Desire

Passages

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

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• From Henry and June (1986)

  Hugo says angrily that she is an empty box and that I am the full box. But who wants the ideas, the fantasies, the contents, if the box is beautiful and inspiring? I am inspired by June the empty box. To think of her in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living. The world has never been as empty for me since I have known her. June supplies the beautiful incandescent flesh, the fulgurant voice, the abysmal eyes, the drugged gestures, the presence, the body, the incarnate image of our imaginings. What are we? Only the creators. She is. I get letters from Henry every other day. I answer him immediately. I gave him my typewriter, and I write by hand. I think of him day and night. I dream of an extraordinary extra life I am going to lead someday, which may even fill another and special diary. Last night, after reading Henry’s novel, I couldn’t sleep. It was midnight. Hugo was sleeping. I wanted to get up and go to my writing room and write Henry about his first novel. But I would have awakened Hugo. There are two doors to open, and they creak. Hugo was so exhausted when he went to bed. I lay very still and forced myself to sleep, with phrases rushing through my head like a cyclone. I thought that I would remember them in the morning. But I couldn’t remember, not even half. If Hugo did not have to go to work, I could have awakened him, and he could have slept on the next morning. Our whole life is spoiled by his work in the bank. I must get him out of it. And that makes me work on my novel, rewriting, which I hate, for a new book is boiling in my head—June’s book. The conflict between my being “possessed” and my devotion to Hugo is becoming unbearable. I will love him with all my strength but in my own way. Is it impossible for me to grow in only one direction? Tonight I am full of joy because Henry is here again. The impression is always the same: one is filled with the weight and lashing of his writing, and then he comes upon you so softly—soft voice, trailing off, soft gestures, soft, fine white hands—and one surrenders to his indefatigable curiosity and his romanticism towards women. Henry’s description of the Henry Street joint (where June brought Jean to live with them): Bed unmade all day; climbing into it with shoes on frequently; sheets a mess. Using soiled shirts for towels. Laundry seldom gotten out. Sinks stopped up from too much garbage. Washing dishes in bathtub, which was greasy and black-rimmed. Bathroom always cold as an icebox. Breaking up furniture to throw into fire.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I revolve around your richness of being. “Come close to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.” You keep your promise. Listen, I do not believe that I alone feel we are living something new because it is new to me. I do not see in your writing any of the feelings you have shown me or any of the phrases you have used. When I read your writing, I wondered, What episode are we going to repeat? You carry your vision, and I mine, and they have mingled. If at moments I see the world as you see it (because they are Henry’s whores I love them), you will sometimes see it as I do. To Henry the investigator I offer enigmatic replies. When I was dressing, I was laughingly commenting on my underwear, which June had liked, June who is always naked under her dress. “It is Spanish,” I said. Henry said, “What comes to my mind when you say this is how did June know that you wore such underclothing?” I said, “Don’t you think I am trying to make it all more innocent than it was, but at the same time, don’t go so directly at ideas like that or you’ll never quite get the truth.” He overlooks the voluptuousness of half-knowledge, half-possession, of leaning over the edge dangerously, for no specific climax. Both Henry and June have destroyed the logic and unity of my life. It is good, for a pattern is not living. Now I am living. I am not making patterns. What eludes me forever is the reality of being a man. When the imagination and emotions of a woman overstep normal boundaries, occasionally she is possessed by feelings she cannot express. I want to possess June. I identify myself with the men who can penetrate her. But I am powerless. I can give her the pleasure of my love, but not the supreme coition. What a torment! And Henry’s letters: “. . . terribly, terribly alive, pained, and feeling absolutely that I need you . . . But I must see you: I see you bright and wonderful and at the same time I have been writing to June and all torn apart, but you will understand: you must understand. Anaïs, stand by me. You’re all around me like a bright flame. Anaïs, by Christ, if you knew what I am feeling now. “I want to get more familiar with you. I love you. I loved you when you came and sat on the bed—all that second afternoon was like warm mist—and I hear again the way you say my name—with that queer accent of yours. You arouse in me such a mixture of feelings, I don’t know how to approach you. Only come to me—get closer and closer to me. It will be beautiful, I promise you. I like so much your frankness—a humility almost. I could never hurt that.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “I don’t know what I expect of you, but it is something in the way of a miracle. I am going to demand everything of you—even the impossible, because you encourage it. You are really strong. I like even your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me. (Does aristocratic sound wrong in my mouth?) “Yes, Anaïs, I was thinking how I could betray you, but I can’t. I want you. I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit—ah, I don’t know what I am saying. I am a little drunk because you are not here. I would like to be able to clap my hands and voilà, Anaïs! I want to own you, use you, I want to fuck you, I want to teach you things. No, I don’t appreciate you—God forbid! Perhaps I even want to humiliate you a little—why, why? Why don’t I get down on my knees and just worship you? I can’t, I love you laughingly. Do you like that? And dear Anaïs, I am so many things. You see only the good things now—or at least you lead me to believe so. I want you for a whole day at least. I want to go places with you—possess