Despair

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 Detransition, Baby (2021)

  He puts out a hand. “I don’t know. I am desperate too. What can I do?” “Nothing.” He shakes his head. “Let’s start small. What if I promise to tell you everything you’d ever want to know?” She looks at his open palm. A moment passes. The shadows rotate like a second hand with every streetlight that passes. The whir of tires hiccup regularly over the tarred repairs of the Chicago streets. Tentatively, she presses her forefinger into the center of his palm, and his hand curls around it. “I’d tell you that you're still probably lying, but that I want to hear it.” “Come here,” he says, pulling on her hand. “Come here, please. Sit in the middle seat and lean on me instead of the window.” She hesitates, then fumbles with her free hand to unlatch her seatbelt, slides into the middle seat, where he circles his arm around her shoulders, pulls her in. He wakes up in her bed, his nose inches from a lock of glossy hair that had trailed off her pillow to violate the imaginary DMZ he’d unilaterally marked down the center of the bed. Four empty plastic water bottles, the complimentary contents of which she’d chugged to stave off the hangover, lay scattered on her nightstand and she’s snoring cutely. Quietly, he slips back the sheets, walks down the hall to his own room, and collects the four water bottles the hotel had allotted for his room. She’s peering at him groggily when he returns to set them down beside the empties. “More water for you,” he says. “Fuck.” She sits up and puts a hand to the back of her neck, then fumbles through the empty bottles to check the time on her phone. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck-fuck. Last night was a mess. I’m so sorry, Ames.” “Yeah, it was.” “We've got a meeting with them Thursday. Think we can fix it before then?” “T don’t know. You outed me to them. What’s there to fix?” Katrina scrunches her nose. “Yeah, but those guys were on your side.” He sits on the bed next to her. Quietly he says, “Abby is the project manager for them. And Josh is dealing with the contract. If they tell either of those two what you said. Well”’—he pauses—“you effectively told the whole company last night that I used to be a transsexual.” Katrina’s face goes slack. “Oh god. Oh fuck. Those guys probably won't tell, right? I mean, why would they?” Ames shrugs. “Who knows what they'll do?” He wants to add that she really fucked him over, but she seems to know. Katrina groans. “We can deal with this, Ames. I’m sure we can.” “Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe it’s okay in the long run. Maybe we re even now.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  For trans women: To tuck or not to tuck, that is the question. Reese never tucks. Her math is solid, tight as a geometric proof: to go untucked, to bare her little dickprint for all to see, is brazen enough that she can otherwise wear a tight one-piece without seeming too prudish. Thalia, beside Reese, wears only a pair of boy shorts—but tucked —and is sunning her perfect little boobs golden. Thalia has always had, in Reese’s estimation, the best collarbones in Brooklyn; she recently gave up eating any animal products, and between her new diet and the sun, they’ve taken on the soft gloss of burnished teak. Reese showed up at Thalia’s house the night before, trying to hold it together, to maintain the righteousness of the letter she had emailed to Ames and Katrina, but she fell apart after only ten minutes, sobbing about the cowboy, and AIDS panics, and how she'll never get another chance to be a mother. Despite her amazing collarbones, Thalia’s shoulders are not the most comfortable upon which to cry. Because Thalia grew up with a self-described histrionic Greek stereotype for a mother, whenever Reese got histrionic, Thalia turned edgy and furtive, insecure about the adequacy of her own emotions in response. But for once, Thalia’s reassurances did not falter. “Babe,” she told Reese, “just sleep over, okay?” And she led Reese to her bed, fed her an Ambien, and tucked her in to sleep. Reese woke in the morning to instant coffee steaming beside the bed and Thalia already dressed. As Reese sipped, Thalia announced that she had spent the night thinking about Reese’s problem, and that it was not in fact a problem, but a solution. Ames and Katrina had indeed been the issue all along. Reese was a queer, if she was going to do a queer family model, she ought to do it with real queers. “Ames brainwashed you,” Thalia insisted. “He made you think this is your only chance to have a child. But why should that be? Queers have kids all the time.” “Not trans women.” Thalia listed off five trans women who had children, but Reese protested that they had all had children before they transitioned. They had been fathers. “What about Babs?” Thalia countered. Babs was a trans woman who had married a trans guy and the two of them moved to southwest Florida, where the trans guy got pregnant. “You could pull a Babs!” Thalia suggested brightly.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Four men make the rescue attempt. Three turn back before the sandbar. In the water, in the cold, their bodies won’t respond. Up and down their legs, nerves go incommunicado and muscles turn to lead. The sandy bottom can be seen, but cannot be felt. Only Fredrick, a rent-boy muscle queen in a neon-blue speedo who has been drinking Nutcrackers the color of antifreeze for the past hour, presses on. Between his mass and a blood alcohol level that would keep plumbing running in the dead of winter, he splashes forth to Reese. At the sandbar, his broad back rises from the water and he scans for the woman. She is floating on her back, hair fanned out, lips blue, inhaling and exhaling hard. He dives, comes up, plants his feet, grips her arm, and hefts her, fireman-style, to his shoulders. She opens her eyes, startled. “Hey!” She pushes against him. “T have you!” he bellows. “No, no,” she wheezes out. She is so cold, it is hard to get her lungs to push out enough air to speak. “Wim Hof method.” “Huh?” he shouts, churning with her toward land. On the beach, people cheer. What a rescue. “Wim Hof method! I’m fine. Wim Hof method.” They rise at the sandbar, and he sets her on her feet. The heat of the sun is only a distant memory. The air too has turned arctic. “Can you walk?” he asks dubiously. “Yes, yes,” she says. Her ears ache from the cold, a terrible pain like from eating ice cream too fast, but encircling her whole skull. She hears people shouting, and suddenly is aware of how many people are watching. She can’t believe it. She was only in the water, like, what, five minutes? But she can’t focus on that now. Instinct has reasserted itself and she needs to get warm. Nothing else matters. Wim Hof was right. He discovered, in our backyard ponds and on banal coasts, the lair of a terrible god, a place beyond self-pity, beyond grief. Reese is on the shore, wrapped in a towel, fending off Thalia’s worry, which has turned to rage. Reese’s skin is blue and her teeth clack. She has only a few moments to try to explain herself, uselessly, in between Thalia’s imprecations, before the paramedics arrive. The lifeguards haven’t yet come out for the season, but someone who witnessed Reese’s submersion has called an ambulance and reported an incident of self-harm. What is happening? the newly arrived beachgoers ask each other, as the ambulance lights flash at the end of the boardwalk. The rumor goes around: Another trans woman has tried to commit suicide. They nod sadly, knowingly: Isn’t this kind of performance just what trans women do? Throw themselves in front of trains from crowded platforms? Film themselves downing fistfuls of pills on Facebook Live? Broadcast and perform their pain no matter whom it triggers? Don’t even trans women expect this from each other?

