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 The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She could see the scrotum, no more than a shadow. "You were sent here in Tribute by your father." "As your mother demanded, your Highness." "And to serve how many years?" "As long as it pleases your Highness, and my mistress, the Queen," Prince Alexi answered. "And you are what? Nineteen? And a model among the other Tributes?" Prince Alexi blushed. The Prince turned him towards Beauty with a rough blow on the shoulder, and steered him towards the bed. Beauty drew herself up, feeling her face flushed warm. "And the favorite of my mother?" the Prince demanded. "Not tonight, your Highness," Prince Alexi said with the barest trace of a smile. The Prince acknowledged this with a soft laugh. "No, you have not comported yourself very well today, have you?" "I can only beg forgiveness, your Highness," said Prince Alexi. "You can do more than that," said the Prince into his ear as he pushed him nearer to Beauty. "You can suffer for it. And you can give my Beauty a lesson in willingness and perfect submission." Now the Prince turned his gaze on Beauty, scrutinizing her mercilessly. She looked down, terrified of displeasing him. "Look at Prince Alexi," he told her, and when she raised her eyes, she saw the beautiful captive Prince only a few inches from her. His disheveled hair partially veiled his face, and his skin appeared deliciously smooth to her. She was trembling. Just as she feared he would, the Prince lifted Prince Alexi's chin again, and when Prince Alexi looked at her with his large brown eyes, he smiled very slowly and serenely at her for an instant the Prince could not have witnessed. Beauty drank her fill of him with her eyes because she had no choice and hoped the Prince would see no more than her distress. "Kiss my new slave and welcome her to this house. Kiss her lips and her breasts," said the Prince. And he lifted Prince Alexi's hands from the back of his neck so they went silently and obediently to his sides. Beauty gasped. Prince Alexi was smiling at her again, secretly as his shadow fell over her, and she felt his lips close over hers and the shock of his kiss pass through her. She could feel that misery between her legs formed into a tight know, and when his lips touched her left breast and then the right, she bit into her lower lip so hard she might have drawn blood. Prince Alexi's hair stroked her cheek and her breasts as he carried out the command and then he stood back with that same beguiling equanimity. Beauty put her hands to her face before she could stop herself. But immediately the Prince took them away. "Look well, Beauty.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  But now she saw the first of them appear amid the crowd, carrying silver pitchers with which they filled the goblets at the table, always bowing when they passed the Queen and the Prince, and she watched them, forgetting herself for the moment, with great absorption. The young men had softly curly hair, cut at the shoulders and neatly combed so that it framed their lean faces. And never did they raise their eyes, though some seemed to move in obvious discomfort from the hardness of their penises. How she could tell this discomfort, she was not sure; it was their manner, a manner of bearing tension and desire, with no expression for it. And as she saw the first of the long-haired girls bending over the table with her pitcher, she wondered if she too felt this same softly agonizing pleasure. Beauty felt it now just looking at these slaves, and she felt a quiet relief that for a moment she herself was unobserved. Or so she thought. Because she could sense a restlessness in the room. Some were rising and walking about, perhaps even dancing to the music. She could not be sure. And others had gone to gather near the Queen, their goblets in hand, regaling the Prince it seemed with stories. The Prince. She caught a clear glimpse of him and he smiled at her. How regal he looked, his black hair glossy and full, his long, shining white boots stretched out on the blue carpet before him. He was nodding and smiling to those who addressed him, but now and then his eyes moved to Beauty. But there was so much to see, and now she felt someone was very near her, and touching her again, and she realized that a line of dancers was just forming to one side of her. There was a reckless air to things. Much wine was being poured. There were great eruptions of laughter. And then, quite suddenly, she saw far to her left a young naked boy drop his pitcher of wine, and the red liquid run out on the floor as the others hastened to clean it. At once the Lord at Beauty's side clapped his hands, and Beauty saw three exquisitely dressed Pages, no older than the naked boys themselves, rush forward and seize the boy and hold him up quickly by his ankles. This brought a loud round of applause from those Lords and Ladies nearest the boy, and at once a paddle was produced, a very beautiful piece of gold enameling and white tracery, and the offender was smartly spanked while all looked on with the greatest fascination. Beauty felt a fluttering in her heart. If she were to be humiliated like that, punished so immediately and ignominiously for clumsiness, she didn't know how she could bear it.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Monday. Delectatio morosa. I spend my doleful days in dumps and dolors. We (mother Haze, Dolores and I) were to go to Our Glass Lake this afternoon, and bathe, and bask; but a nacreous morn degenerated at noon into rain, and Lo made a scene. The median age of pubescence for girls has been found to be thirteen years and nine months in New York and Chicago. The age varies for individuals from ten, or earlier, to seventeen. Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. “Monsieur Poe-poe,” as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert’s classes in Paris called the poet-poet. I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean- cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice, broad shoulder. Moreover, I am said to resemble some crooner or actor chap on whom Lo has a crush. Tuesday. Rain. Lake of the Rains. Mamma out shopping. L., I knew, was somewhere quite near. In result of some stealthy maneuvering, I came across her in her mother’s bedroom. Prying her left eye open to get rid of a speck of something. Checked frock. Although I do love that intoxicating brown fragrance of hers, I really think she should wash her hair once in a while. For a moment, we were both in the same warm green bath of the mirror that reflected the top of a poplar with us in the sky. Held her roughly by the shoulders, then tenderly by the temples, and turned her about. “It’s right there,” she said, “I can feel it.” “Swiss peasant would use the tip of her tongue.” “Lick it out?” “Yeth. Shly try?” “Sure,” she said. Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. “Goody-goody,” she said nictating. “It is gone.” “Now the other?” “You dope,” she began, “there is noth—” but here she noticed the pucker of my approaching lips. “Okay,” she said co-operatively, and bending toward her warm upturned russet face somber Humbert pressed his mouth to her fluttering eyelid. She laughed, and brushed past me out of the room. My heart seemed everywhere at once. Never in my life—not even when fondling my child- love in France—never— Night. Never have I experienced such agony. I would like to describe her face, her ways—and I cannot, because my own desire for her blinds me when she is near. I am not used to being with nymphets, damn it. If I close my eyes I see but an immobilized fraction of her, a cinematographic still, a sudden smooth nether loveliness, as with one knee up under her tartan skirt she sits tying her shoe. “Dolores Haze, ne montrez pas vos zhambes” (this is her mother who thinks she knows French).

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years” (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young person”). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the other hand, a “wayward child” is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen years of age” (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. This is all very interesting, and I daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in single tone, but probably preferred a lad’s perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse. But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child, “ enfant charmante et fourbe ,” dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her. So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple. “Give it back,” she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms. I produced Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under thin crimson skin, and with the monkeyish nimbleness that was so typical of that American nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I had opened (pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves). Rapidly, hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo flipped violently through the pages in search of something she wished Humbert to see. Found it at last. I faked interest by bringing my head so close that her hair touched my temple and her arm brushed my cheek as she wiped her lips with her wrist. Because of the burnished mist through which I peered at the picture, I was slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently against each other. Dimly there came into view: a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend. I whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a sham effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap. By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  It was a look that seemed dangerous, challenging, but also ambiguous; many women were hooked by it. The face speaks its own lan- guage. We are used to trying to read people's faces, which are often better indicators of their feelings than what they say, which is so easy to control. topics, the friar drew him to one side and reproached him in a very kindly sort of way for the amorous glances which, as the lady had given him to understand, he believed him to be casting in her direction. • Not unnaturally, the gentleman was amazed, for he had never so much as looked at the lady and it was very seldom that he passed by her house. . . . • The gentleman, being rather more perceptive than the reverend friar, was not exactly slow to appreciate the lady's cleverness, and putting on a somewhat sheepish expression, he promised not to bother her any more. But after leaving the friar, he made his way toward the house of the lady, who was keeping continuous vigil at a tiny little window so that she would see him if he happened to pass by. . . . And from that day forward, proceeding with the maximum prudence and conveying the impression that he was engaged in some other business entirely, he became a regular visitor to the neighborhood. —GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO, THE DECAMERON, TRANSLATED BY G. H. MCWILLIAM Glances are the heavy artillery of the flirt: everything can be conveyed in a look, yet that look can always be denied, for it cannot be quoted word for word. —STENDHAL, QUOTED IN RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES, ED., VICE: AN ANTHOLOGY 218 • The Art of Seduction Since people are always reading your looks, use them to transmit the insinu- ating signals you choose. Finally, the reason insinuation works so well is not just that it bypasses people's natural resistance. It is also the language of pleasure. There is too little mystery in the world; too many people say exactly what they feel or want. We yearn for something enigmatic, for something to feed our fan- tasies. Because of the lack of suggestion and ambiguity in daily life, the person who uses them suddenly seems to have something alluring and full of promise. It is a kind of titillating game—what is this person up to? What does he or she mean? Hints, suggestions, and insinuations create a seductive atmosphere, signaling that their victim is no longer involved in the routines of daily life but has entered another realm. Symbol: The Seed. The soil is carefully prepared. The seeds are planted months in advance. Once they are in the ground, no one knows what hand threw them there. They are part of the earth.