you. You don’t know how insatiable I am. Or how dastardly. And how selfish! “I have been on my good behavior with you. But I warn you, I am no angel. I think principally that I am a little drunk. I love you. I go to bed now—it is too painful to stay awake. I am insatiable. I will ask you to do the impossible. What it is, I don’t know. You will tell me probably. You are faster than I am. I love your cunt, Anaïs—it drives me crazy. And the way you say my name! God, it’s unreal. Listen, I am very drunk. I am hurt to be here alone. I need you. Can I say everything to you? I can, can’t I? Come quickly then and screw me. Shoot with me. Wrap your legs around me. Warm me.” I felt as if I were reading his most unconscious feelings. I felt all life embracing me, in those words. I felt the supreme challenge to my worship of life, and I wanted to yield, to give myself to all life, which is Henry. What new sensations he arouses in me, what new torments, new fear and new courage! No letter from him after our day. He felt a tremendous relief, satisfaction, fatigue, just as I did. And then? Yesterday he came to Louveciennes. A new Henry, or, rather, the Henry sensed behind the one generally known, the Henry beyond what he has written down, beyond all literal knowledge, my Henry, the man I love tremendously now, too much, dangerously.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I feel a tremendous curiosity. I have looked into this man, I have imagined him naked. He has looked into me, too, with narrow animal eyes. The emotion of duplicity releases an insidious poison. All the way home the poison spreads. I understand now how to play for a moment with those feelings I have held too sacred. Next week instead of going out with my quiet “husband,” Henry, I’ll go and see the Spaniard. And women—I want women. But the masculine lesbians in Le Fetiche cabaret did not please me at all. I now also understand the carnation in Carmen’s mouth. I was smelling mock orange. The white blossoms touched my lips. They were like the skin of a woman. My lips pressed them, opened and closed gently around them. Soft petaled kisses. I bit into the white blossoms. Morsel of perfumed flesh, silkiness of skin. Carmen’s full mouth biting her carnation; and I, Carmen. It is too bad Henry has been good to me, too bad he is a good man. He is becoming aware of a subtle change in me. Yes, he says, I may look immature at first sight, but when I am undressed and in bed, how womanly I am. The other day Joaquin came downstairs unexpectedly, into the salon, to ask me a trivial question, and Henry and I had been kissing. It showed on Henry’s face, and he was embarrassed. I did not feel troubled or ashamed. I was resentful of the intrusion, and I said to Henry, “Well, it serves him right for coming here when he shouldn’t.” If Henry realizes that I am becoming shameless, strong, sure of my actions, refusing to be impressed by others, if he realizes the true course of my life now, will he change towards me? No. He has his needs, and he needs the woman in me who was soft, timid, good, incapable of hurting, of running wild. Instead of that, every day I grow nearer to June. I begin to want her, to know her better, to love her more. Now I realize that every interesting move in their life together was made by June. Without her he is a quiet watcher, not a participant. Henry and I combine beautifully for companionship but not for living. I expected those first days (or nights) in Clichy to be sensational. I was surprised when we fell into deep, quiet talks and did so little. I expected Dostoevskian scenes and found a gentle German who could not bear to let the dishes go unwashed. I found a husband, not a difficult and temperamental lover. Henry was, at first, even uneasy as to how to entertain me. June would have known. Yet I was happy and deeply satisfied then because I loved him.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  And I send him money. I think about him most of the day. But I would never let Henry touch me. I struggle to find the exact reason, and I can only find it in his own language. “I don’t want just to be pissed on.” Do you do such things, June, do you? Or does Henry caricature your desires? Are you half sunk in such sophisticated, such obscure, such tremendous feelings that Henry’s bordellos seem almost laughable? He counts on me to understand, because, like him, I am a writer. I must know. It must be clear to me. To his surprise I tell him just what you say: “It is not the same thing.” There is one world forever closed to him—the world which contains our abstract talks, our kiss, our ecstasies. He senses uneasily that there is a certain side of you he has not grasped, everything that is left out of his novel. You slip between his fingers! The richness of Hugo. His power to love, to forgive, to give, to understand. God, but I am a blessed woman. I will be home tomorrow night. I am finished with hotel life and solitude at night. July But when Hugo left for London Monday, I rushed off to Henry. Two nights of ecstasy. I still bear the traces of his bites, and last night he was so frenzied he hurt me. Our love-making was broken by profound talks. He is jealous. He took me to Montparnasse, and a handsome Hungarian sat next to me and made advances to me, boldly. Henry talked afterwards of wanting to keep me under lock and key, that I was made for intimacy. When he saw me in Montparnasse, he felt that I was too soft and delicate for the crowd; he wanted to protect me, to hide me. He has been debating with himself whether or not to give up June. With me he feels whole, and he knows I have loved him better. We lie awake in the night talking about this, but I know he cannot and must not think of giving up June, his passion. I, in his place, would not give her up. June and I do not efface each other; we complement one another. Henry needs both of us. June is the stimulant and I the refuge. With June he knows despair and with me harmony. All this I say while I hold him very firmly in my arms. And then I have Hugo. I would not give him up for Henry. What I cannot say to Henry is that he is primarily a physical man and that this is why June is essential to him. Such a man inspires sensual love. I, too, love him sensually. And in the end, this tie cannot last. He is destined to lose me. What I give him would be tremendous to a man less sensual.