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She wants to be inured to hope. When it comes, it always disappoints, and unlike in her twenties, now it never comes simply, instead it arrives twisted, with caveats and strings. What was she doing here anyway? Trying to get some cis woman to share her baby with Reese and Reese’s detransitioned ex-lover? How sad her life has become that such a ridiculous plan was the best peg on which to hang some kind of hope. Reese used to say that she was only interested in people who’d had a major failure in life. She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible. Only after the breakup with Amy did Reese begin to concede that perhaps Amy had been her own first major failure. She had previously been under the impression that she had failed majorly for most of her life, but in fact, she had simply confused failure with being a transsexual—an outlook in which a state of failure confirmed one’s transsexuality, and one’s transsexuality confirmed a state of failure. A mistake many of the transsexuals she knew made. Such thinking was static. You had to hope for something in the first place in order to have those hopes dashed. With Amy, she had hoped. She made her earlier quips about failure because she believed them, but also partly because she thought they made her sound urbane and worldly. She suspected, however, that actual failure had turned her unlovely. At thirty-four, she feels old. “What are you doing on the floor?” The floorboards creak as Ames steps out of the bathroom, freshly shaven, wearing a snug linen jacket, his fingers deftly manipulating a Windsor knot with practiced ease. “Are you crying?” Reese pushes onto her left arm and, looking up, wipes beneath her eyes carefully with the pads of her fingers so as not to disturb her mascara. “No.” “Yes you are! I didn’t know what I was hearing. What happened?” “T smelled the closet. And suddenly I remembered what it was like when we lived together. It made me so sad and nostalgic.” Ames lowers himself into a squat just beside her, resting on his heels. The joints of his knees crack. Tentatively Ames puts a hand on her back on the fabric of her dress. “It happens to me too.” Reese draws in a quick sniffle, but otherwise doesn’t respond, so he continues. “I read that of our senses, only taste and smell pass directly to the hippocampus, where memory gets stored. Sights, sounds, and touches get converted into thoughts and symbols before they continue on to the memory in the hippocampus. But smell connects directly to memory.”