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The alternative is anarchy, the lawlessness of nature, which we dread. But we are strange animals: the moment any kind of limit is im- This is how Monsieur Maudair analyzed men's attitude toward prostitutes: "Neither the love of a passionate but well- brought-up mistress, nor his marriage to a woman whom he respects, can replace the prostitute for the human animal in those perverse moments when he covets the pleasure of debasing himself without affecting his social prestige. Nothing can replace this bizarre and powerful pleasure of being able to say everything, do everything, profane and parody without any fear of retribution, remorse, or responsibility. It is a complete revolt against organized society, his organized, educated self and especially his religion." Monsieur Mauclair hears the call of the Devil in this dark passion poetized by Baudelaire. "The prostitute represents the unconscious which enables us to put aside our responsibilities." —NINA EPTON, LOVE AND THE FRENCH Hearts and eye go traveling along the paths that have always brought them joy; and if anyone attempts to spoil their game, he only makes them the more passionate about it, God knows. . . . so it was with Tristan and Isolde. As soon as they were forbidden their desires, and prevented from enjoying one another by spies and guards, they began to suffer intensely. Desire now seriously tormented them by its magic, many times worse than before; their need for one another was more Stir Up the Transgressive and Taboo • 355 posed, physically or psychologically, we are instantly curious. A part of us wants to go beyond that limit, to explore what is forbidden. If, as children, we are told not to go past a certain point in the woods, that is precisely where we want to go. But we grow older, and become po- lite and deferential; more and more boundaries encumber our lives. Do not confuse politeness with happiness, however. It covers up frustration, un- wanted compromise. How can we explore the shadow side of our person- ality without incurring punishment or ostracism? It seeps out in our dreams. We sometimes wake up with a sense of guilt at the murder, incest, adultery, and mayhem that goes on in our dreams, until we realize no one needs to know about it but ourselves. But give a person the sense that with you they will have a chance to explore the outer reaches of acceptable, po- lite behavior, that with you they can vent some of their closeted person- ality, and you create the ingredients for a deep and powerful seduction. You will have to go beyond the point of merely teasing them with an elusive fantasy. The shock and seductive power will come from the reality of what you are offering them. Like Byron, at a certain point you can even press it further than they may want to go.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  He The year was 1907 and La Belle [Otero], by then, had been an international figure for over a dozen years. The story was told by M. Maurice Chevalier. • "I was a young star about to make my first appearance at the Folies. Otero had been the headliner there for several weeks and although I knew who she was I had never seen her before on stage or off • "I was scurrying along, head bent, thinking of something or other, when I looked up. There was La Belle, in the company of another woman, walking in my direction. Otero was then nearly forty and I was not yet out of my teens but— ah!—she was so beautiful! • "She was tall, dark- haired, with a magnificent body, like the bodies of the women of those days, not like the lightweight ones of today." • Chevalier smiled. • "Of course I like modern women, too, but there was something of a fatal charm about Otero. We three stood there for a moment or two, not saying a word, I staring at La Belle, not so young as she once was and maybe not so beautiful, but 395 396 • The Art of Seduction made frequent trips to Paris to be with her, forgetting about his family, lav- ishing money and gifts on her. Otero's New York debut, in October of 1890, was an astounding suc- cess. "Otero dances with abandon," read an article in The New York Times. "Her lithe and supple body looks like that of a serpent writhing in quick, graceful curves." In a few short weeks she became the toast of New York society, performing at private parties late into the night. The tycoon Wil- liam Vanderbilt courted her with expensive jewels and evenings on his yacht. Other millionaires vied for her attention. Meanwhile Jurgens was dipping into the company till to pay for presents for her—he would do anything to keep her, a task in which he was facing heavy competition. A few months later, after his embezzling became public, he was a ruined man. He eventually committed suicide. Otero went back to France, to Paris, and over the next few years rose to become the most infamous courtesan of the Belle Epoque. Word spread quickly: a night with La Belle Otero (as she was now known) was more ef- fective than all the aphrodisiacs in the world. She had a temper, and was de- manding, but that was to be expected. Prince Albert of Monaco, a man who had been plagued by doubts of his virility, felt like an insatiable tiger after a night with Otero.