• From Vox (1992)

  “But you’ve called these numbers before, haven’t you?” she asked. “A few times, but with no real success. And I don’t think I’ve ever called this very number before—2VOX.” “What do you mean by ‘success’?” “No women with any kind of spark. Or, actually, honestly, few women at all, period, except the ones who are paid by the phone service to make mechanical sexual small talk and moan occasionally. It’s mostly just men saying ‘Hey, any ladies out there?’ But then once in a while a real woman will call. And at least with this, as opposed to pictures, at least there’s the remote possibility of something clicking. Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to say that we, you and I, click, but there is that possibility.” “Yes.” “In a way it’s like the radio. Do you know that I’ve never actually gone to a store and bought a record? That’s probably why I never learned to appreciate the fade-out, as you describe it, since on the radio, one song melts into the next. But it seems to me that you really need the feeling of radio luck in listening to pop music, since after all it’s about somebody meeting, out of all the zillions of people in the world, this one other nice person, or at least several adequate people. And so, if you buy the record, or the tape, then you control when you can hear it, when what you want is for it to be like luck, and like fate, and to zoom up and down the dial, looking for the song you want, hoping some station will play it—and the joy when it finally rotates around is so intense. You’re not hearing it, you’re overhearing it.” “On the other hand,” she said, “if you own the tape, you show you’ve got some self-knowledge: you know what you like, you know how to make yourself happy, you’re not just wandering in this welter of chance occurrences, passively hoping the disk jockey will come through. Maybe when you’re a little kid you find yourself out on a balcony in the sun and you think, My oh my, this feels unexpectedly nice. But later on you think, I know that I will feel a particular kind of pleasure if I walk out onto this balcony and sit in that chair, and I wish to experience that pleasure now.” “Well, right, and so the reason I called this line was that the pleasures I’d sought out weren’t doing it for me and there was this hope of luck, that I, that there would be a conversation …” “You never said what it was about the Disney Tinker Bell exactly, at the video store.”