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  What was I thinking? Why did I let him do that to me? I wanted the dark, to explore how bad it could be—but it’s too dark for me. I cannot do this. Yet this is what he does; this is how he gets his kicks. What a monumental wake-up call. And to be fair to him, he warned me and warned me, time and again. He’s not normal. He has needs that I cannot fulfill. I realize that now. I don’t want him to hit me like that again, ever. I think of the couple of times he has hit me, and how easy he was on me by comparison. Is that enough for him? I sob harder into the pillow. I am going to lose him. He won’t want to be with me if I can’t give him this. Why, why, why have I fallen in love with Fifty Shades? Why? Why can’t I love José, or Paul Clayton, or someone like me? Oh, his distraught look as I left. I was so cruel, shocked by the savagery. Will he forgive me? Will I forgive him? My thoughts are all haywire and jumbled, echoing and bouncing off the inside of my skull. My subconscious is shaking her head sadly, and my inner goddess is nowhere to be seen. Oh, this is a dark morning of the soul for me. I’m so alone. I want my mom. I remember her parting words at the airport: Follow your heart, darling, and please, please—try not to overthink things. Relax and enjoy yourself. You are so young, sweetheart. You have so much of life to experience yet, just let it happen. You deserve the best of everything. I did follow my heart, and I have a sore ass and an anguished, broken spirit to show for it. I have to go. That’s it—I have to leave. He’s no good for me, and I am no good for him. How can we possibly make this work? And the thought of not seeing him again practically chokes me…my Fifty Shades. I hear the door click open. Oh no, he’s here. He puts something down on the bedside table, and the bed shifts under his weight as he climbs in behind me. “Hush,” he breathes, and I want to pull away from him, move to the other side of the bed, but I’m paralyzed. I cannot move and lie stiffly, not yielding at all. “Don’t fight me, Ana, please.” Gently, he pulls me into his arms, burying his nose in my hair, kissing my neck. “Don’t hate me,” he whispers against my skin, his voice achingly sad. My heart clenches anew and releases a fresh wave of silent sobbing. He continues to kiss me softly, tenderly, but I remain aloof and wary.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “We’ll never get past that, will we?” My scalp tightens again. He shakes his head bleakly. I close my eyes. I cannot bear to look at him. “Well, I’d better go, then,” I murmur, wincing as I sit up. “No, don’t go.” He sounds panicked. “There’s no point in me staying.” Suddenly, I feel tired, really dog-tired, and I want to go now. I climb out of bed, and Christian follows. “I’m going to get dressed. I’d like some privacy.” My voice is flat and empty as I leave him standing in the bedroom. Heading downstairs, I glance at the great room, thinking how only hours before I had rested my head on his shoulder as he played the piano. So much has happened since then. I have had my eyes opened and glimpsed the extent of his depravity, and I now know he’s not capable of love—of giving or receiving love. My worst fears have been realized. And strangely, it’s liberating. The pain is such that I refuse to acknowledge it. I feel numb. I have somehow escaped from my body and am now a casual observer to this unfolding tragedy. I shower quickly and methodically, thinking only of each second in front of me. Now squeeze body wash bottle. Put body wash bottle back in rack. Rub cloth on face, on shoulders…on and on, all simple, mechanical actions, requiring simple, mechanical thoughts. I finish my shower—and as I haven’t washed my hair, I can dry myself quickly. I dress in the bathroom, taking my jeans and T-shirt out of my small suitcase. My jeans chafe against my backside, but quite frankly, it’s a pain I welcome as it distracts my mind from what’s happening to my splintering, shattered heart. I stoop to shut my suitcase and the bag holding Christian’s gift catches my eye, a model kit for a Blaník L23 glider, something for him to build. Tears threaten. Oh no. Happier times, when there was hope of more. I take it out of the case, knowing I need to give it to him. Quickly, I rip a small piece of paper from my notebook, hastily scribble a note for him, and leave it on top of the box. This reminded me of a happy time. Thank you. Ana I gaze at myself in the mirror. A pale and haunted ghost stares back at me. I scoop my hair into a bun and ignore how swollen my eyelids are from crying. My subconscious nods with approval. Even she knows not to be snarky right now. I cannot believe my world is crumbling around me into a sterile pile of ashes, all my hopes and dreams cruelly dashed. No, no, don’t think about it. Not now, not yet. Taking a deep breath, I pick up my case, and after placing the glider kit and my note on his pillow, I head for the great room.

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend “the personal” is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly. It provides mainly demonic vocabularies in which to situate that need and from which to initiate action and construct rites of behavior. One is offered a choice among vocabularies of thought and action which are not merely self-transcending but self-destructive. 6 But the pornographic imagination is not just to be understood as a form of psychic absolutism—some of whose products we might be able to regard (in the role of connoisseur, rather than client) with more sympathy or intellectual curiosity or aesthetic sophistication. Several times before in this essay I have alluded to the possibility that the pornographic imagination says something worth listening to, albeit in a degraded and often unrecognizable form. I’ve urged that this spectacularly cramped form of the human imagination has, nevertheless, its peculiar access to some truth. This truth—about sensibility, about sex, about individual personality, about despair, about limits—can be shared when it projects itself into art. (Everyone, at least in dreams, has inhabited the world of the pornographic imagination for some hours or days or even longer periods of his life; but only the full-time residents make the fetishes, the trophies, the art.) That discourse one might call the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know. Pornography, considered as an artistic or art-producing form of the human imagination, is an expression of what William James called “morbid-mindedness”. But James was surely right when he gave as part of the definition of morbid-mindedness that it ranged over “a wider scale of experience” than healthy-mindedness. What can be said, though, to the many sensible and sensitive people who find depressing the fact that a whole library of pornographic reading material has been made, within the last few years, so easily available in paperback form to the very young? Probably one thing: that their apprehension is justified, but may not be in scale. I am not addressing the usual complainers, those who feel that since sex after all is dirty, so are books reveling in sex (dirty in a way that a genocide screened nightly on TV, apparently, is not). There still remains a sizeable minority of people who object to or are repelled by pornography not because they think it’s dirty but because they know that pornography can be a crutch for the psychologically deformed and a brutalization of the morally innocent. I feel an aversion to pornography for those reasons, too, and am uncomfortable about the consequences of its increasing availability. But isn’t the worry somewhat misplaced?