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  A ritual full of charming little actions is so enjoy- able to watch. Jewelry, handsome furnishings, touches of color in clothing, dazzle the eye. It is a childish weakness of ours: we prefer to focus on the pleasant little details rather than on the larger picture. The more senses you appeal to, the more mesmerizing the effect. The objects you use in your se- duction (gifts, clothes, etc.) speak their own language, and it is a powerful one. Never ignore a detail or leave one to chance. Orchestrate them into a spectacle and no one will notice how manipulative you are being. The Sensuous Effect O ne day a messenger told Prince Genji—the aging but still consum- mate seducer in the Heian court of late-tenth-century Japan—that one of his youthful conquests had suddenly died, leaving behind an or- phan, a young woman named Tamakazura. Genji was not Tamakazura s fa- ther, but he decided to bring her to court and be her protector anyway. Soon after her arrival, men of the highest rank began to woo her. Genji had told everyone she was a lost daughter of his; as a result, they assumed that she was beautiful, for Genji was the handsomest man in the court. (At the time, men rarely saw a young girl's face before marriage; in theory, they were allowed to talk to her only if she was on the other side of a screen.) Genji showered her with attention, helping her sort through all the love letters she was receiving and advising her on the right match. As Tamakazura's protector, Genji was able to see her face, and she was indeed beautiful. He fell in love with her. What a shame, he thought, to give this lovely creature away to another man. One night, overwhelmed by work ruin and loss to the grand cloth of gold and web of silver, to tinsel and silken stuffs, pearls and precious stones, 'tis plain how his ardour and satisfaction be increased manifold—far more than with some simple shepherdess or other woman of like quality, be she as fair as she may. • And why of yore was Venus found so fair and so desirable, if not that with all her beauty she was always gracefully attired likewise, and generally scented, that she did ever smell sweet an hundred paces away?

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Petersburg apartment for spiritual guidance. He would talk to them of the simple goodness of the Russian peasantry, God's forgiveness, and other lofty matters. But after a few minutes of this, he would inject a comment or two that were of a much different nature— something about the woman's beauty, her lips that were so inviting, the de- sires she could inspire in a man. He would talk of different kinds of love—love of God, love between friends, love between a man and a woman—but mix them all up as if they were one. Then as he returned to discussing spiritual matters, he would suddenly take the woman's hand, or whisper into her ear. All this would have an intoxicating effect—women would find themselves dragged into a kind of maelstrom, both spiritually uplifted and sexually excited. Hundreds of women succumbed during these spiritual visits, for he would also tell them that they could not repent until they had sinned, and who better to sin with than Rasputin. Rasputin understood the intimate connection between the sexual and the spiritual. Spirituality, the love of God, is a sublimated version of sexual love. The language of the religious mystics of the Middle Ages is full of erotic images; the contemplation of God and of the sublime can offer a kind of mental orgasm. There is no more seductive brew than the combi- nation of the spiritual and the sexual, the high and the low. When you talk of spiritual matters, then, let your looks and physical presence hint of sexu- ality at the same time.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Here the real journey through Potemkin's fairyland began. It was like a dream—the waking dream of some magician who had discovered the secret of materializing his visions. . . . [Catherine] and her companions had left the world of reality behind. . . . Their talk was of Iphigenia and the ancient gods, and Catherine felt that she was both Alexander and Cleopatra. —GINA KAUS Keys to Seduction T he real world can be unforgiving: events occur over which we have lit- tle control, other people ignore our feelings in their quests to get what they need, time runs out before we accomplish what we had wanted. If we ever stopped to look at the present and future in a completely objective way, we would despair. Fortunately we develop the habit of dreaming early on. In this other, mental world that we inhabit, the future is full of rosy possibilities. Perhaps tomorrow we will sell that brilliant idea, or meet the person who will change our lives. Our culture stimulates these fantasies with constant images and stories of marvelous occurrences and happy romances. The problem is, these images and fantasies exist only in our minds, or on-screen. They really aren't enough—we crave the real thing, not this endless daydreaming and titillation. Your task as a seducer is to bring some flesh and blood into someone's fantasy life by embodying a fantasy figure, or creating a scenario resembling that person's dreams. No one can resist the pull of a secret desire that has come to life before their eyes. You must first choose targets who have some repression or dream unrealized—always the most likely victims of a seduction. Slowly and gradually, you will build up the illusion that they are getting to see and feel and live those dreams of theirs. Once they have this sensation they will lose contact with reality, and begin to see your fantasy as more real than anything else. And once they 304 • The Art of Seduction lose touch with reality, they are (to quote Stendhal on Lord Byron's female victims) like roasted larks that fall into your mouth. Most people have a misconception about illusion. As any magician knows, it need not be built out of anything grand or theatrical; the grand and theatrical can in fact be destructive, calling too much attention to you and your schemes. Instead create the appearance of normality. Once your targets feel secure—nothing is out of the ordinary—you have room to de- ceive them. Pei Pu did not spin the lie about his gender immediately; he took his time, made Bouriscout come to him. Once Bouriscout had fallen for it, Pei Pu continued to wear men's clothes. In animating a fantasy, the great mistake is imagining it must be larger than life. That would border on camp, which is entertaining but rarely seductive.