• From Vox (1992)

  The place was absolutely deserted, it was a holiday weekend. I went past this woman’s door, her name was Emily, and it was like I was passing a huge vulva, so big it had a desk inside, and I decided that what I should do is make an actual photocopy of my dick, in fact two copies, one before coming, one after, and leave these, along with an asterisk memo, on her desk.” “What did you hope to accomplish by doing that?” “Well, I was very interested in having her see my cock, but of course I wasn’t ever going to just flip it out in front of her, I needed some … distancing step, so that ho ho ho yes we’re civilized adults here, it’s all on paper. Well it’s harder than you may think to make a copy of your dick. I know it’s done in offices all the time, but I found it to be quite a project. Maybe if I’d been able to do some kind of planche , like your painter friend did on your … back, it would have been easy, but what I had to do was first try to get something akin to an erection standing at the copier of a deserted office on a holiday, I had to think of her seeing the copy of my cock on Monday, I had to think of her first thinking, Golly, what a nut, and then finding she had to stare uncontrollably at the specific image of my cock, boyoing , had to file that image away in a secret file folder where she filed away all my asterisk memos, and that some night, working late, she’d reach her long arms down to that drawer and bring out the asterisk file and go through the pages, asterisk after asterisk, until she found my cock. So I got hard, that was one hurdle. Then I had to place my cock down on the glass, but the way this copier is designed—I disliked this copier, by the way, that place is too cheap to lease a decent brand of copier—the way it’s designed is that a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper is oriented sideways in the middle of the glass between two marks, you know how that works, right?” “Yes.” “So the problem then is that only a little sliver of the tip of my cock was going to make it in range of the footprint of a normal eight-and-a-half-by-eleven copy. There were ways I could straddle the machine, but this just seemed ludicrous.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Henry was affected by the directness of her words, the image she left with him, but he ran away from her. He could not understand why he should have been so susceptible when he was in another world a moment before and when he didn’t even like the woman. He prefers aggressivity in women. Was this a weakness? he asked. I didn’t know, but I had to learn to be aggressive, to please him. After he had talked thus, flushed, exultant, dancing before me, illustrating his raving and biting a woman’s ass, he was suddenly quiet, thoughtful, and a great change came over his face. “I have outgrown all this,” he said. And I, who was clapping at his show, was tempted to say, “I have not outgrown it. I have yet to run amuck.” I look at Hugo’s tormented face (a period of torment and jealousy in his analysis) and experience great effusions of tenderness. And Henry says, “When you and I get married, we will take Emilia with us.” As we climb the stairs to my “cave” he puts his hands between my legs. I am rushing again into June’s chaos. It is June I want and not Allendy’s wisdom, not even Henry’s love of aggressivity. I want eroticism, I want those moist dreams I dream at night, four more days like those summer days with Henry when he was constantly throwing me down on the bed, the carpet, or the ivy. I want to wallow in sexuality until I outgrow it or become as sated as Henry. I arrive at Clichy for dinner, drunk and feverish. Henry has been writing about my writing. The last page is still in the typewriter. And I read these extraordinary lines: “It was presumptuous of me to want to alter her language. If it is not English, it is a language nevertheless and the farther one goes along with it the more vital and necessary it seems. It is a violation of language that corresponds with the violation of thought and feeling. It could not have been written in an English which every capable writer can employ. . . . Above all it is the language of modernity, the language of nerves, repressions, larval thoughts, unconscious processes, images not entirely divorced from their dream content; it is the language of the neurotic, the perverted, ‘marbled