hard at me I thought my skull might fracture. Or something in me, anyway. After that eventful phone call from Paris that led to my carefully calculated drunk on and drive episode, Andy sauntered into my office and brought me a novel manuscript. A good one. And he offered to let me borrow one of his cars. Mine, was totaled. Like my life. I borrowed the car. When I drove his car around I could smell him and feel him. In the seat and on the steering wheel. In the holder thing between seats where I found cassette tapes he listened to. Bob Dylan and The Cure and Sublime. In the glove compartment where I found a lighter and rolling papers. On the car floor he’d so obviously worked hard to vacuum. The engine ran hot. The kind of teacher I was, I’d meet the grad students to go over their writing anyplace but my office. I’ve never believed in institutional authority. So I’d let the grad student choose where we’d meet - let them name a place where they felt like themselves - and I would go there to talk with them about writing. With Andy, it was a Mediterranean coffee shop off the beaten track with an outdoor area where we sat under bougainvillea and orange blossoms and spoke of writing. That sentence cracked me up. Immediately it was not about writing. Man-lust fucks a girl up. We both wore sunglasses. Since neither of us took them off, I took it as a draw. We both threw out a few mock barbs. Neither flinched. We both executed a couple of low-level sexual innuendos. Dead even. And when I asked him about the references to Italy in his novel, he began to narrate his lifestory - so I came back at him with a bit of mine. Andy grew up in Reno. And what was coming out of his mouth, well, it was a worthy backstory. “My mother was a single mother. She taught math. I’ve always hated math. I grew up with a series of father stand-ins… guys with names like ‘Pidge.’ ” I countered with “My mother was an alcoholic pathological liar. On the other hand, she was a great storyteller.” “I was once a bouncer at Paul Revere’s ‘Kicks’ nightclub when I was 19.” “Paul Revere and the Raiders?” I asked, thinking about how when I was 19 I was in Monte’s basement. “The same,” he said. “I’ve been swimming with Kathy Acker,” I said, trying quite hard to impress him. “Who is Kathy Acker?” Goose egg. Why had I said that?

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Each item came to me warm from her body, and with its own particular scent; each seemed charged with a strange kind of power, and tingled or glowed (or so I imagined) beneath my hand.Her petticoats and dresses were cold and did not tingle; but I still blushed to handle them, for I couldn’t help but think of all the soft and secret places they would soon enclose, or brush against, or warm and make moist, once she had donned them. Every time she stepped from behind the screen, clad as a girl, small and slim and shapely, a false plait smothering the lovely, ragged edges of her crop, I had the same sensation: a pang of disappointment and regret that turned instantly to pleasure and to aching love; a desire to touch, to embrace and caress, so strong I had to turn aside or fold my arms for fear that they would fly about her and press her close.At length I grew so handy with her costumes she suggested that I visit her before she went on stage, to help her ready herself for her act, like a proper dresser. She said it with a kind of studied carelessness, as if half-fearful that I might not wish to; she could not have known, I suppose, how dreary the hours were to me, that I must pass away from her ... Soon I never stepped into the auditorium at all, but headed, every night, back stage, a half-hour before she was due before the footlights, to help her re-don the shirt and waistcoat and trousers that I had taken from her the night before; to hold the powder-box while she dusted out her freckles, to dampen the brushes with which she smoothed out the curl in her hair, to fasten the rose to her lapel.The first time I did all this I walked with her to the stage afterwards, and stood in the wing while she went through her set, gazing in wonder at the limes-men who strode, nimble as acrobats, across the battens in the fly-gallery; seeing nothing of the hall, nothing of the stage except a stretch of dusty board with a boy at the other end of it, his arm upon the handle that turned the rope that brought the curtain down.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Look I’m trying to say I didn’t have little girl crushes like you are imagining. And I didn’t have the cliché swimmers are all dykes deal - though lots of swimmer girls regularly spanked twinkies, I was to learn later - no, it was much more serious. I mean I was in pain. Whatever blue balls were, I was pretty sure I had them. Every day at practice, in the showers, with all that girl stuff right in front of my face. All the soaped up torsos and boobs, all the uninhibited washing of you know whats, the bubbles sliding down their asses and legs. If a kid could coronary from want, I’d be a dead woman. No, I didn’t want to have a slumber party. I didn’t want to go to the mall. I wanted to use my hair brush and rubberbands and make someone ... whimper. I did consider girls my age. Evie Kosenkranius had a kid sister my age. Tina Kosenkranius. I … christ. Will you look at those names? I can’t even look at those names today without going all porno in my head - hey, Evie Kosenkranius has a sister. I mean my god, why couldn’t I just be a 16 year old blond boy with raging hormones and a spanky new flagpole that everyone wants to sit on? But I wasn’t. I was me, a painfully shy girl kid with a hidden girl bomb in her panties not knowing what the hell to do with it who really, really wanted to … eat someone. OF COURSE I tried the neighborhood girls my age. I’d invite them into my room to play doctor and they’d just lie there, letting me do anything, sometimes giggling, until they clamped their legs shut. The best I could get out of the deal was to put a blanket over us so the smell would intensify. Something like hay and apples. Then they’d get dressed and want to go do something dumb that girls do. Like ice skating or talking on the phone or mall bullshit. What I needed was a girl who was older than me. Bigger. Sienna Torres was a troublemaker young woman from a troubled household making trouble wherever she went. She broke the rules at school, she broke them at home, she broke them at Albertson’s and Nordstrom and 7-Eleven, and she broke them at swim practice. She came late, she skipped laps, she got swatted with a kickboard in what was perversely known as “licks” for her rebelliousness. I was terrified of her. The missing ingredient.