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  He closes his eyes in frustration and runs his hand through his hair. “Please, Ana. Let Taylor take you home.” “I’ll get the car, Miss Steele,” Taylor announces authoritatively. Christian nods at him, and when I glance around, Taylor has gone. I turn back to face Christian. We are four feet apart. He steps forward, and instinctively I step back. He stops, and the anguish in his expression is palpable, his gray eyes burning. “I don’t want you to go,” he murmurs, his voice full of longing. “I can’t stay. I know what I want and you can’t give it to me, and I can’t give you what you need.” He takes another step forward, and I hold up my hands. “Don’t—please.” I recoil from him. There’s no way I can tolerate his touch now. It will slay me. “I can’t do this.” Grabbing my suitcase and my backpack, I head for the foyer. He follows me, keeping a careful distance. He presses the elevator button, and the doors open. I walk in and turn to face him. “Goodbye, Christian,” I murmur. “Ana…goodbye,” he says softly, and he looks utterly, utterly broken, a man in agonizing pain, reflecting how I feel inside. I tear my gaze away from him before I change my mind and try to comfort him. The elevator doors close and it whisks me down to the bowels of the basement and to my own personal hell. Taylor holds the door open for me, and I climb into the back of the car. I avoid eye contact. Embarrassment and shame wash over me. I’m a complete failure. I had hoped to drag my Fifty Shades into the light, but it’s proved a task beyond my meager abilities. Desperately, I try to keep my emotions banked and at bay. As we head out onto Fourth Avenue, I stare blankly out the window, and the enormity of what I’ve done slowly washes over me. Shit—I’ve left him. The only man I’ve ever loved. The only man I’ve ever slept with. I gasp, as crippling pain slices through me, and the levees burst. Tears course unbidden and unwelcome down my cheeks, and I wipe them away hurriedly with my fingers, scrambling in my bag for my sunglasses. As we pause at some traffic light, Taylor holds out a linen handkerchief for me. He says nothing and doesn’t look in my direction, and I take it with gratitude. “Thank you,” I mutter, and this small discreet act of kindness is my undoing. I sit back in the luxurious leather seat and weep.

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  Her condition, if it can be characterized as one of dehumanization, is not to be understood as a by-product of her enslavement to René, Sir Stephen, and the other men at Roissy, but as the point of her situation, something she seeks and eventually attains. The terminal image for her achievement comes in the last scene of the book: O is led to a party, mutilated, in chains, unrecognizable, costumed (as an owl)—so convincingly no longer human that none of the guests thinks of speaking to her directly. O’s quest is neatly summed up in the expressive letter which serves her for a name. “O” suggests a cartoon of her sex, not her individual sex but simply woman; it also stands for a nothing. But what Story of O unfolds is a spiritual paradox, that of the full void and of the vacuity that is also a plenum. The power of the book lies exactly in the anguish stirred up by the continuing presence of this paradox. “Pauline Réage” raises, in a far more organic and sophisticated manner than Sade does with his clumsy expositions and discourses, the question of the status of human personality itself. But whereas Sade is interested in the obliteration of personality from the viewpoint of power and liberty, the author of Story of O is interested in the obliteration of personality from the viewpoint of happiness. (The closest statement of this theme in English literature: certain passages in Lawrence’s The Lost Girl .) For the paradox to gain real significance, however, the reader must entertain a view of sex different from that held by most enlightened members of the community. The prevailing view—an amalgam of Rousseauist, Freudian, and liberal social thought—regards the phenomenon of sex as a perfectly intelligible, although uniquely precious, source of emotional and physical pleasure. What difficulties arise come from the long deformation of the sexual impulses administered by Western Christianity, whose ugly wounds virtually everyone in this culture bears. First, guilt and anxiety. Then, the reduction of sexual capacities—leading if not to virtual impotence or frigidity, at least to the depletion of erotic energy and the repression of many natural elements of sexual appetite (the “perversions”). Then the spill-over into public dishonesties in which people tend to respond to news of the sexual pleasures of others with envy, fascination, revulsion, and spiteful indignation.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Two-thirds of the children grew up in families where they experienced multiple divorces and remarriages of one or both of their parents. Such figures don’t capture the many cohabitations and brief love affairs that never become legal relationships. Given this experience, can we be surprised that so many children of divorce conclude that love is fleeting? Ghosts of Childhood W HEN I TURNED to the notes of my interview with Karen fifteen years after her parents’ divorce, the image of a young woman crying inconsolably entered my mind. Karen was sitting on the sofa in my old office, with her chin in her hands and elbows on her knees, telling me about her live-in relationship with her boyfriend Nick. “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said, twisting a damp tissue into the shape of a rope. “I can’t believe I’ve gotten myself into this. I never should have done it. It’s like my worst nightmare come to life. It’s what I grew up dreading most and look what happened.” Karen gripped her fingers tightly until her knuckles shone like moons. “What’s wrong?” I asked, as gently as I could. “Everything,” she moaned. “He drinks beer. He has no ambition, no life goals, no education, no regular job. He’s going nowhere. When I come home after work, he’s just sitting there in front of the TV and that’s where he’s been all day.” Then Karen’s voice dropped. “But he loves me,” she said in anguish. “He would be devastated if I ever left him.” Even in her great distress and anger she was intensely cognizant of her boyfriend’s suffering. I thought to myself, this epitomizes Karen—she’s always aware of other people’s hurts and suffering. “But then why did you move in with him? ” “I’m not sure. I knew I didn’t love him. But I was scared of marriage. I was scared of divorce, and I’m terrified of being alone. Look, you can hope for love but you can’t expect it! When Nick asked me to live with him, I was afraid that I’d get older and that I wouldn’t have another chance. I kept thinking that I’d end up lonely like my dad. And Mom.” I looked at this beautiful young woman and shook my head in disbelief. Could she really think that shacking up with a man she didn’t love was all she could hope for? Karen must have read my mind because she quickly said, “I know. People have been telling me how pretty I am since I was a child. But I don’t believe it. And I don’t care. Looks were always important to my mother. She wears tons of makeup and dresses like a model. I thought she was silly and still do.