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Think of the victims of the great Sirens of history: Paris causes a war for the sake of Helen of Troy, Caesar risks an empire and Antony loses his power and his life for Cleopatra, Napoleon becomes a laughingstock over Josephine, DiMaggio never gets over Marilyn, and Arthur Miller can't write for years. A man is often ruined by a Siren, yet cannot tear himself away. (Many powerful men have a masochistic streak.) An element of danger is easy to hint at, and will enhance your other Siren characteristics—the touch of madness in Marilyn, for example, that pulled men in. Sirens are often fantastically irrational, which is immensely attrac- tive to men who are oppressed by their own reasonableness. An element of fear is also critical: keeping a man at a proper distance creates respect, so that he doesn't get close enough to see through you or notice your weaker qualities. Create such fear by suddenly changing your moods, keeping the man off balance, occasionally intimidating him with capricious behavior. The most important element for an aspiring Siren is always the physical, the Siren's main instrument of power. Physical qualities—a scent, a height- ened femininity evoked through makeup or through elaborate or seductive clothing—act all the more powerfully on men because they have no mean- ing. In their immediacy they bypass rational processes, having the same ef- fect that a decoy has on an animal, or the movement of a cape on a bull. The proper Siren appearance is often confused with physical beauty, par- ticularly the face. But a beautiful face does not a Siren make: instead it cre- ates too much distance and coldness. (Neither Cleopatra nor Marilyn Monroe, the two greatest Sirens in history, were known for their beautiful faces.) Although a smile and an inviting look are infinitely seductive, they must never dominate your appearance. They are too obvious and direct. The Siren must stimulate a generalized desire, and the best way to do this is by creating an overall impression that is both distracting and alluring. It is not one particular trait, but a combination of qualities: The voice. Clearly a critical quality, as the legend indicates, the Siren's voice has an immediate animal presence with incredible suggestive power.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  But when he came nearer to her, she felt immediately that another quite different man, mysterious, crafty, and corrupting, looked out from behind the eyes that radiated goodness and gentleness. • He sat down opposite her, edged quite close up to her, and his light blue eyes changed color, and became deep and The Charismatic • 105 in salons throughout the city, he led the guests in a folk song, and as they sang, he began to dance, a strange uninhibited dance of his own design, and as he danced, he circled the most attractive women there, and with his eyes invited them to join him. The dance turned vaguely sexual; as his partners fell under his spell, he whispered suggestive comments in their ears. Yet none of them seemed to be offended. Over the next few months, women from every level of St. Petersburg society visited Rasputin in his apartment. He would talk to them of spiri- tual matters, but then without warning he would turn sexual, murmuring the crassest come-ons. He would justify himself through spiritual dogma: how can you repent if you have not sinned? Salvation only comes to those who go astray. One of the few who rejected his advances was asked by a friend, "How can one refuse anything to a saint?" "Does a saint need sinful love?" she replied. Her friend said, "He makes everything that comes near him holy. I have already belonged to him, and I am proud and happy to have done so." "But you are married! What does your husband say?" "He considers it a very great honor. If Rasputin desires a woman we all think it a blessing and a distinction, our husbands as well as ourselves." Rasputin's spell soon extended over Czar Nicholas and more particu- larly over his wife, the Czarina Alexandra, after he apparently healed their son from a life-threatening injury. Within a few years, he had become the most powerful man in Russia, with total sway over the royal couple. People are more complicated than the masks they wear in society. The man who seems so noble and gentle is probably disguising a dark side, which will often come out in strange ways; if his nobility and refinement are in fact a put-on, sooner or later the truth will out, and his hypocrisy will dis- appoint and alienate. On the other hand, we are drawn to people who seem more comfortably human, who do not bother to disguise their con- tradictions. This was the source of Rasputin's charisma. A man so authenti- cally himself, so devoid of self-consciousness or hypocrisy, was immensely appealing. His wickedness and saintliness were so extreme that it made him seem larger than life.