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  It is their randomness and, often, their very lack of overt sexiness that makes these instants so erotically precious. My sense of sight is infinitely and lovingly promiscuous, and each time I Drop I get another chance to love a chosen body as it really is: to see a woman’s ass, for example, when its owner-operator is talking at a pay-phone and thinking about other things than the fact that she has an ass, and her ass can therefore be completely itself. (For example, once I noticed a woman washing the long stretch of glass in front of the freezer-counter in the ice cream place where she worked, in a mall—she worked the cloth so vigorously over the glass that her ass circled unrestrainedly clockwise to counterbalance her hard work. She was wearing extremely tight stretchy jeans of a sort I can’t fully understand but can forgive, and I wrote out the equation I used back then to get into the Fold—an equation adapted from one I saw in a journal of mathematics—and I pulled her pants down and came into a sugar cone staring at the cleavage of her ass. But I see now that this isn’t in fact a good example of my appreciating an ass while it is unselfconsciously itself, since the reason I was attracted to her was that I had been observing her for a few minutes beforehand, as she served a customer, and I had sensed how relatively unproud of her face and upper body she was, and how certain she was that her ass was her best feature, and how much therefore she had wanted to wash the glass boldly in front of her store, though it was quite clean, with her back to all the mall-boys. As their representative, on their behalf, I came.) The point is, in any case, that I could never get interested in a woman who was passed out drunk, or was sedated, in a coma, or dead; for then she is unconscious of me, and what I want is to be with her when she would be conscious of me but for the fact that I have interjected myself into a chink of her day so infinitesimally brief that she can’t know that I have come and gone. The way the discussion came up with Rhody was that she announced, on the plane, apropos of tiny Latino swimsuits, that more and more she was interested in seeing naked men and their penises. She said she liked the idea of semis —by which she meant penises that weren’t totally hard, since a hard straight line was unbeautiful against the human body, nor totally soft and wrinkly either, but rather loungingly, curvingly full and interested and ready to be teased straight—like (she explained) Jimmy Cliff’s penis in The Harder They Come .

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  There was the trashy girl in six-inch heels and crotchless wonders—“Lick my shoes! Lick them clean!” And then there was the virgin in Victorian white cotton whose rich father pays the “healer” to give her her first orgasm: it is the only way to save her life, for she is, of course, mortally ill. She resists mightily, feigning sleep and frigidity, and comes like a rolling avalanche—brought back from the brink of death by the anonymous roving tongue. The whore fantasies were prolific and my fee enormous. I found it fascinating that the man who materialized in these heated encounters was more often than not almost physically repugnant to me—a beast-man. Being a sucker for beauty in general, I gave this unexpected scenario a great deal of thought. I concluded that every woman must have a man—real or imaginary—to whom she is a whore, for whom she is a whore. I have always wanted, alas, to be some man’s bimbo. I don’t mean just acting like a slut or being desired for sex alone, although these are both excellent goals. I mean that the sex is for profit—be it financial or otherwise—more than for physical desire. If a woman is driven by a physical craving, she is vulnerable; with a beast-man, obviously, she retains her power. But that is not the most interesting part . I also discovered that imaginary sex with a man for gain is incredibly sexy. One’s inner whore gets a real workout, so to speak. Selling one’s sexuality, by choice, frees a woman’s desires from the incriminations, restrictions, and suppressions of good-girlness that proliferate when one is “in love.” And thus the paradoxical surprise: love is released as gratitude in great gushes of incredible uncensored sexual energy. With my fantasy beast-men I achieved orgasms that were, finally, entirely guiltless; they were, after all, my job. You see, I have an impeccable work ethic, whereas in matters of the heart I have no idea of my rights, much less their application. When sex becomes my work, I’m home free—cash in hand. I found that if I allowed these various fantasies to rove uncensored, they would uncover parts of myself that were otherwise entirely hidden. I became particularly interested in the fraction of time that preceded the moment of orgasmic inevitability. What thought, what dynamic, what image would cause that final, magical, loss of control? That was the pivotal moment that seemed to join consciousness to the divine—and more often than not, I found this lofty pathway to be inspired by completely slutty activities (see above—and below).