• From The Lover (1984)

  In the dormitory the light is blue. There’s a smell of incense, they always burn incense at dusk. The heat is oppressive, all the windows are wide open, and there’s not a breath of air. I take my shoes off so as not to make any noise, but I’m not worried, I know the mistress in charge won’t get up, I know it’s accepted now that I come back at night at whatever time I like. I go straight to where H.L. is, always slightly anxious, always afraid she may have run away during the day. But she’s there. She sleeps deeply, H.L. An obstinate, almost hostile sleep, I remember. Expressing rejection. Her bare arms are flung up in abandon around her head. Her body is not lying down decorously like those of the other girls, her legs are bent, her face is invisible, her pillow awry. I expect she was waiting for me but fell asleep as she waited, impatient and angry. She must have been crying too, and then lapsed into oblivion. I’d like to wake her up, have a whispered conversation. I don’t talk to the man from Cholon any more, he doesn’t talk to me, I need to hear H.L.’s questions. She has the matchless attentiveness of those who don’t understand what is said to them. But I can’t wake her up. Once she’s awakened like that, in the middle of the night, H.L. can’t go back to sleep again. She gets up, wants to go outside, does so, goes down the stairs, along the corridors, out all alone into the big empty playgrounds, she runs, she calls out to me, she’s so happy, it’s irresistible, and when she’s not allowed to go out with the other girls, you know that’s just what she wants. I hesitate, but then no, I don’t wake her up. Under the mosquito net the heat is stifling, when you close the net after you it seems unendurable. But I know it’s because I’ve come in from outside, from the banks of the river where it’s always cool at night. I’m used to it, I keep still, wait for it to pass. It passes. I never fall asleep right away despite the new fatigues in my life. I think about the man from Cholon. He’s probably in a nightclub somewhere near the Fountain with his driver, they’ll be drinking in silence, they drink arrack when they’re on their own. Or else he’s gone home, he’s fallen asleep with the light on, still without speaking to anyone. That night I can’t bear the thought of the man from Cholon any more. Nor the thought of H.L. It’s as if they were happy, and as if it came from outside themselves. And I have nothing like that. My mother says, This one will never be satisfied with anything. I think I’m beginning to see my life. I think I can already say, I have a vague desire to die. From now on I treat that word and my life as inseparable. I think I have a vague desire to be alone, just as I realize I’ve never been alone any more since I left childhood behind, and the family of the hunter. I’m going to write. That’s what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me.

• From The Lover (1984)