and veined with verdigris,’ as Gautier put it, in referring to the style of decadence. . . . “When I try to think to whom it is you are indebted for this style I am frustrated—I do not recall anyone to whom you bear the slightest resemblance. You remind me only of yourself. . . . ”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  It is ironical that the deepest experience of my life has come to me when I am famished not for profundity but for pleasure. Sensualism consumes me. What is deep and serious I look at with less intensity, but it is that which fascinates Henry, the depths he has not yet lived out in love. Is this the high moment? If only June would return now, to leave in Henry and me that taste of the climax, never to be reached again, never to be annihilated. Henry said, “I want to leave a scar on the world.” I write to him how I feel about his book. Then: “There will never be darkness because in both of us there is always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience. . . . If this is so, then think what I find in you, who are a gold mine. Henry, I love you with a realization, a knowledge of you, which takes in all of you, with the strength of my mind and imagination, besides that of my body. I love you in such a way that June can return, our love can be destroyed, and yet nothing can sever the fusion that has been. . . . I think today of what you said: ‘I want to leave a scar on the world.’ I will help you. I want to leave the feminine scar.” Today, I would follow Henry to the end of the world. What saves me is only that we are both penniless.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I was very happy after Allendy’s kiss. At the same time I know that Henry’s most casual kiss can shake the foundations of my body. I realized this keenly today when I saw him after five days’ separation. What a convergence of bodies. It is like a furnace when we meet. Yet day by day I realize more completely that only my body is stirred. My best moments with Henry are in bed. July But when Hugo left for London Monday, I rushed off to Henry. Two nights of ecstasy. I still bear the traces of his bites, and last night he was so frenzied he hurt me. Our love-making was broken by profound talks. He is jealous. He took me to Montparnasse, and a handsome Hungarian sat next to me and made advances to me, boldly. Henry talked afterwards of wanting to keep me under lock and key, that I was made for intimacy. When he saw me in Montparnasse, he felt that I was too soft and delicate for the crowd; he wanted to protect me, to hide me. He has been debating with himself whether or not to give up June. With me he feels whole, and he knows I have loved him better. We lie awake in the night talking about this, but I know he cannot and must not think of giving up June, his passion. I, in his place, would not give her up. June and I do not efface each other; we complement one another. Henry needs both of us. June is the stimulant and I the refuge. With June he knows despair and with me harmony. All this I say while I hold him very firmly in my arms. And then I have Hugo. I would not give him up for Henry. What I cannot say to Henry is that he is primarily a physical man and that this is why June is essential to him. Such a man inspires sensual love. I, too, love him sensually. And in the end, this tie cannot last. He is destined to lose me. What I give him would be tremendous to a man less sensual. But not to a Henry. We lie awake in the night, talking, and although my arms clasp him firmly my wisdom already relinquishes him. He is begging me not to take risks during the summer; he is still kissing me, after the convulsions of our fucking, which was, as he said, as if the thermometer had broken. I have conquered a man least conquerable. But I also know the limits of my power, and I know it takes June and me together to answer the demands of men. I accept this with a sad elation.