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I ran my fingers through my flat, shorn locks; the action - and the cigarette that I had just smoked - made me feel wonderfully calm.I said: ‘You can’t tell, can you, that it’s a false one?’Now Alice sat up with the blankets gripped before her. ‘You needn’t look so horrified,’ I said. ‘I told you all, I wrote and told you: I’ve joined the act; I’m not Kitty’s dresser any more. I’m on the stage myself, now, doing what she does. Singing, dancing...’She said, ‘You never wrote it like it was really true. If it was true we would have heard! I don’t believe you.’‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’She shook her head. ‘Singing,’ she said. ‘Dancing. That’s a tart’s life. You couldn’t. You wouldn’t...’I said, ‘I do’; and just to show her that I meant it, I lifted my nightie and did a little shuffle across the rug.The dance seemed, like the hair, to frighten her. When she spoke next it was with a show of bitterness - but her voice was thick with rising tears. ‘I suppose you lift your skirts like that, do you? and show your legs, on stage, for all the world to look at!’‘My skirts?’ I laughed. ‘Good heavens, Alice, I don’t wear skirts! I didn’t get my hair cut off to wear a frock. It’s trousers I wear: I wear gentlemen’s suits -!’‘Oh!’ Now she had begun to cry. ‘What a thing to do! What a thing to do, in front of strangers!’I said. ‘You thought it good enough when Kitty did it.’‘Nothing she did was ever good! She took you off, and has made you strange. I don’t know you at all. I wish you’d never gone with her - or never come back!’She lay down, pulled the blankets to her chin, and wept; and since I don’t know a girl who is not moved to tears by the sight of her own sister weeping, I climbed in beside her, and my own eyes began to sting.But when she felt me close she gave a jerk. ‘Get off me!’ she cried, and wriggled away. She said it with such real passion, such horror and grief, I could do nothing but what she asked, and let her lie at the cold edge of the bed. Soon she ceased her shaking, and fell silent; and my own eyes dried, and my face grew hard again. I reached for the lamp, and put it out; then lay on my back and said nothing.The bed, that had been chill, grew warmer. I began at last to wish that Alice would turn, and talk to me. Then I began to wish that Alice was Kitty. Then I began - I couldn’t help it! - to think of all that I would do with her, if she was. The sudden force of my desire unnerved me.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I was tempted to walk to a bookstore in the Fold and pick up some other Virago to show off to her, but I thought better of it: too aggressive a manufactured coincidence. Instead I erased the Inequality to end the time-transplantation and, once back in the swing, pulled out a turn-of-the-century biography of Edward FitzGerald by A. C. Benson that I had been halfheartedly reading; I held it open with the edge of my plate. The waiter came. I ordered dinner in a fairly loud, friendly voice in order to draw Rhody’s attention. When I had handed over the menu, I dropped my eyes immediately to my book as if I were impatient to get back to it, and then absent-mindedly began moving my watch up and down on my wrist. I knew “Rhoda E. Levering” was watching me. I turned a page, lifting the plate so that it would clear, and went back to playing with my watch. Suddenly I looked up, caught Rhody’s eye, and gave her a friendly hello-look. I felt bad about doing this, because I know how hard it is to go back to a book, no matter how engrossed you were in it, when you are alone at a table in a restaurant and you become aware of someone else who may or may not be lonely, and may or may not be curious about you—suddenly, whether you welcome it or not, there is a fiery transversity connecting the two of you, where before there had only been a narrow rectilinear green-carpeted Thai restaurant that tolerated solo readers. I returned to my book, deliberately making ugly lip-pursed faces to show that I was deeply caught up in Edward FitzGerald —and to release Rhody from the tyranny of the transversity if she wanted to return to Lady Audley’s Secret . Without lifting my eyes from the page (though I was still sure that her black-rimmed glasses were flashing in my direction), I raised my left hand and very slowly and teasingly pulled on the flap of my watchband until the tiny gold prong of its buckle hung free of the slightly elongated second hole. Like a stripper delaying a moment of conclusive disrobing, I held the unbuckled watch in place for a time, turning my wrist slowly within its loosened embrace; finally I slid the buckle off the strap and caught the face of the watch as it fell from my arm. I did everything as smoothly and unsuddenly and strokingly as I could, not as if I were aware of Rhody and trying to entice her, but as if I were reading with such intense concentration that my unconscious watch-removal movements were being slowed to a fraction of their normal speed by the rapture of my literary appreciation.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Thanks, but I can’t. My friends just got here and we’re all camped,” I said, gesturing to the rise beyond the road, behind which my tent and probably by now the tents of the Three Young Bucks were erected. As I did so, I had a precise image of what the Three Young Bucks were likely doing at that very moment, the way they’d be crouched beneath their raincoats in the rain, trying to eat their loathsome dinners, or sitting alone in their tents because there was simply no other place to be, and then I thought of that warm fire and the booze and how if the men went with me to drink with the ranger I could use them to help me dodge whatever else he had in mind. “But maybe,” I wavered, as the ranger drooled and then blotted his mouth. “I mean, as long as it’s okay to bring my friends.” I returned with the cake to our camp. The Three Young Bucks were all zipped into their tents. “I have cake!” I called, and they came and stood around me and ate it with their fingers out of my hands, splitting it among themselves in the easy, unspoken way they’d honed over months of endless deprivation and unity. In the nine days since I’d said goodbye to them, it seemed as if we’d grown closer, more familiar, as if we’d been together in that time instead of apart. They were still the Three Young Bucks to me, but they’d also begun to differentiate in my mind. Richie was hilarious and a little bit strange, with a dark edge of mystery I found compelling. Josh was sweet and smart, more reserved than the others. Rick was funny and incisive, kind and a great conversationalist. As I stood there with the three of them eating cake out of my hands, I realized that though I had a little crush on all of them, I had a bigger crush on Rick. It was an absurd crush, I knew. He was nearly four years younger than me and we were at an age when those nearly four years mattered, when the gap between what he had done and what I had done was large enough that I was more like a big sister than I was someone who should be thinking about being alone with him in his tent—so I didn’t think about it, but I couldn’t deny that to an increasing degree I got a little fluttery feeling inside me every time Rick’s eyes met mine, and I also couldn’t deny that I could see in his eyes that he got a little fluttery feeling too. “I’m sorry about dinner,” I said, after explaining what had happened. “Did you guys eat?” I asked, feeling guilty, and they all nodded, licking the frosting from their fingers. “Was it good?” asked Richie in his New Orleans accent, which only increased his appeal, in spite of my crush on Rick.