  After my mother’s death he’s left alone. He has no friends, never has had, sometimes he’s had women who “worked” for him in Montparnasse, sometimes women who didn’t work for him, at least to begin with, sometimes men, but then they did the paying. He lived a very lonely life. And more so as he grew older. He was only a layabout, he operated on a very small scale. He inspired fear in his immediate circle, but no farther. When he lost us he lost his real empire. He wasn’t a gangster, just a family layabout, a rummager in closets, a murderer without a gun. He didn’t take any risks. Layabouts all live as he did, without any loyalty, without any grandeur, in fear. He was afraid. After my mother’s death he leads a strange existence. In Tours. The only people he knows are waiters in cafés, for the racing tips, and the bibulous patrons of backroom poker games. He starts to look like them, drinks a lot, gets bloodshot eyes and slurred speech. In Tours he had nothing. Both houses had been sold off. Nothing. For a year he lived in a furniture warehouse leased by my mother. For a year he slept in an armchair. They let him go there. Stay for a year. Then they threw him out. For a year he must have hoped to buy his mortgaged property back. He gambled away my mother’s furniture out of storage, bit by bit. The bronze Buddhas, the brasses, then the beds, then the wardrobes, then the sheets. And then one day he has nothing left, that does happen to people like him, one day he has the suit on his back and nothing else, not a sheet, not a shelter. He’s alone. For a year no one will open their door to him. He writes to a cousin in Paris. He can have a servant’s room in the boulevard Malesherbes. And when he’s over fifty he’ll have his first job, his first wages ever, as messenger for a marine insurance company. That lasted, I think, fifteen years. He had to go into the hospital. He didn’t die there. He died in his room. My mother never talked about that one of her children. She never mentioned the rummager in closets to anyone. She treated the fact that she was his mother as if it were a crime. She kept it hidden. She must have thought it was unintelligible, impossible to convey to anyone who didn’t know her son as she did, before God and only before Him. She repeated little platitudes about him, always the same ones. That if he’d wanted to he could have been the cleverest of the three. The most “artistic.” The most astute. And he was the one who’d loved his mother most. The one, in short, who’d understood her best. I didn’t know, she’d say, that you could expect that of a boy, such intuition, such deep affection.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  said they needed to go. They had so much to do before they came back for good. My head snapped in their direction. “What do you mean, for good?” “Your mama will tell you, honey. Bye, you all.” The door closed and my mouth opened in a long, dry wail. “Why are they coming back? Are you leaving?” “Kids, I have something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Come sit on the couch with me.” Gary crawled on the couch. I kept my distance. “I know this is hard. It’s hard for me, too, but there are people who have never heard of Jesus. I’m going to travel with Brother Terrell and help him tell the world about Christ.” I put my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to help anyone. I don’t want to hear anything you say.” I ran into my room and crawled under my bed. Mama followed me and sat on the bed. Her voice rose and fell and rose and fell, saying all the things I already knew about Jesus and God and sacrifice. I couldn’t bear to hear her talk. I wanted her to go, just go. My brother bawled like a baby calf in the living room. I would have felt better if I could have cried, but I couldn’t squeeze out a single tear. The bed creaked and I watched the back of her heels shuffle away. I slid out from under the bed and headed for the front door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my brother and mother sitting on the couch. She held him in her lap and rocked him like a baby. “Donna? Donna?” The crack in her voice made me want to turn around, but I slammed through the door and headed to the brown, crunchy field across the street. Just a few weeks earlier, the tall green thicket of leafy weeds provided a jungle in which we played for hours. Now it was a bunch of tall sticks with a few gray leaves twirling in the hot wind. I picked up a long stick and began to walk and slash the dried stalks around me. With every step I repeated the same phrase: “I will never forget this.” Gary cried every night after our mother left and refused to eat much for weeks. He looked like a baby bird: big head, big eyes, bony little body. I busied myself practicing my letters and learning to read short, simple words. I wanted to be ready when I started first grade that fall. I took all my shots without crying. Then at the last minute, Queenie and Rita found out that because my birthday fell too late in the month of September, I would have to wait until the next year to start school.

• From The Lover (1984)

  He’d asked him, implored him to let him keep me with him, close to him, he’d told him he must understand, must have known a passion like this himself at least once in his long life, it couldn’t be otherwise, he’d begged him to let him have his turn at living, just once, this passion, this madness, this infatuation with the little white girl, he’d asked him to give him time to love her a while longer before sending her away to France, let him have her a little longer, another year perhaps, because it wasn’t possible for him to give up this love yet, it was too new, too strong still, too much in its first violence, it was too terrible for him to part yet from her body, especially since, as he the father knew, it could never happen again. The father said he’d sooner see him dead. We bathed together in the cool water from the jars, we kissed, we wept, and again it was unto death, but this time, already, the pleasure it gave was inconsolable. And then I told him. I told him not to have any regrets, I reminded him of what he’d said, that I’d go away from everywhere, that I wasn’t responsible for what I did. He said he didn’t mind even that now, nothing counted any more. Then I said I agreed with his father. That I refused to stay with him. I didn’t give any reasons.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It’s a family of stone, petrified so deeply it’s impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don’t even look at one another. When you’re being looked at you can’t look. To look is to feel curious, to be interested, to lower yourself. No one you look at is worth it. Looking is always demeaning. The word conversation is banished. I think that’s what best conveys the shame and the pride. Every sort of community, whether of the family or other, is hateful to us, degrading. We’re united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It’s here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother’s children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We’re on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what’s been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves. My mother didn’t foresee what was going to become of us as a result of witnessing her despair. I’m speaking particularly of the boys, her sons. But even if she had foreseen it, how could she have kept quiet about what had become her own essential fate? How could she have made them all lie—her face, her eyes, her voice? Her love? She could have died. Done away with herself. Broken up our intolerable community. Seen to it that the eldest was completely separated from the younger two. But she didn’t. She was careless, muddle-headed, irresponsible. All that. She went on living. And all three of us loved her beyond love. Just because she couldn’t, because she wasn’t able to keep quiet, hide things, lie, we, different as we all three were from one another, all three loved her in the same way. • • • It went on for a long time. Seven years. When it began we were ten. And then we were twelve. Then thirteen. Then fourteen, fifteen, Then sixteen, seventeen. It lasted all that age, seven years. And then finally hope was given up. Abandoned. Like the struggles against the sea. From the shade of the veranda we look at the mountains of Siam, dark in broad daylight, almost black. My mother is quiet at last, mute. We, her children, are heroic, desperate.