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Why, six times out oj seven they don't even know their own minds." • But when they 234 • The Art of Seduction person is not good enough for you; and so on. Conversely, you can choose someone who has a built-in barrier: they are taken, they are not meant to want you. These barriers are more subtle than the social or religious variety, but they are barriers nevertheless, and the psychology remains the same. People are perversely excited by what they cannot or should not have. Create this inner conflict—there is excitement and interest, but you are unavailable—and you will have them grasping like Tantalus for water. And as with Don Juan and Cristeta, the more you make your targets pursue you, the more they imagine that it is they who are the aggressors. Your seduc- tion is perfectly disguised. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. —OSCAR WILDE. Keys to Seduction M ost of the time, people struggle to maintain security and a sense of balance in their lives. If they were always uprooting themselves in pursuit of every new person or fantasy that passed them by, they could not survive the daily grind. They usually win the struggle, but it does not come easy. The world is full of temptation. They read about people who have more than they do, about adventures others are having, about people who have found wealth and happiness. The security that they strive for, and that they seem to have in their lives, is actually an illusion. It covers up a con- stant tension. As a seducer, you can never mistake people's appearance for reality. You know that their fight to keep order in their lives is exhausting, and that they are gnawed by doubts and regrets. It is hard to be good and virtuous, always having to repress the strongest desires. With that knowledge in mind, se- duction is easier. What people want is not temptation; temptation happens every day. What people want is to give into temptation, to yield. That is the only way to get rid of the tension in their lives. It costs much more to resist temptation than to surrender. Your task, then, is to create a temptation that is stronger than the daily variety. It has to be focused on them, aimed at them as individuals—at their weakness. Understand: everyone has a principal weakness, from which oth- ers stem. Find that childhood insecurity, that lack in their life, and you hold the key to tempting them. Their weakness may be greed, vanity, boredom, some deeply repressed desire, a hunger for forbidden fruit.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Am I making him sound repulsive? Some people found him that. But everyone found him entertaining. He was a born clown, a vaudevillian, a nonstop talker. He gave the illusion of always bursting with energy. He could do more things in a day than most people can do in ten, and he always seemed to be jumping out of his skin. Naturally that appealed to me—with my own hunger-thump, my ravenous appetite for experiencing everything. We met in the second week of my freshman year (and his sophomore) and from then on we were almost inseparable. Oh, I reserved the right to go out with other people from time to time, but he saw to it that I was so inundated with his presence, his talk, his gifts, his typing of my papers, his ransacking the stacks for books I needed, his letters and phone calls and flowers and poems vowing eternal devotion—that inevitably the other boys seemed like very pale imitations. In those days, there were Jocks and Intellectuals, Fraternity Boys and Independents. Brian fell into no category and all categories. He was an original, a character, an encyclopedia of information on every subject except perhaps sex where his knowledge was more theoretical at first than practical. We lost our virginity together. Or almost. I say “almost” because it is doubtful that I had much left after all those years of strenuous finger-fucking and regular masturbation, and Brian had been to a whorehouse in Tijuana once when he was sixteen—a birthday present from his dad, who drove him with a carload of buddies as a sort of Jock Sweet-Sixteen Party. As Brian described it, the experience was a fiasco. The whore kept saying “Hurry up, hurry up!” and Brian lost his erection, and his father (as Oedipus would have it) had screwed her first, and his buddies were knocking at the door. It wasn’t much of an initiation; penetration, as they say in the sex books, was not completed. So I guess you could say we lost our virginity together. I was seventeen (still jail bait, as Brian quaintly reminded me) and he was nineteen. We had known each other two months—two months of doing violence to our instincts in Riverside Park, under the tables of the Classics Library where we “studied together” (beneath the watchful blank eyes of Sophocles, Pericles, and Julius Caesar), on the couch in my parents’ living room, in the stacks at Butler Library (where I later was shocked to hear some sacrilegious students actually screwed). We finally had each other’s “final favor” (to use that charming eighteenth-century term) in Brian’s basement apartment on Riverside Drive where the roaches (or perhaps they were water bugs) were bigger than my fist (or his penis) and Brian’s two room-mates kept knocking on the door on the pretext of wanting The Sunday Times “if we were through with it yet.