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  She was wearing a white shirt and white shorts, and I could see the outlines of her white bra and white panties. Her skin was pale white. Milky white. Cloud white. So she was all white on white on white, like the most perfect kind of vanilla dessert cake you’ve ever seen. I wanted to be her chocolate topping. She was serving against the mean girls from Davenport Lady Gorillas. Yeah, you read that correctly. They willingly called themselves the Lady Gorillas. And they played like superstrong primates, too. Penelope and her teammates were getting killed. The score was like 12 to 0 in the first set. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to watch the sweaty Penelope sweat her perfect sweat on that perfectly sweaty day. She stood at the service line, bounced the volleyball a few times to get her rhythm, then tossed it into the air above her head. She tracked the ball with her blue eyes. Just watched it intensely. Like that volleyball mattered more than anything else in the world. I got jealous of that ball. I wished I were that ball. As the ball floated in the air, Penelope twisted her hips and back and swung her right arm back over her shoulder, coiling like a really pretty snake. Her leg muscles were stretched and taut. I almost fainted when she served. Using all of that twisting and flexing and concentration, she smashed the ball and aced the Lady Gorillas. And then Penelope clenched a fist and shouted, “Yes!” Absolutely gorgeous. Even though I didn’t think I’d ever hear back, I wanted to know what to do with my feelings, so I walked over to the computer lab and e-mailed Rowdy. He’s had the same address for five years. “Hey, Rowdy,” I wrote. “I’m in love with a white girl. What should I do?” A few minutes later, Rowdy wrote back. “Hey, Asshole,” Rowdy wrote back. “I’m sick of Indian guys who treat white women like bowling trophies. Get a life.” Well, that didn’t do me any good. So I asked Gordy what I should do about Penelope. “I’m an Indian boy,” I said. “How can I get a white girl to love me?” “Let me do some research on that,” Gordy said. A few days later, he gave me a brief report. “Hey, Arnold,” he said. “I looked up ‘in love with a white girl’ on Google and found an article about that white girl named Cynthia who disappeared in Mexico last summer. You remember how her face was all over the papers and everybody said it was such a sad thing?” “I kinda remember,” I said.

• From Less (2017)

  “You are a friend of Alexander? I am Javier,” the man says. He holds in his hand a plate of salmon and couscous. Green-golden eyes. Straight black hair, center parted, long enough to push behind his ears. Less says nothing; he suddenly feels hot and knows he has flushed bright pink. Perhaps it is the drink. “And you are American!” the man adds. Nonplussed, Less turns an even brighter hue. “How…how did you know?” The man’s eyes dart up and down his body. “You are dressed like an American.” Less looks down at his linen pants, his furred leather jacket. He understands that he has fallen under the spell of a shopkeeper, as has many an American before him; he has spent a small fortune to dress as Parisians might rather than as they do. He should have worn the blue suit. He says, “I’m Arthur. Arthur Less. A friend of Alexander; he invited me. But he doesn’t seem to be coming.” The man leans in but has to look up; he is quite a bit shorter than Less. “He always invites, Arthur. He never comes.” “Actually, I was about to leave. I don’t know anybody here.” “No, don’t leave!” Javier seems to realize he has said this too loudly. “I have a plane to catch tonight.” “Arthur, stay one moment. I also know nobody here. You see those two over there?” He nods toward a woman in a backless black dress, her blond chignon lit by a nearby lamp, and a man all in grays with an oversized Humphrey Bogart head. They are standing side by side, examining a drawing. Javier gives a conspiratorial grin; a strand of hair has come loose and hangs over his forehead. “I was talking with them. We all just met, but I could…sense…very quickly that I was not needed. That is why I came over here.” Javier pats the stray hair back in place. “They are going to sleep together.” Less laughs and says surely they didn’t say that. “No, but. Look at their bodies. Their arms are touching. And he leans in to talk to her. It is not loud here. He is leaning in just to be close to her. They did not want me there.” At that moment, Humphrey Bogart puts his hand on the woman’s shoulder and points to the drawing, talking. His lips are so close to her ear that his breath blows her loose wisps of hair. Now it is obvious; they are going to sleep together. He turns back to Javier, who shrugs: What can you do? Less asks, “And that is why you came over here.” Javier’s eyes remain on Less. “It is part of why I came over here.