• From The Lover (1984)

  He takes her as he would his own child. He’d take his own child the same way. He plays with his child’s body, turns it over, covers his face with it, his lips, his eyes. And she, she goes on abandoning herself in exactly the same way as he set when he started. Then suddenly it’s she who’s imploring, she doesn’t say what for, and he, he shouts to her to be quiet, that he doesn’t want to have anything more to do with her, doesn’t want to have his pleasure of her any more. And now once more they are caught together, locked together in terror, and now the terror abates again, and now they succumb to it again, amid tears, despair, and happiness. They are silent all evening long. In the black car that takes her back to the boarding school she leans her head on his shoulder. He puts his arm around her. He says it’s a good thing the boat from France is coming soon to take her away and separate them. They are silent during the drive. Sometimes he tells the driver to go around by the river. She sleeps, exhausted, on his shoulder. He wakes her with kisses.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  the pleasure of knowing you, leaving the world behind. In any case, some people are too fragile to be cut off from their base of support. The great modern courtesan Pamela Harriman had a solution to this problem: she isolated her victims from their families, their former or present wives, and in place of those old connections she quickly set up new comforts for her lovers. She overwhelmed them with attention, attending to their every need. In the case of Averill Harriman, the billionaire who eventually married her, she literally established a new home for him, one that had no associations with the past and was full of the pleasures of the present. It is unwise to keep the seduced dangling in midair for too long, with nothing familiar or comforting in sight. Instead, replace the familiar things you have cut them off from with a new home, a new series of comforts. Phase Three The Precipice— Deepening the Effect Through Extreme Measures The goal in this phase is to make everything deeper—the effect you have on their mind, feelings of love and attachment, tension within your victims. With your hooks deep into them, you can then push them back and forth, between hope and despair, until they weaken and snap. Showing how far you are willing to go for your victims, doing some noble or chivalrous deed (16: Prove yourself) will create a powerful jolt, spark an intensely positive reaction. Everyone has scars, repressed desires, and unfinished business from childhood. Bring these desires and wounds to the surface, make your victims feel they are getting what they never got as a child and you will penetrate deep into their psyche, stir uncontrollable emotions (17: Effect a regression). Now you can take your victims past their limits, getting them to act out their dark sides, adding a sense of danger to your seduction (18: Stir up the transgressive and taboo). You need to deepen the spell, and nothing will more confuse and enchant your victims than giving your seduction a spiritual veneer. It is not lust that motivates you, but destiny, divine thoughts and everything elevated (19: Use spiritual lures). The erotic lurks beneath the spiritual. Now your victims have been properly set up. By deliberately hurting them, instilling fears and anxieties, you will lead them to the edge of the precipice from which it will be easy to push and make them fall (20: Mix pleasure with pain). They feel great tension and are yearning for relief. Prove Yourself Most people want to be seduced. If they resist your efforts, it is proba- bly because you have not gone far enough to allay their doubts— about your motives, the depth of your feel- ings, and so on. One well-timed ac- tion that shows how far you are willing to go to win them over will dispel their doubts. Do not worry about looking foolish or making a mistake— any kind of deed that is self-sacrificing and for your targets'

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  easily be redirected into love. promising me your love when I have performed great toils. God forbid that I or any other could win Some Examples the love of so worthy a woman without first 1. In France in the 1640s, Marion de l'Orme was the courtesan men lusted attaining it by many labors." after the most. Renowned for her beauty, she had been the mistress of Cardinal Richelieu, among other notable political and military figures. To win — A N D R E A S C A P E L L A N U S ON LOVE, TRANSLATED BY her bed was a sign of achievement. P . G . W A L S H For weeks the rake Count Grammont had wooed de l'Orme, and finally she had given him an appointment for a particular evening. The count prepared himself for a delightful encounter, but on the day of the appoint-One day, [ Saint-Preuil] ment he received a letter from her in which she expressed, in polite and pleaded more than usual tender terms, her terrible regrets—she had the most awful headache, and that [ Madame de la Maisonfort] grant him the would have to stay in bed that evening. Their appointment would have to ultimate favors a woman be postponed. The count felt certain he was being pushed to the side for could offer, and he went someone else, for de l'Orme was as capricious as she was beautiful. beyond just words in his Grammont did not hesitate. At nightfall he rode to the Marais, where pleading. Madame, saying he had gone way too far, de l'Orme lived, and scouted the area. In a square near her home he spot-ordered him to never ever ted a man approaching on foot. Recognizing the Duc de Brissac, he imme-appear before her again. diately knew that this man was to supplant him in the courtesan's bed. He left her room. Only an hour later, the lady was Brissac seemed unhappy to see the count, and so Grammont approached taking her customary walk him hurriedly and said, "Brissac, my friend, you must do me a service of along one of those beautiful the greatest importance: I have an appointment, for the first time, with a canals at Bagnolet, when Saint-Preuil leapt out from girl who lives near this place; and as this visit is only to concert measures, I behind a hedge, totally shall make but a very short stay. Be so kind as to lend me your cloak, and naked, and standing before walk my horse a little, until I return; but above all, do not go far from this his mistress in this state, he place." Without waiting for an answer, Grammont took the duke's cloak cried out, "For the last time, Madame— and handed him the bridle of his horse. Looking back, he saw that Brissac Goodbye!" Thereupon, he was watching him, so he pretended to enter a house, slipped out through threw himself into the