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “No, at three.” I was thinking we didn’t have enough time together the last day we met. Henry’s face is impenetrable. I never know by any sign on it what he feels. There are transitions, yes, when he is flushed and excited, or serious and chastened, or observant and introspective. The blue eyes are analytical, like a scientist’s, or moist with feeling. When they are moist I am moved down to my toes because I remember a story about his childhood. His parents (his father was a tailor) used to take him with them on their Sunday outings, visiting, dragging the child along all day and late at night. They sat in the houses of their friends to play cards and smoke. The smoke would grow thick and hurt Henry’s eyes. They would put him on the bed in the room next to the parlor, with wet towels over his inflamed eyes. And now his eyes get tired with proofreading at the newspaper, and I would like to free him of it, and I can’t. Last night I couldn’t sleep. I imagined being in Natasha’s apartment again with Henry. I wanted to relive the moment when he came into me as we were standing. He taught me to encircle him with my legs. Such practices are so unfamiliar that they bewilder me. Afterwards, the joy bursts upon my senses, because it has unleashed a new kind of desire. “Anaïs, I feel you, your hotness right down to my toes.” In him, too, it is like lightning. He is always amazed by my moisture and my warmth. Often, though, the passivity of the woman’s role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever. I have just been standing before the open window of my bedroom and I have breathed in deeply, all the sunshine, the snowdrops, the crocuses, the primroses, the crooning of the pigeons, the trills of the birds, the entire procession of soft winds and cool smells, of frail colors and petal-textured skies, the knotted gray-brown of old trees, the vertical shoots of young branches, the wet brown earth, the torn roots. It is all so savory that my mouth opens, and it is Henry’s tongue which I taste, and I smell his breath as he sleeps, wrapped in my arms.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I am getting tongue-tied. I am sitting here writing you with a tremendous erection. I can feel your soft mouth closing over me, your leg clutching me tight, see you again in the kitchen here lifting your dress and sitting on top of me and the chair riding around over the kitchen floor, going thump, thump.” I answer in the same tone, enclose my mad note, send a telegram. Oh, there is no fighting against Henry’s invasion of me. Hugo is reading. I bend over him and pour out love, a love which is acutely penitent. Hugo gasps, “I swear I could never find such joy in anyone but you. You’re everything to me.” I have a sleepless night, with nerve-wracking pain, thinking of Jung’s wise words: “Let things happen.” The next day I slowly pack, dreaming of Henry. He is food and drink to me. How could I, even for a few days, swing away from him? If Hugo would not laugh like that, like a child, if his warm, furry hands would not reach out constantly for me, if he would not lean over to give chocolate to a black Scotch terrier, if he would not turn that finely chiseled face to me, saying, “Pussywillow, do you love me?” Meanwhile it is Henry who leaps in my body. I feel the spurt of him, his thumping and pushing. Monday night is intolerably far off. The length of his letters, twenty and thirty pages, is symbolical of his bigness. His torrent lashes me. I desire to be only a woman. Not to write books, to face the world directly, but to live by literary blood transfusion. To stand behind Henry, feeding him. To rest from self-assertion and creation. Mountaineers. Smoke. Tea. Beer. The radio. My head floats away from my body, suspended midair in the smoke of Tyrolean pipes. I see frog eyes, straw hair, mouths like open pocketbooks, pig noses, heads like billiard balls, monkey hands with ham-colored palms. I begin to laugh, as if I were drunk, and say Henry words: “cripes,” “screw,” and Hugo gets angry. I am silent and cold. My head floats back. I cry. Hugo, who has been trying to tune himself to my gaiety, now observes the swift transition and is baffled. I increasingly experience this monstrous deformation of reality. I spent a day in Paris before leaving for Austria. I rented a room to rest in because I had not slept the night before, a small attic room with dormer windows. As I lay there I had the sensation of all connections breaking, I parted from each being I loved, carefully and completely. I remembered Hugo’s last glance from the train, Joaquin’s pale face and fraternal kiss, Henry’s last milky kiss, his last words—“Is everything all right?” which he says when he is embarrassed and wants to say something deeper.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