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Then he saw who it was I sat with - It was Diana and Maria - and he stared. I gave a shrug, he looked thoughtful - then rolled his eyes again, as much as to say, What a business!To all these places, as I have said, I went clad as a boy — indeed, the only time I ever dressed as a girl, now, was for our visits to the Cavendish. This was the single spot in the city at which Diana might have put me in trousers and not cared who knew it; but after Miss Bruce’s complaint they introduced a new rule, and ever after I was taken there in skirts - Diana having something made up for me, I forget the cut and colour of it now. At the club I would sit and drink and smoke, and be flirted with by Maria, and eyed by other ladies, while Diana met friends or wrote letters. She did this very often, for she was known - I suppose I might have guessed it, in a way - as a philanthropist, and ladies courted her for schemes. She gave money to certain charities. She sent books to girls in prisons. She was involved in the producing of a magazine for the Suffrage, named Shafts. She attended to all this, with me at her side. If I leaned to pick up a paper or a list and idly read it, she would take the sheet away, as if gazing too hard at too many words might tire me. In the end, I would settle on the cartoons in Punch. These, then, were my public appearances. There were not too many of them - I am describing here a period that lasted about a year. Diana kept me close, for the most part, and displayed me at home. She liked to limit the numbers who gazed at me, she said; she said she feared that like a photograph I might fade, from too much handling.When I say display, of course, I mean it: it was part of Diana’s mystery, to make real the words that other people said in metaphor or jest. I had posed for Maria and Dickie and Evelyn in my trousers with the scorch-mark and my underthings of silk. When they came a second time, with another lady, Diana had me pose for them again in a different suit. After that, it became a kind of sport with her, to put me in a new costume and have me walk before her guests, or among them, filling glasses, lighting cigarettes. Once she dressed me as a footman, in breeches and a powdered wig. It was the costume I had worn for Cinderella, more or less - though my breeches at the Brit had not been so snug, nor so large at the groin.The freak with the breeches inspired her further.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Wallis was hardly queen material. An American, she had divorced her first husband, a dashing naval aviator, for his alcoholic brutality. When she met Prince Edward in 1931, she was happily married to handsome ship broker Ernest Simpson who had brought her to London. She nevertheless entered into an affair with the prince; five years later Edward’s father, George V, died, and Edward was suddenly king. Shortly thereafter, Wallis filed for her second divorce, this time to become queen of England. Wallis was completely mesmerized by the trappings of royalty. She wrote of Edward, “His slightest wish seemed always to be translated instantly into the most impressive kind of reality. Trains were held; yachts materialized; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; airplanes stood waiting…. He was the open sesame to a new and glittering world that excited me as nothing in my life had ever done before.”4 While Wallis’s fascination with the king was understandable, no one could comprehend his violent passion for a woman whose face resembled the metal part of a garden shovel and her body the wooden handle. Her nose was lumpy, her mouth large and ugly, her hands short and stubby. Some speculated that Wallis had conquered Edward with bizarre Asian sexual techniques she had learned in China after having separated from her first husband, who was stationed there. Others claimed the two were brought together by an avid aversion to sex—that Edward was hopelessly impotent and Wallis icily frigid. The theory of Wallis’s frigidity melted in 2003 when the British government released secret files revealing that in 1935 Wallis, while married to Ernest Simpson and dangling the Prince of Wales, was having a torrid affair with Guy Trundle, a handsome car salesman. It is interesting to speculate whether the prince, while offering Wallis a glittering life, delivered a lackluster performance in bed. Whatever their sexual relationship, certainly Wallis had a strong psychological hold over the prince. Whereas other women had melted into butter at his feet, Wallis completely dominated Edward, who became gushingly subservient. And, like many a royal mistress before her, Wallis offered scintillating charm and delightful wit. But why did Edward insist on marrying the woman? Why didn’t he simply keep her as his mistress? Perhaps Edward, stubborn, selfish, and intellectually limited almost to the point of imbecility, could not imagine himself on the throne without her seated on a throne beside him, smoothing things over, telling him what to do. Or maybe he never wanted to be king at all and used Wallis as a convenient and romantic excuse to liberate himself from a monarch’s responsibilities.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  We lived in the midst of the paradox of going to war and being in love with love. Love was everywhere and we lived an intensity that only the combination of hormones and war could produce. We held each other tight because we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. It was now or never. I remember those nights when we performed for hundreds of soldiers who had not been home for weeks. I was too young to understand what I felt, that tension in the air, an energy that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before or since. It was the time we performed for the Golani Brigade unit that I remember most vividly. We were invited to perform on their last day of training. The musical group performed every day and we usually didn’t know in advance who our audience would be. The production unit took care of the practicalities. We just met every day at noon. Duchan, our military driver, waited for us to load the musical and sound equipment on the bus, and we drove, to the south, to the north, or to the east. We didn’t really care where and we didn’t mind his wild driving, thinking that if we had an accident we would finally get a chance to skip that evening’s show. The Golani base was all the way in the north, about three hours’ drive from our base. We were tired and took naps on the bus. When we got there, it was almost evening and we had only two hours to put the stage together, eat something, and start the show. We looked around. The place seemed empty. “Where is everyone?” we asked. “They have to finish something and will come to your concert right after,” someone answered. I remember thinking, They can come whenever they want, or come late, or not come at all. I helped the drummer put his drum set together and then checked the microphones. “The soldiers are really looking forward to it,” someone else said. “We are too,” we lied. It was our second year performing the same show every night. At that point we didn’t even like one another anymore, and we could sing those songs in our sleep. But we felt it was not appropriate to complain. After all, we went home almost every night. “Can you play the songs faster today?” we asked the drummer. “It’s already late and the soldiers are not here yet. We won’t get home till late tonight.” Sometimes, when we played songs we didn’t like, the drummer actually did play them faster and we all thought it was funny. But that evening was different—for some reason it felt too important.