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I just walked till I got too cold, and then I turned around.” “You didn’t sleep?” “No! The dreams are terrible. In my dreams, she doesn’t even look like herself anymore. I don’t even remember what she looked like.” I let go of his hand, grabbed last year’s yearbook, and found her picture. In the black-and-white photograph, she’s wearing her orange tank top and cutoff jeans that stretch halfway down her skinny thighs, her mouth open wide in a frozen laugh as her left arm holds Takumi in a headlock. Her hair falls over her face just enough to obscure her cheeks. “Right,” the Colonel said. “Yeah. I was so tired of her getting upset for no reason. The way she would get sulky and make references to the freaking oppressive weight of tragedy or whatever but then never said what was wrong, never have any goddamned reason to be sad. And I just think you ought to have a reason. My girlfriend dumped me, so I’m sad. I got caught smoking, so I’m pissed off. My head hurts, so I’m cranky. She never had a reason, Pudge. I was just so tired of putting up with her drama. And I just let her go. Christ.” Her moodiness had annoyed me, too, sometimes, but not that night. That night I let her go because she told me to. It was that simple for me, and that stupid. The Colonel’s hand was so little, and I grabbed it tight, his cold seeping into me and my warmth into him. “I memorized the populations,” he said. “Uzbekistan.” “Twenty-four million seven hundred fifty-five thousand five hundred and nineteen.” “Cameroon,” I said, but it was too late. He was asleep, his hand limp in mine. I placed it back under the quilt and climbed up into his bed, a top-bunk man for this night at least. I fell asleep listening to his slow, even breaths, his stubbornness finally melting away in the face of insurmountable fatigue. six days after THAT SUNDAY, I got up after three hours of sleep and showered for the first time in a long while. I put on my only suit. I almost hadn’t brought it, but my mom insisted that you never know when you’re going to need a suit, and sure enough. The Colonel did not own a suit, and by virtue of his stature could not borrow one from anyone at the Creek, so he wore black slacks and a gray button-down. “I don’t suppose I can wear the flamingo tie,” he said as he pulled on black socks. “It’s a bit festive, given the occasion,” I responded. “Can’t wear it to the opera,” said the Colonel, almost smiling. “Can’t wear it to a funeral. Can’t use it to hang myself.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  10Sometimes … Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride—and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look—a gray furry question mark of a look: “Oh no, not again” (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours–how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and—“Pulease, leave me alone, will you,” you would say, “for Christ’s sake leave me alone.” And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story. 11One Monday forenoon, in December I think, Pratt asked me to come over for a talk. Dolly’s last report had been poor, I knew. But instead of contenting myself with some such plausible explanation of this summons, I imagined all sorts of horrors, and had to fortify myself with a pint of my “pin” before I could face the interview. Slowly, all Adam’s apple and heart, I went up the steps of the scaffold. A huge woman, gray-haired, frowsy, with a broad flat nose and small eyes behind black-rimmed glasses—“Sit down,” she said, pointing to an informal and humiliating hassock, while she perched with ponderous spryness on the arm of an oak chair. For a moment or two, she peered at me with smiling curiosity. She had done it at our first meeting, I recalled, but I could afford then to scowl back. Her eye left me. She lapsed into thought—probably assumed. Making up her mind she rubbed, fold on fold, her dark gray flannel skirt at the knee, dispelling a trace of chalk or something. Then she said, still rubbing, not looking up: “Let me ask a blunt question, Mr. Haze. You are an old-fashioned Continental father, aren’t you?” “Why, no,” I said, “conservative, perhaps, but not what you would call old-fashioned.” She sighed, frowned, then clapped her big plump hands together in a let’s-get-down-to-business manner, and again fixed her beady eyes upon me. “Dolly Haze,” she said, “is a lovely child, but the onset of sexual maturing seems to give her trouble.” I bowed slightly. What else could I do?