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Words are a woman's weak- ness, and the Rake is a master of seductive language. Stir a woman's repressed longings by adapting the Rake's mix of danger and pleasure. The Ardent Rake F or the court of Louis XIV, the king's last years were gloomy—he was old, and had become both insufferably religious and personally unpleas- ant. The court was bored and desperate for novelty. So in 1710, the arrival of a fifteen-year-old lad who was both devilishly handsome and charming had a particularly strong effect on the ladies. His name was Fronsac, the future Duke de Richelieu (his granduncle being the infamous Cardinal Richelieu). He was impudent and witty. The ladies would play with him like a toy, but he would kiss them on the lips in return, his hands wandering far for an inexperienced boy. When those hands strayed up the skirts of a duchess who was not so indulgent, the king was furious, and sent the youth to the Bastille to teach him a lesson. But the ladies who had found him so amusing could not endure his absence. Compared to the stiffs in court, here was someone incredibly bold, his eyes boring into you, his hands quicker than was safe. Nothing could stop him, his novelty was irresistible. The court ladies pleaded and his stay in the Bastille was cut short. Several years later, the young Mademoiselle de Valois was walking in a Paris park with her chaperone, an older woman who never left her side. De Valois's father, the Duke d'Orléans, was determined to protect her, his youngest daughter, from all the court seducers until she could be married off, so he had attached to her this chaperone, a woman of impeccable virtue and sourness. In the park, however, de Valois saw a young man who gave her a look that set her heart on fire. He walked on by, but the look was intense and clear. It was her chaperone who told her his name: the now in- famous Duke de Richelieu, blasphemer, seducer, heartbreaker. Someone to avoid at all cost. A few days later, the chaperone took de Valois to a different park, and lo and behold, Richelieu crossed their path again. This time he was in dis- guise, dressed as a beggar, but the look in his eye was unforgettable. Made- moiselle de Valois returned his gaze: at last something exciting in her drab life. Given her father's sternness, no man had dared approach her. And now this notorious courtier was pursuing her, instead of all the other ladies at court—what a thrill!

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Byron arrived on the scene at the right time. He became the lightning rod for women's unexpressed desires; with him they could go beyond the limits society had imposed. For some the lure was adultery, for others it was romantic rebellion, or a chance to become irrational and uncivilized. (The desire to reform him merely covered up the truth—the desire to be over- whelmed by him.) In all cases it was the lure of the forbidden, which in this case was more than merely a superficial temptation: once you became in- volved with Lord Byron, he took you further than you had imagined or wanted, since he recognized no limits. Women did not just fall in love with him, they let him turn their lives upside down, even ruin them. They pre- ferred that fate to the safe confines of marriage. In some ways, the situation of women in the early nineteenth century has become generalized in the early twenty-first. The outlets for male bad behavior—war, dirty politics, the institution of mistresses and courtesans— have faded away; today, not just women but men are supposed to be emi- nently civilized and reasonable. And many have a hard time living up to this. As children we are able to vent the darker side of our characters, a side that all of us have. But under pressure from society (at first in the form of our parents), we slowly repress the naughty, rebellious, perverse streaks in our characters. To get along, we learn to repress our dark sides, which become a kind of lost self, a part of our psyche buried beneath our polite appearance. As adults, we secretly want to recapture that lost self—the more adven- turous, less respectful, childhood part of us. We are drawn to those who live out their lost selves as adults, even if it involves some evil or destruc- tion. Like Byron, you can become the lightning rod for such desires. You must learn, however, to keep this potential under control, and to use it strategically. As the aura of the forbidden around you is drawing targets into your web, do not overplay your dangerousness, or they will be frightened away. Once you feel them falling under your spell, you have freer rein. If they begin to imitate you, as Lady Caroline imitated Byron, then take it further—mix in some cruelty, involve them in sin, crime, taboo activity, whatever it takes. Unleash the lost self within them; the more they act it out, the deeper your hold over them. Going halfway will break the spell and create self-consciousness. Take it as far as you can. Baseness attracts everybody. —JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE Keys to Seduction S ociety and culture are based on limits—this kind of behavior is accept- able, that is not. The limits are fluid and change with time, but there are always limits.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Soon he was smuggling beautifully written notes to her expressing his uncontrollable desire for her. She responded timidly, but soon the notes were all she was living for. In one of them he promised to arrange everything if she would spend the night with him; imagining it was [After an accident at sect, Don Juan finds himself washed up on a beach, where he is discovered by a young woman.] • TISBEA: Wake up, handsomest of all men, and be yourself again. • DON JUAN: If the sea gives me death, you give me life. But the sea really saved me only to be killed by you. Oh the sea tosses me from one torment to the other, for I no sooner pulled myself from the water than I met this siren—yourself. Why fill my ears with wax, since you kill me with your eyes? I was dying in the sea, but from today I shall die of love. • TISBEA: YOU have abundant breath for a man almost drowned. You suffered much, but who knows what suffering you are preparing for me? . . . I found you at my feet all water, and now you are all fire. If you burn when you are so wet, what will you do when you're dry again? You promise a scorching flame; I hope to God you're not lying. • DON JUAN: Dear girl, God should have drowned me before I could be charred by you. Perhaps love was wise 19 20 • The Art of Seduction impossible to bring such a thing to pass, she did not mind playing along and agreeing to his bold proposal. Mademoiselle de Valois had a chambermaid named Angelique, who dressed her for bed and slept in an adjoining room. One night as the chap- erone was knitting, de Valois looked up from the book she was reading to see Angelique carrying her mistress's nightclothes to her room, but for some strange reason Angelique looked back at her and smiled—it was Richelieu, expertly dressed as the maid! De Valois nearly gasped from fright, but caught herself, realizing the danger she was in: if she said anything her family would find out about the notes, and about her part in the whole affair. What could she do? She decided to go to her room and talk the young duke out of his ridiculously dangerous maneuver. She said good night to her chaperone, but once she was in her bedroom, the words she had planned were useless. When she tried to reason with Richelieu, he responded with that look in his eye, and then with his arms around her. She could not yell, but now she was unsure what to do.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  If they have followed you merely out of curiosity, they may feel some fear and hesitation, but once they are hooked, they will fond you hard to resist, for it is hard to return to a limit once you have transgressed and gone past it. The human cries out for more, and does not know when to stop. You will determine for them when it is time to stop. The moment people feel that something is prohibited, a part of them will want it. That is what makes a married man or woman such a delicious target—the more someone is prohibited, the greater the desire. George Vil- liers, the Earl of Buckingham, was the favorite first of King James I, then of James's son, King Charles I. Nothing was ever denied him. In 1625, on a visit to France, he met the beautiful Queen Anne and fell hopelessly in love. What could be more impossible, more out of reach, than the queen of a rival power? He could have had almost any other woman, but the prohib- ited nature of the queen completely enflamed him, until he embarrassed himself and his country by trying to kiss her in public. Since what is forbidden is desired, somehow you must make yourself seem forbidden. The most blatant way to do this is to engage in behavior that gives you a dark and forbidden aura. Theoretically you are someone to avoid; in fact you are too seductive to resist. That was the allure of the actor Errol Flynn, who, like Byron, often found himself the pursued rather than the pursuer. Flynn was devilishly handsome, but he also had something else: a definite criminal streak. In his wild youth he engaged in all kinds of shady activities. In the 1950s he was charged with rape, a permanent stain on his reputation even though he was acquitted; but his popularity among women only increased. Play up your dark side and you will have a similar effect. For your targets to be involved with you means going beyond their limits, doing something naughty and unacceptable—to society, to their peers. For many that is reason to bite the bait. painful and urgent than it had ever been. • . . .

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Why does the way she walks—a child, mind you, a mere child!—excite me so abominably? Analyze it. A faint suggestion of turned in toes. A kind of wiggly looseness below the knee prolonged to the end of each footfall. The ghost of a drag. Very infantile, infinitely meretricious. Humbert Humbert is also infinitely moved by the little one’s slangy speech, by her harsh high voice. Later heard her volley crude nonsense at Rose across the fence. Twanging through me in a rising rhythm. Pause. “I must go now, kiddo.” Saturday. (Beginning perhaps amended.) I know it is madness to keep this journal but it gives me a strange thrill to do so; and only a loving wife could decipher my microscopic script. Let me state with a sob that today my L. was sun-bathing on the so-called “piazza,” but her mother and some other woman were around all the time. Of course, I might have sat there in the rocker and pretended to read. Playing safe, I kept away, for I was afraid that the horrible, insane, ridiculous and pitiful tremor that palsied me might prevent me from making my entrée with any semblance of casualness. Sunday. Heat ripple still with us; a most favonian week. This time I took up a strategic position, with obese newspaper and new pipe, in the piazza rocker before L. arrived. To my intense disappointment she came with her mother, both in two-piece bathing suits, black, as new as my pipe. My darling, my sweetheart stood for a moment near me—wanted the funnies—and she smelt almost exactly like the other one, the Riviera one, but more intensely so, with rougher overtones—a torrid odor that at once set my manhood astir—but she had already yanked out of me the coveted section and retreated to her mat near her phocine mamma. There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, the seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics. She was the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up. As I looked on, through prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a moving prey to a motionless one, I planned to have this pitiful attainment coincide with one of the various girlish movements she made now and then as she read, such as trying to scratch the middle of her back and revealing a stippled armpit—but fat Haze suddenly spoiled everything by turning to me and asking me for a light, and starting a make-believe conversation about a fake book by some popular fraud.