• From Wild (2012)

  All morning, as I walked west to Bucks Lake, then north and west again along its shore before coming to the rugged jeep road that would take me back up to the PCT, I thought of the resupply box that waited for me in Belden Town. Not so much the box, but the twenty-dollar bill that would be inside. And not so much the twenty-dollar bill, but the food and beverages I could buy with it. I spent hours in a half-ecstatic, half-tortured reverie, fantasizing about cake and cheeseburgers, chocolate and bananas, apples and mixed-green salads, and, more than anything, about Snapple lemonade. This did not make sense. I’d had only a few Snapple lemonades in my pre-PCT life and liked them well enough, but they hadn’t stood out in any particular way. It had not been my drink. But now it haunted me. Pink or yellow, it didn’t matter. Not a day passed that I didn’t imagine in vivid detail what it would be like to hold one in my hand and bring it to my mouth. Some days I forbade myself to think about it, lest I go entirely insane.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Our knowledge of Ignatius is derived from his disputed epistles,30 and a few short notices by Irenaeus and Origen. While his existence, his position in the early Church, and his martyrdom are admitted, everything else about him is called in question. How many epistles he wrote, and when he wrote them, how much truth there is in the account of his martyrdom, and when it took place, when it was written up, and by whom—all are undecided, and the subject of protracted controversy. He was, according to tradition, a pupil of the Apostle John, and by his piety so commended himself to the Christians in Antioch that he was chosen bishop, the second after Peter, Euodius being, the first. But although he was a man of apostolic character and governed the church with great care, he was personally not satisfied, until he should be counted worthy of sealing his testimony with his blood, and thereby attaining to the highest seat of honor. The coveted crown came to him at last and his eager and morbid desire for martyrdom was gratified. The emperor Trajan, in 107, came to Antioch, and there threatened with persecution all who refused to sacrifice to the gods. Ignatius was tried for this offence, and proudly confessed himself a "Theophorus" ("bearer of God") because, as he said, he had Christ within his breast. Trajan condemned him to be thrown to the lions at Rome. The sentence was executed with all haste. Ignatius was immediately bound in chains, and taken over land and sea, accompanied by ten soldiers, whom he denominated his "leopards," from Antioch to Seleucia, to Smyrna, where he met Polycarp, and whence be wrote to the churches, particularly to that in Rome; to Troas, to Neapolis, through Macedonia to Epirus, and so over the Adriatic to Rome. He was received by the Christians there with every manifestation of respect, but would not allow them to avert or even to delay his martyrdom. It was on the 20th day of December, 107, that he was thrown into the amphitheater: immediately the wild beasts fell upon him, and soon naught remained of his body but a few bones, which were carefully conveyed to Antioch as an inestimable treasure. The faithful friends who had accompanied him from home dreamed that night that they saw him; some that he was standing by Christ, dropping with sweat as if he had just come from his great labor. Comforted by these dreams they returned with the relics to Antioch. Note on the Date of the Martyrdom of Ignatius.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I told her that I lodged with a lady who, though she would wonder at my absence, wouldn’t worry over it. Then she asked if I had an employer - perhaps at the laundry I had mentioned ? - who would expect me on the morrow. I laughed at that, and shook my head: ‘There is no one at all to miss me. I’ve only myself to think of and please.’ As I said it, the toy at her thigh began to swing. She said, ‘You did, before tonight. Now, however, you have me ...’ Her words, her expression, made a mockery of my efforts with the handkerchief: I was wet for her anew. I reunited my trousers with her discarded petticoats, and added my jacket to the pile. Next door, the silken counterpane had been turned back, and the sheets beneath looked very white and cool. The chest kept its still, enigmatic place at the foot of the bed. The clock on the mantel showed half-past two. It was four, or thereabouts, before we slumbered; and perhaps eleven when I woke. I remembered stumbling to the commode some time in the early morning, and recalled the brief renewal of passion which had followed my return to her arms; but my sleep since then had been a heavy, dreamless one, and when next I knew the bed I was alone in it: she had donned her dressing-gown and stood at the half-opened window, smoking, and gazing thoughtfully at the view beyond. I stirred, and she turned and smiled. ‘You sleep like a child,’ she said. ‘I have been up this half-hour, making a fearful row, and still you’ve slumbered on.’ ‘I was so very weary.’ I yawned - then I recalled all that had wearied me. A slight awkwardness seemed to fall between us. The room last night had been as unreal as a stage-set: a place of lamplight and shadows, and colours and scents of impossible brilliance, in which we had been given a licence to be not ourselves, or more than ourselves, as actors are. Now, in the late morning light that flowed between the partly-drawn drapes, I saw that there was nothing fantastic about the chamber at all; I saw that it was really elegant, and rather austere. I felt, all at once, quite horribly out of place. How does a tart take leave of her customer? I did not know; I had never had to do it. The lady was still gazing at me. She said, ‘I have waited for you to wake, before ringing for breakfast.’ There was a bell-pull set into the wall beside the fireplace: I had not seen that the night before, either. ‘I hope you are hungry?’ I was, I realised, very hungry indeed; but also slightly nauseous. My mouth, moreover, tasted abominable: I hoped she wouldn’t try to kiss me again. She didn’t, but kept her distance.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  In 1876 the czar’s health seemed to be failing. He was examined by the court physician who could find no illness and indicated diplomatically that the fifty-eight-year-old czar was suffering from exhaustion and “excesses in sexual relations.”28 But this medical opinion did not deter the czar. Soon after, he wrote Katia, “I enjoyed our love-making madly, and am still all steeped in it. You are so tempting, it is impossible to resist! There is no word for this delirium.”29 The same year, as Katia prepared to deliver her third child, she lamented the fact that she would not be able to have sex for some time after the birth. “I feel so heavy,” she wrote, “but I am not grumbling because it is my fault, and I confess I cannot be without your fountain, which I love so, and therefore after my six weeks are over I count on renewing my injections.”30 The love affairs of Napoleon III (1808–1873) were not nearly as satisfying. The emperor’s libido had forced him to marry the only woman who had refused to have sex with him, Eugénie de Montijo, the beautiful daughter of a petty Spanish grandee. One wit said that Napoleon III had become emperor by election, but Eugénie became empress by erection. But when Napoleon discovered that his wife’s virtue was, in fact, frigidity, he roamed the court like a lion sniffing for prey, prowling the ballrooms on sexual hunting expeditions. In the 1860s, now in his fifties, the emperor was unable to sustain foreplay and dove into his pleasure with little concern for his partners. The marquise de Taisey-Châtenoy endured one of these encounters after having made a rendezvous with the emperor during a ball at the Tuileries. After midnight, he arrived in her bedroom in mauve pajamas looking faintly ridiculous. She reported, “There follows a brief period of physical exertion, during which he breathes heavily and the wax on the ends of his mustaches melts, causing them to droop, and finally a hasty withdrawal, leaving the Marquise unimpressed and unsatisfied.”31 A journalist and acquaintance of the imperial family Jules de Goncourt wrote, “When a woman is brought into the Tuileries, she is undressed in one room, then goes nude to another room where the Emperor, also nude, awaits her. [The chamberlain] who is in charge, gives her the following instruction: You may kiss His Majesty on any part of his person except the face.”32 One woman, the wife of a court official, sought a private audience with the emperor to discuss her husband’s career. She reported that she “did not even have time to make a token protest before he laid hold of me in an intimate place…. It all happens so quickly that even the staunchest principles are rendered powerless.”33

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Maurice, Count de Saxe (1696–1750), bastard son of Augustus the Strong of Saxony and Aurora von Königsmarck, became a great general and military theorist. James Fitzjames, the marshal duke of Berwick (1670–1734), the son of James II of England and his mistress Arabella Churchill, became a general and fought victoriously first for his exiled father and then for his cousin Louis XIV. During the War of the Austrian Succession, when the duke was sixty-four, a cannonball took off his head in a burst of glory. While the illegitimate sons of kings often won glory on the battlefield, the daughters were used as marriage pawns to placate unruly but powerful noble families. Louis XIV married two of his bastard daughters into the Condé clan, a powerful family with a history of treason going back several generations. Louise-Françoise, Mademoiselle de Nantes, daughter of the king and Madame de Montespan, was only twelve when she married a Condé, a seventeen-year-old dwarf with an enormous head. Because of the bride’s tender age, consummation of the marriage would have to wait two or three years. But Madame de Montespan, grasping greedily at such a brilliant match and fearing the marriage might fall through before consummation, pushed for her daughter to lose her virginity that very night. The groom’s family was equally pleased at such a close connection to the king, though they insisted that sex wait. Madame de Caylus wrote, “The nuptials were celebrated at Versailles in the King’s state apartments…with a glorious illumination of the gardens and with all that magnificence of which the King was capable. The Grand Condé [the groom’s grandfather] and his son left nothing undone to signal their delight in the consummation of the betrothal which they had made every effort to bring about.”11 The Strangest Bastard of AllThe oddest case on record of a royal bastard was that of Don Antonio de Medici, the son—and yet not the son—of Archduke Francesco de Medici of Tuscany and his mistress Bianca Cappello. In 1576 Bianca had been a royal mistress for a full decade but had never conceived. Archduchess Johanna had provided her husband with several useless girls, and Francesco promised his mistress that if she gave him a son he would marry her and make her archduchess as soon as his unloved wife, always in precarious health, breathed her last. This longed-for son, legitimized through marriage, might very well inherit the throne. Not one to accept defeat, Bianca seized on a bold measure to give Francesco the son he wanted. She sent an accomplice to choose three unmarried pregnant women in need, believing that surely one of the three would have a son, and housed them at her expense in different parts of the city. Bianca then proudly announced to a delighted Francesco that she was finally pregnant. She began padding her gowns and would not let her lover touch her for fear of disturbing her pregnancy.