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

• From Henry and June (1986)

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

• From Blue Nights (2011)

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

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  For at least there is that: entertainers, personalities are in demand. To forestall lawsuits, I must explain that I am not discussing “names”—who are in rather a different position, too touchy and complex to analyze here—but the unknown, the struggling, endless armies of Negro boys and girls bent on, and as yet very far from, recognition. A segment of this army, a quartet called The Melodeers, made a trip to Atlanta under the auspices of the Progressive Party in August, a trip which lasted about eighteen days and which left them with no love for Mr. Wallace. Since this quartet included two of my brothers, I was given the details of the trip; indeed, David, the younger, kept a sort of journal for me—literally a blow-by-blow account. Harlem is filled with churches and on Sundays it gives the impression of being filled with music. Quartets such as my brothers’ travel from church to church in the fashion of circuit preachers, singing as much for the love of singing and the need for practice as for the rather indifferent sums collected for them which are then divided. These quartets have “battles of song,” the winning team adding, of course, immensely to its prestige, the most consistent winners being the giants in this field. The aim of all these quartets, of course, is to branch out, to hit the big time and sing for a livelihood. The Golden Gate Quartet, judging at least from its music, had its roots here, and out of such a background came Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whom I heard, not quite ten years ago, plunking a guitar in a storefront church on Fifth Avenue. The Melodeers have not been singing very long and are very far from well-known, and the invitation to sing on tour with the Wallace party in the South seemed, whatever their misgivings about the Mason-Dixon line, too good an opportunity to pass up. This invitation, by the way, seems to have been the brainstorm of a Clarence Warde, a Negro merchant seaman once employed as a cottage father in a corrective institution up-state; it was he in New York who acted as a go-between, arranging, since The Melodeers are minors, to be their legal guardian and manager on the road.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Oh my, oh my, oh my—that feels good. And it looks absolutely beyond porn queen, like the summit of high art—like a Modigliani by Mondrian . To be so framed, positioned, and exposed and then have a lover find his target—well, I could come right now just thinking about it. It seems to me to be, at the very least, respectful to utilize these various crotchless darlings to aid and abet those men whose only object is my clit and whose only reward is my clit. TRINITY If old-fashioned fucking-for-two remained a minefield for me, fucking-for-three continued to be a delight. The Pre-Raphaelite redhead plotted reunions, and we three got together every month or so with unplanned regularity for over a year. I returned to my New Year’s Eve lovers again and again, hungry for love and freedom—a previously impossible duet in my experience. Says Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same . . . then you will enter the kingdom. One day, I ventured down on the Pre-Raphaelite. First time. Terrified. Curious. I wanted to see her pleasure in order to know my own. She was a genuine redhead. Eating pussy when you are a heterosexual woman is overwhelming. To confront a pussy that close for the first time—you can’t ever get that close, at that angle, to your own—is like looking narcissism in the face with a resounding Yes! Profound. Wet. It can sometimes be so hard to be oneself in one’s own sex life. With another woman, a woman’s identity receives a brutal jolt: she is me, I am her, her pleasure is mine, mine is hers. The source, the center, the origin of the human race becomes your only view. I bonded with my own sex and learned to love myself. I also developed a new compassion for the male divers. A pussy is a wild and watery landscape of hills and valleys and ravines and mighty holes that suck one in like quicksand. Once in, you cannot escape. Diving is an act of bravery. The redhead, however, demonstrated less hesitancy, and ate me like a woman who knows how. Naughty, considerate, and relentless. Her fingers felt like tongues, her mouth like a baby’s, sucking. I resist men’s fingers. Too rough, too big, too fast. My shield goes up, my clit hides. My orgasms with her were long, open, and free. The next New Year’s we three reconvened and she had a surprise for us: her beautiful young Belgian friend who was mourning the loss of her rock-star lover. One-two-three-four, three of one and one of the other. She and me and him . . . and her.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He explained still further, but this time I was not convinced. Next game. We examined my ass in the mirror from all angles, and he pointed out every curve and line to explain why it was the best ass—best in the boudoir, anyway. Then we looked at how my shaved pussy lips peeked through my thighs below my ass when I bent over. This was really fun—right out there with it all, shamelessly. So far he hadn’t been allowed to touch me. Lying on my bed, I then asked for a back massage, then a breast and stomach massage, then a butt massage, then a hip and thigh massage. Then I told him to go back to the chair, sit down, take out his cock, and stroke himself while I displayed my pussy to him like a stripper girl on the runway, spread lips, swollen red clit, long lean legs, killer shoes. He got pretty fucking hard. Then I asked that he lick my pussy for a while, taking long strokes from my ass to my pussy to my clit and back again, the whole wet package. That was great. Really just great. Next I asked him to concentrate on rimming my asshole with slowly increasing pressure until his tongue started forcing its way inside: “Like you want it.” “Like?” He did want it. Then he served me four or five inches of a red chili pepper vibrator up my ass. I hadn’t asked for that part, so to speak, but it was hot so I didn’t object. Then followed some straight-on clit licking, for as long as it took while I tried to hold out. During this time I indulged all my fantasies, flipping randomly through my Rolodex. Of A-Man watching this other guy lick me and being amused at my outrageous indulgence, approving, and saying to him: “You keep doing that till she’s had enough, then I’ll fuck her ass.” Then I fantasized that A-Man was licking my clit relentlessly—but that was way too exciting, so I had to stop. Then I imagined all the men I’ve been with, and dumped, in a lineup, outside my bedroom window, watching. I displayed my pleasure and my juice like a whore. On and on with the fantasies until the final one, the finishing one: Reality. This man, for reasons I don’t really understand—could it be love?—is willing to be slave to my orgasm, licking until I have had enough (and enough for me, of course, is a lot).

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  However he sees it, he gets it. Already well fucked, I am now at my most obedient. My will is now about 40 percent depleted, but I am still holding on to my consciousness, to my awareness, and to my high heels. I have much more to give. Much more. I have the power to give, give power. Other lovers never even got 10 percent of what I have to give. They didn’t have the power to ask for it. He does . . . and then he asks for more than that. REAR ENTRY He places me on my left side, two pillows snug under my hip, raising my ass in a fetching little upward sideways arch. I rest my left cheek on the bed, turn my head, and look up to him—it’s always up with him, never down. He grabs one of the tubes of K-Y scattered about the bed. I adore the sound as the top clicks open. Looking at me, he squeezes a gob onto two of his fingers. Looking to my ass, he spreads my cheeks so deliberately I cannot believe my luck. He rubs the gel gently, firmly onto my asshole, into my asshole, rimming the entryway, smoothing the passage. There is the most wondrous look on his face as he does this, alternately gazing in my eyes and gazing to my ass. He slips a finger inside, then two, watching my face, keeping the gaze as I feel his fingers turning inside me, connecting us internally and externally, full circle. Sliding his fingers out, he squeezes more K-Y onto his fingers and rubs it smoothly along the length of his cock, hard as a rock. It’s Time. Holding his cock, he guides it toward the crack in my ass, like a canoe aiming down a narrow ravine. I feel the smooth tip, both hard and velvety on my skin. The center of my asshole, like a magnet, gravitates toward the pressure. We meet. His key to my door, his positive to my negative, his plug to my socket. And the light goes on. Center to center, he nudges, I breathe, he pushes, I release, he pulses, I open, he pushes, he pushes, I open, he plunges in, our eyes lock, and he sends me home. Sometimes he’ll then pull back, and thrust short at the entry for a while, other times he’ll slide inward, downward, slowly, slowly until he is buried in my ass with no cock to spare, only balls outside. He’ll stay there for a moment, not moving. Then he’ll pulse farther. Sometimes he will move me into a different position—on my hands and knees; or standing up while bending over, hands plastered to the wall; or on my back, feet to the ceiling; or, a favorite, legs over my head and ass to the ceiling. Whichever position I’m in, he remains above me, always looking down upon me, watching me, loving me.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Here were sinners, come to hear the Word of God. And, indeed, from their apparel the sinfulness of their lives was evident: Esther wore a blue hat, trimmed with many ribbons, and a heavy, wine-red dress; and her mother, massive, and darker than Esther, wore great gold ear-rings in her pierced ears and had that air, vaguely disreputable, and hurriedly dressed, of women he had known in sporting-houses. They sat in the back, rigid and uncomfortable, like sisters of sin, like a living defiance of the drab sanctity of the saints. Deborah turned to look at them, and in that moment Gabriel saw, as though for the first time, how black and how bony was this wife of his, and how wholly undesirable. Deborah looked at him with a watchful silence in her look; he felt the hand that held his Bible begin to sweat and tremble; he thought of the joyless groaning of their marriage bed; and he hated her. Then the pastor rose. While he spoke, Gabriel closed his eyes. He felt the words that he was about to speak fly from him; he felt the power of God go out of him. Then the voice of the pastor ceased, and Gabriel opened his eyes in the silence and found that all eyes were on him. And so he rose and faced the congregation. ‘Dearly beloved in the Lord,’ he began—but her eyes were on him, that strange, that mocking light—‘let us how our heads in prayer.’ And he closed his eyes and bowed his head. His later memory of this sermon was like the memory of a storm. From the moment that he raised his head and looked out over their faces again, his tongue was loosed and he was filled with the power of the Holy Ghost. Yes, the power of the Lord was on him that night, and he preached a sermon that was remembered in camp-meetings and in cabins, and that set a standard for visiting evangelists for a generation to come. Years later, when Esther and Royal and Deborah were dead, and Gabriel was leaving the South, people remembered this sermon and the gaunt, possessed young man who had preached it. He took his text from the eighteenth chapter of the second book of Samuel, the story of the young Ahimaaz who ran too soon to bring the tidings of battle to King David.