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I developed a perfect passion for reading stories in which the extremest cruelties were described. I loved especially to look at pictures and prints which represented them. All the sanguinary tyrants that ever occupied a throne; the inquisitors who had the heretics tortured, roasted, and butchered; all the woman whom the pages of history have recorded as lustful, beautiful, and violent women like Libussa, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes of Hungary, Queen Margot, Isabeau, the Sultana Roxolane, the Russian Czarinas of last century—all these I saw in furs or in robes bordered with ermine.” “And so furs now rouse strange imaginings in you,” said Wanda, and simultaneously she began to drape her magnificent fur-cloak coquettishly about her, so that the dark shining sable played beautifully around her bust and arms. “Well, how do you feel now, half broken on the wheel?” Her piercing green eyes rested on me with a peculiar mocking satisfaction. Overcome by desire, I flung myself down before her, and threw my arms about her. “Yes—you have awakened my dearest dream,” I cried. “It has slept long enough.” “And this is?” She put her hand on my neck. I was seized with a sweet intoxication under the influence of this warm little hand and of her regard, which, tenderly searching, fell upon me through her half-closed lids. “To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I worship.” “And who on that account maltreats you,” interrupted Wanda, laughing. “Yes, who fetters me and whips me, treads me underfoot, the while she gives herself to another.” “And who in her wantonness will go so far as to make a present of you to your successful rival when driven insane by jealousy you must meet him face to face, who will turn you over to his absolute mercy. Why not? This final tableau doesn’t please you so well?” I looked at Wanda frightened. “You surpass my dreams.” “Yes, we women are inventive,” she said, “take heed, when you find your ideal, it might easily happen, that she will treat you more cruelly than you anticipate.” “I am afraid that I have already found my ideal!” I exclaimed, burying my burning face in her lap. “Not I?” exclaimed Wanda, throwing off her furs and moving about the room laughing. She was still laughing as I went downstairs, and when I stood musing in the yard, I still heard her peals of laughter above. * * * * * “Do you really then expect me to embody your ideal?” Wanda asked archly, when we met in the park to- day. At first I could find no answer. The most antagonistic emotions were battling within me. In the meantime she sat down on one of the stone-benches, and played with a flower. “Well—am I?”

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  In the water they wrestled, but each movement affected her only more physically, made her more aware of his body against hers, of his hands upon her. The water swung her breasts back and forth like two heavy water lilies floating. He kissed them. With the constant motion he could not really take her, but his penis touched her over and over again in the most vulnerable tip of her sex, and Maria was losing her strength. She swam towards shore, and he followed. They fell on the sand. The waves still lapped them as they lay there panting, naked. The boy then took the girl, and the sea came and washed over them and washed away the virgin blood. From that night they met only at this hour. He took her there in the water, swaying, floating. The wavelike movements of their bodies as they enjoyed each other seemed part of the sea. They found a foothold on a rock and stood together, caressed by the waves, and shaking from the orgasm. When I went down to the beach at night, I often felt as though I could see them, swimming together, making love. [image file=image_rsrc1RD.jpg] Artists and ModelsOne morning I was called to a studio in Greenwich Village, where a sculptor was beginning a statuette. His name was Millard. He already had a rough version of the figure he wanted and had reached the stage where he needed a model. The statuette was wearing a clinging dress, and the body showed through in every line and curve. The sculptor asked me to undress completely because he could not work otherwise. He seemed so absorbed by the statuette and looked at me so absently that I was able to undress and take the pose without hesitation. Although I was quite innocent at that time he made me feel as if my body were no different than my face, as if I were the same as the statuette. As Millard worked, he talked about his former life in Montparnasse, and the time passed quickly. I didn’t know if his stories were meant to affect my imagination, but he showed no signs of being interested in me. He enjoyed recreating the atmosphere of Montparnasse for his own sake. This is one of the stories he told me: