Disappointment

Passages

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

Page 60 of 189 · 20 per page

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “No one here by that name, Madam,” said a long, thin concierge who looked like Bob Cratchit. My heart sank. “Are you sure?” “Here, you can have a look at the register—if you like….” And he passed the book over to me. There were only about ten guests in that haunted house. You could see why. Swinging London had swung right by without stopping. I looked down the register. Strawbridge, Henkel, Harbellow, Bottom, Cohen, Kinney, Watts, Wong…. That was it. It had to be Wong. Of course they’d misspell it that way. All Chinese look alike and all Chinese names are Wong. I felt a great closeness to Bennett, having to put up with that kind of crap his whole life and not become bitter. “How about this one in Room 60?” I asked, pointing to the dumb misspelling. “Oh, the Japanese gentleman?” Shit, I thought. They never can tell the difference. “Yes, could you ring his room please?” “Who shall I say is calling?” “His wife.” The term “wife” apparently had clout back here in the nineteenth century. My friend Bob Cratchit literally sprang for the phone. Maybe it really was a Japanese gentleman. Toshiro Mifune perhaps? Complete with Samurai sword and topknot of hair? One of the rapists of Rashomon? The ghost of Yukio Mishima with his wounds still oozing? “I’m sorry, Madam, there’s no answer,” the deskman said. “May I wait in the room?” “Suit yourself, Madam.” And with that he banged a bell on his desk and called for the porter. Another Dickensian type. This one was shorter than me and had glossily Vase-lined hair. I followed him into the elevator cage. Many whirring minutes later, we arrived on the sixth floor. It was Bennett’s room all right; his jackets and ties hanging neatly in the closet. A stack of playbills on the dresser top, his toothbrush and shampoo on the rim of the old-fashioned sink. His slippers on the floor. His underwear and socks drying on the radiator. It scarcely felt as if I had been away at all. Had I? Was Bennett that able to adjust to my absence, calmly going to plays and coming home to wash his socks? The bed was a single. It was unmade but hardly looked tossed at all. I flipped through the stack of playbills. He’d seen every play in London. He had not cracked up or done anything crazy. He was the same predictable Bennett. I sighed with relief, or was it disappointment? I ran a bath for myself and stripped off my dirty clothes, letting them drop in a trail on the floor. The bathtub was one of those long, deep, claw-footed ones. A regular sarcophagus. I sank in up to my chin.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I found my first husband during my freshman year and married him after graduation four years later with occasional sidetrips and experiments in between. By the time I was twenty-two, I was a veteran of one marriage which had fallen apart under the most painful circumstances. Pia found a succession of bastards who fucked her and disappointed her. From college, she wrote long epistolary epics in her tiny baroque handwriting and described each bastard in detail, but somehow I could never tell them apart. They all seemed to have hollow cheekbones and lank blond hair. She was hung up on the midwestern shagetz the way certain Jewish guys are hung up on shikses. It was as if they were all the same guy. Huck Finn without a raft. Blond hair, blue denim, and cowboy boots. And they always wound up walking all over her. Progressively the two of us got more and more disillusioned. This was inevitable, of course, given the absurd fantasies we’d started out with, but I don’t think we were that different from other adolescent girls (though we were more literary and certainly more pretentious). All we wanted were men we could share everything with. Why was that so much to ask? Was it that men and women were basically incompatible? Or just that we hadn’t yet found the right ones? By the summer of ‘65 when we were both twenty-three and toured Europe together, our disillusionment was such that we slept with men principally to boast to each other about the number of scalps on our belts. In Florence, Pia paraphrased Robert Browning: Open my cunt and you shall see Engraved upon it: Italy. We slept with guys who sold wallets outside the Uffizi, with two black musicians who lived in a pensione across the Piazza, with Alitalia ticket clerks, with mail clerks from American Express. I had a weeklong affair with that married Italian named Alessandro who liked me to whisper “shit fuck cunt” in his ear while we screwed. This usually made me so hysterical with laughter that I lost interest in screwing. Then another weeklong affair with a middle-aged American professor of art history whose name was Michael Karlinsky and who signed his love letters “Michelangelo.” He had an alcoholic American wife in Fiesole, a gleaming bald head, a goatee, and a passion for Granità di Coffee. He wanted to eat orange segments out of my cunt because he’d read about it in The Perfumed Garden. And then there was the Italian voice student (tenor) who, on our second date, told me his favorite book was Sade’s Justine, and did I want to enact scenes from it? Experience for experience’s sake, Pia and I believed—but I never saw him again.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Where is the signing? What he did most Saturdays wasn’t all that different from standing on a street corner with an arrow sign, directing people to an army surplus store. And, although the dusty light sifted delicately through the high windows, and the spirit of studious contemplation lingered on in the phoney Tudor-style panelling of the walls and the carved roses and tulips that decorated the many balconies, no one in here was genuinely seeking enlightenment. And that was a shame, for Levi loved rap music; its beauty, ingenuity and humanity were neither obscure nor unlikely to him, and he could argue a case for its equal greatness against any of the artistic products of  On Beauty the human species. Half an hour of a customer’s time spent with Levi expressing this enthusiasm would be like listening to Harold Bloom wax lyrical about Falstaff – but the opportunity never arose. Instead he spent his days directing people to novelty rap records from hit movies. Consequently, Levi did not get paid enough or enjoy his time here sufficiently even to contemplate working the Christmas weekend. It just wasn’t going down like that. ‘Candy! Yo, Candy!’ Thirty feet away from Levi, and not sure, initially, who it was shouting at her, Candy turned from the customer she was dealing with and gave Levi a sign to leave her alone. Levi waited for her customer to move on. Then he jogged up to Candy in the Alt. Rock / Heavy Metal section and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, already sighing. She had a new piercing. A bolt that went through the skin on her chin, just beneath her bottom lip. That was the thing about working here: you met the kind of people you would never ever meet in any other circumstances. ‘Candy – I need to talk to you.’ ‘Look . . . I’ve been here since seven stocking and I’m going to lunch now so don’t even ask .’ ‘No, man – I just got here, I’m taking my break at twelve. Did you hear about Christmas Day?’ Candy groaned and rubbed her eyes vigorously. Levi noted the grubbiness of her fingers, the torn cuticles, the little translucent wart on her thumb. When she’d finished her face was purple and blotchy and clashed with the pink-black stripes of her hair. ‘Yeah, I heard about it.’ ‘They’re tripping if they think they gonna see me on that weekend. I am not working Christmas, it ain’t happening.’ ‘So, what – you going to quit or something?’ ‘Now, why would I do that? That’s plain dumb.’ ‘Well, you can complain, but . . .’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  The absurdity of this plan – economically, personally, educationally – was debated loudly here in the middle of the road, while the Thai woman who ran the stall grew nervous about the weight of Kiki’s elbow as it pressed down beside a pyramid display of her useful little men. ‘So I’m just meant to sit around like an asshole – pretend nothing happened, is that it?’ ‘No, it means we’ll deal it with politely as a family who – ’ ‘Because of course that’s the Kiki way of dealing with trouble,’ said Jerome over his mother. ‘Just ignore the problem, forgive and forget, and poof, it’s gone away.’ They stared at each other for a moment, Jerome brazen and Kiki surprised at his brazenness. He was, temperamentally, traditionally, the mildest of her children, the one she had always felt closest to. ‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ said Jerome bitterly. ‘He only ever thinks of himself. He doesn’t care who he hurts.’ ‘We’re not talking about . . . about that, we’re talking about you.’ ‘I’m just saying,’ said Jerome uneasily, apparently scared of his own topic. ‘Don’t tell me I’m not dealing with my stuff when you’re not dealing with yours.’ It surprised Kiki, how angry Jerome was about Howard, apparently on her behalf. It made her envious too – she wished she could muster up such clarity of hate. But she could not feel fury for Howard any more. If she was going to leave him, she should have done so in the winter. But she had stayed and now summer was  On Beauty here. The only account she could give of this decision was that she was not quite done loving him, which was the same as saying she was not yet done with Love – Love itself being coeval with knowing Howard. What was one night in Michigan set against Love! ‘Jerome,’ she said regretfully, and looked to the ground. But now he was determined to have his parting shot – children in a righteous mood always are. Kiki recalled being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old; remembered feeling exactly this: that if her family could only speak the truth, together they would emerge, weeping but clear-eyed, into the light. Jerome said, ‘It’s like, a family doesn’t work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?’ Kiki’s kids always seemed to say ‘you know’ at the end of their sentences these days, but they never waited to find out if she did know. By the time Kiki looked up, Jerome was already a hundred feet away, tunnelling into the accepting crowd. 

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi laughed nervously. ‘Now, Choo . . . don’t look too excited, you know, all at once, now.’ Choo looked Levi straight in his eyes, hoping for fellow feeling. ‘I really fucking hate to sell things, you know?’ he said, pretty sorrowfully, Levi thought. ‘Choo – you ain’t selling , man,’ said Levi keenly in reply. Now that he understood the problem he was happy – it was so easily solved! It was just a matter of attitude. He said, ‘This ain’t like working the counter at CVS! You hustling , man. And that’s a different thing. That’s street . To hustle is to be alive – you dead if you don’t know how to hustle. And you ain’t a brother if you can’t hustle. That’s what joins us all together – whether we be on Wall Street or on MTV or sitting on a corner with a dime-bag. It’s a beautiful thing, man. We hustling!’ This, the most complete version of Levi’s personal philosophy that he himself had ever articulated, hung in the air awaiting its appropriate Amen! ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ said Choo, sighing. ‘Let’s get going.’ This disappointed Levi. Even if the other guys didn’t fully understand Levi’s enthusiasm for what they did, they always smiled and played along, and they had learned a few of the artificial words that Levi liked to apply to their real-life situation. Hustler , Playa , Gangsta , Pimp . The reflection of themselves in Levi’s eyes was, after all, a more than welcome replacement for their own realities. Who wouldn’t rather be a gangsta than a street-hawker? Who wouldn’t rather hustle than sell? Who would choose their own lonely, dank rooms over this Technicolor video, this outdoor community that Levi insisted they were all a part of ? The Street, the global Street, lined with hustling brothers working  On Beauty corners from Roxbury to Casablanca, from South Central to Cape Town. Levi tried again: ‘I’m talking about hustlin’ , man! It’s like – ’ ‘Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Gucci, Fendi, Fendi, Prada, Prada,’ called Choo, as he had been instructed. Two middle-aged white women paused by his display, and started to boldly haggle him down. Levi noticed that his colleague’s English transformed at once into something simpler, monosyllabic. He noted also how much more comfortable the women were dealing with Choo than they were with Levi. When Levi tried to interject a little speech about the quality of the merchandise, they looked at him strangely, almost affronted. Of course, they never want conversation – Felix had explained that. They’re ashamed to be buying from you. It was a hard thing to remember, after the mega-store, where people had taken such pride in their capacity as purchasers. Levi zipped his mouth and watched Choo swiftly collect eighty-five dollars for three bags. That was the other good thing about this business: if people were going to buy, they did it quickly and walked on quickly.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  A mega-store demands a mega-building. When Levi’s Saturday employers blew into Boston seven years ago, several grand nineteenth-century structures were considered. The winner was the old municipal library, built in the s in brash red brick with glittering black windows and a high Ruskinian arch above the door. The building took up most of the block it stood upon. In this building Oscar Wilde once gave a lecture concerning the superiority of the lily over all other flowers. One opened the doors by twisting an iron hoop in both hands and awaiting the soft heavy click as metal released metal. Now those twelve-foot oak doors have been replaced by triple sets of glass panels that silently part when people approach. Levi walked through these and touched fists with Marlon and Big James in security. He took the elevator to the basement storeroom to change into the branded T-shirt, the baseball cap and the cheap, skinny-legged, tapered-ankle, lint-ball-attracting black polyester pants they made him wear. He rode the elevator up to the fourth floor and made his way to his department, his eyes to the floor, following the repeated brand logo in the synthetic carpet underfoot. He was pissed off. He felt he’d been let down. Along the corridor he traced the genealogy of the feeling. He had taken  On Beauty this Saturday job in good faith, having always admired the global brand behind these stores, the scope and ambition of their vision. He had been particularly impressed by this section of the application form: Our companies are part of a family rather than a hierarchy. They are empowered to run their own affairs, yet other companies help one another, and solutions to problems come from all kinds of sources. In a sense we are a community, with shared ideas, values, interests and goals. The proof of our success is real and tangible. Be a part of it. He had wanted to be a part of it. Levi liked the way the mythical British guy who owned the brand was like a graffiti artist, tagging the world. Planes, trains, finance, soft drinks, music, cellphones, vacations, cars, wines, publishing, bridal wear – anything with a surface that would take his simple bold logo. That was the kind of thing Levi wanted to do one day. He’d figured that it wasn’t such a bad idea to get a little sales assistant job with this enormous firm, if only to see how their operation worked from the inside. Watch, learn, supplant – Machiavelli style. Even when it turned out to be tough work for bad pay, he’d stuck with it. Because he believed that he was part of a family whose success was real and tangible, despite the $. an hour he was being paid.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The fact was that I was always a compulsive A-student and tests were easy for me, but in graduate school the bullshit was so high you simply couldn’t overlook it. So I slept through it. I slept through the comprehensive exams in May. I slept instead of working on my thesis. On the rare occasions when I made it to class, I sat there scribbling poems in my notebooks. One day I worked up the guts to pour out my troubles to Professor Stanton. “I don’t think I want to be a professor,” I said, trembling in my purple suede boots. It was sacrilege. My Woodrow Wilson Fellowship committed me to college teaching. It was almost like abjuring God, country, and flag. “But you’re such an excellent student, Mrs. Stollerman, what else could you do?” (What else indeed? What else might there be in life but Aesthetic Implications in the Dialectic of Satire?) “Well, er, I think I want to write.” I said it as apologetically as if it were: “I think I want to kill my mother.” Professor Stanton looked troubled. “Oh that,” he said, vexed. Students were probably always coming to him with futile ambitions like wanting to write. “You see, Professor Stanton, I started studying eighteenth-century English literature because I love satire, but I think I want to write satire not criticize it. Criticism doesn’t seem very satisfying somehow.” “Satisfying!” he exploded. I gulped. “What makes you think graduate school is supposed to be satisfying? Literature is work, not fun,” he said. “Yes,” I said meekly. “You come to graduate school because you love to read, because you love literature—well, literature is hard work! It’s not a game!” Professor Stanton seemed to have found his true subject. “Yes, but if you’ll excuse me, Professor Stanton, it does seem that all this criticism is out of keeping with the spirit of Fielding or Pope or Swift. I mean I always imagine them lying there in their graves and laughing at us all. This is just the sort of thing they’d find funny. I mean I read Pope or Swift or Fielding and it makes me want to write. It starts my mind going on poems. The criticism seems sort of silly to me. I’m sorry to say this, but it does.” “Who made you the guardian of the spirit of Pope? Or Swift? Or Fielding?” “No one.” “Then what the hell are you complaining about?” “I’m not complaining. I just think I may have made a mistake. I think I really want to write.” “Mrs. Stollerman, you’ll have plenty of time to write after you get your Ph.D. under your belt. And then you’ll always have something to fall back on just in case you’re not Emily Dickinson.” “I suppose you’re right,” I said, and went home to sleep.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Finally, two years later, after many more attempts, I drafted a disgustingly submissive, meek, and apologetic letter to the editor in question, tore it up ten times before mailing, retyped it eleven times, retyped my poems fifteen times (they had to be letter perfect, one typo and I threw away the page—and I had never learned to type) and sent the damned manila envelope off to New York. By return mail, I received a really warm letter (which even my paranoia couldn’t misinterpret), a notice of acceptance, and a check. How long do you suppose it would have taken me to get the next letter out if I had received a rejection slip? This was the dazzlingly self-confident creature who began treatment with Dr. Happe in Heidelberg. Gradually I learned how to sit still at my desk long enough to work. Gradually I learned how to send off manuscripts and write letters. I felt like a stroke victim learning penmanship all over again, and Dr. Happe was my guide. He was mild and patient and funny. He taught me to stop hating myself. He was as rare a psychoanalyst as he was a German. It was I who kept saying dumb things like: “Oh well, I might as well give up this nonsense of writing and just have a baby.” And it was he who was always pointing out the falseness of such a “solution.” I hadn’t seen him for two and a half years, but I had sent him my first book of poems and he had written me about it. “Zo,” he said, like the comic-book German he wasn’t, “I see you no longer have trouble writing letters….” “No, but I certainly have lots of other trouble…” and I spilled out my whole confused story of what had happened since we arrived in Vienna. He wasn’t going to interpret it for me, he said. He was only going to remind me of what he’d said many times before: “You’re not a secretary; you’re a poet. What makes you think your life is going to be uncomplicated? What makes you think you can avoid all conflict? What makes you think you can avoid pain? Or passion? There’s something to be said for passion. Can’t you ever allow yourself and forgive yourself?” “Apparently not. The trouble is I’m really a puritan at heart. All pornographers are puritans.” “You are certainly not a pornographer,” he said. “No, but it sounded good. I liked those two p’s. The alliteration.” Dr. Happe smiled. Did he know the word “alliteration"? I wondered. I remembered how I always used to ask him if he understood my English. Perhaps for two and a half years he’d understood nothing.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I pursue a man I madly desire, and what happens? He goes limp as a waterlogged noodle and refuses me. Men and women, women and men. It will never work, I thought. Back in the days when men were hunters and chest-beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid…. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild—and what happened? The men wilted. It was hopeless. I had desired Adrian as I had never desired anyone before in my life, and the very intensity of my need canceled out his. The more I showed my passion, the cooler he became. The more I risked to be with him, the less he was willing to risk to be with me. Was it really that simple? Did it all come down to what my mother had told me years ago about “playing hard to get"? It did seem to be true that the men who had loved me hardest were the ones I was most casual about. But what was the fun of that? What was the point? Couldn’t you ever bring philos and eros together, at least for a little while? What was the point of this constant round of alternating losses, this constant cycle of desire and indifference, indifference and desire? I had to find a hotel. It was late and dark and my suitcase was not only a great encumbrance, but it increased my air of availability. I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone—the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Then out of nowhere this morning he received a message on his pager from Tom, a nice kid who worked in the Folk Music section of the store. According to Tom, there was a rumour going around that the floor manager, Bailey, required all floor and counter staff to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It then struck Levi that he had never seriously considered precisely what his employer, the impressive global brand, really meant by these shared ideas, values, interests and goals of which he and Tom and Candy and Gina and LaShonda and Gloria and Jamal and all the rest supposedly partook. Music for the people? Choice is paramount? All music all the time? ‘ Get the money ,’ suggested Howard at breakfast. ‘ No matter what . That’s their motto.’ ‘I am not working Christmas Day,’ said Levi.  the anatomy lesson ‘Nor should you,’ agreed Howard. ‘That’s just not happening. That’s bullshit.’ ‘Well, if you really feel like that, then you need to get your fellow employees together and implement some kind of direct action.’ ‘I don’t even know what that is.’ Over their toast and coffee, Levi’s father explained the principles of direct action as it was practised between  and  by Howard and his friends. He spoke at length about someone called Gramsci and some people called the Situationists. Levi nodded quickly and regularly, as he had learned to do when his father made speeches of this kind. He felt his eyelids tugging low and his spoon heavy in his hand. ‘I don’t think that’s how things go down now,’ Levi said at last, gently, not wanting to disappoint his father, but needing to catch the bus. It was a nice enough story, but it was making him late for work. Now Levi arrived at his sector in the west wing of the fourth floor. He’d been recently promoted, although it was more of a conceptual promotion than a fiscal one. Instead of having to be wherever he was needed, he now worked exclusively in Hip-hop, R & B and Urban; he had been encouraged to believe that this would involve him imparting his knowledge of these genres to knowledge-seeking customers, just as the librarians who once walked this floor had helped the readers who came to them. But that wasn’t exactly how it had panned out. Where are the toilets? Where is Jazz? Where is World Music? Where is the cafe´? Where is the

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  So we walked through the Freud house in search of revelation. I think we half expected to see Montgomery Clift dressed and bearded like Freud and exploring the eaves of his own dank unconscious. What we saw, in fact, was disappointing. Most of the furniture had gone to Hampstead with Freud and now belonged to his daughter. The Vienna Freud Museum had to make do with photographs and largely empty rooms. Freud had lived here for nearly half a century, but there was no scent of him left—just photographs and a waiting room reconstituted with overstuffed furniture of the period. There was a photograph of the famous consulting room with its Oriental carpet-covered analytic couch, its Egyptian and Chinese figurines, and its fragments of ancient sculpture, but the consulting room itself had vanished, along with a whole era, in 1938. How strange, somehow, to pretend that Freud had never been driven out, or that with the help of a few yellowing photos, a world could be recreated. It reminded me of my trip to Dachau: the crematoria torn down and tow-headed German children running and laughing and picnicking on the newly seeded grass. “You can’t judge a country by just twelve years,” they used to tell me in Heidelberg. So we peered at the curiously sterile rooms, the left-over paraphernalia of Freud’s life: his medical diploma, his military record, his application for assistant professorship, a contract with one of his publishers, his list of publications attached to an application for promotion. And then we inspected the photographs: Freud, cigar in hand, with the first psychoanalytic circle, Freud with a grandson, Freud with Anna Freud, Freud before death leaning on his wife’s arm in London, young Ernest Jones striking a glamour-boy profile, Sandor Ferenczi peering imperiously at the world, circa 1913, mild-mannered Karl Abraham looking mild-mannered, Hanns Sachs looking like Robert Morley, und so weiter. The artifacts were present, but the spirit of the enterprise was lacking. We trooped obediently from one display to the next wondering about our own sticky history, still in the writing. We had a quiet lunch together and again tried to repair the damages of the previous evening. I vowed to myself I would never see Adrian again. Bennett and I treated each other with utmost consideration. We were careful not to discuss anything of consequence. Instead we spoke anecdotally of Freud. According to Ernest Jones, he was a poor judge of character, a poor Menschenkenner. Often this trait—a certain naiveté about people—went with genius. Freud could penetrate the secrets of dreams, but he could also fall dupe to an ordinary con man. He could invent psychoanalysis, but he would inevitably put his faith in people who betrayed him. Also he was very indiscreet. He often gave away confidences which had been entrusted to him on the sole condition that he keep quiet about them.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  High-principled but rather simple Lenski, who was abroad for the first time, had some trouble keeping the delights of sightseeing in harmony with his pedagogical duties. We took advantage of this and guided him toward places where our parents might not have allowed us to go. He could not resist the Wintergarten, for instance, and so, one night, we found ourselves there, drinking ice-chocolate in an orchestra box. The show developed on the usual lines: a juggler in evening clothes; then a woman, with flashes of rhinestones on her bosom, trilling a concert aria in alternating effusions of green and red light; then a comic on roller skates. Between him and a bicycle act (of which more later) there was an item on the program called “The Gala Girls,” and with something of the shattering and ignominious physical shock I had experienced when coming that cropper on the rink, I recognized my American ladies in the garland of linked, shrill-voiced, shameless “girls,” all rippling from left to right, and then from right to left, with a rhythmic rising of ten identical legs that shot up from ten corollas of flounces. I located my Louise’s face—and knew at once that it was all over, that I had lost her, that I would never forgive her for singing so loudly, for smiling so redly, for disguising herself in that ridiculous way so unlike the charm of either “proud Creoles” or “questionable señoritas.” I could not stop thinking of her altogether, of course, but the shock seems to have liberated in me a certain inductive process, for I soon noticed that any evocation of the feminine form would be accompanied by the puzzling discomfort already familiar to me. I asked my parents about it (they had come to Berlin to see how we were getting along) and my father ruffled the German newspaper he had just opened and replied in English (with the parody of a possible quotation—a manner of speech he often adopted in order to get going): “That, my boy, is just another of nature’s absurd combinations, like shame and blushes, or grief and red eyes.” “Tolstoy vient de mourir,” he suddenly added, in another, stunned voice, turning to my mother. “Da chto tï [something like “good gracious”]!” she exclaimed in distress, clasping her hands in her lap. “Pora domoy [Time to go home],” she concluded, as if Tolstoy’s death had been the portent of apocalyptic disasters.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Thumbing through that battered tour book, I dimly evoke that Magnolia Garden in a southern state which cost me four bucks and which, according to the ad in the book, you must visit for three reasons: because John Galsworthy (a stone-dead writer of sorts) acclaimed it as the world’s fairest garden; because in 1900 Baedeker’s Guide had marked it with a star; and finally, because … O, Reader, My Reader, guess! … because children (and by Jingo was not my Lolita a child!) will “walk starry-eyed and reverently through this foretaste of Heaven, drinking in beauty that can influence a life.” “Not mine,” said grim Lo, and settled down on a bench with the fillings of two Sunday papers in her lovely lap. We passed and re-passed through the whole gamut of American roadside restaurants, from the lowly Eat with its deer head (dark trace of long tear at inner canthus), “humorous” picture post cards of the posterior “Kurort” type, impaled guest checks, life savers, sunglasses, adman visions of celestial sundaes, one half of a chocolate cake under glass, and several horribly experienced flies zigzagging over the sticky sugar-pour on the ignoble counter; and all the way to the expensive place with the subdued lights, preposterously poor table linen, inept waiters (ex-convicts or college boys), the roan back of a screen actress, the sable eyebrows of her male of the moment, and an orchestra of zoot-suiters with trumpets.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The apartment was empty. I went to the sun-room and looked across the street at the lake churning like old machinery in a deserted amusement park, rides without riders. My mind kept two separate sets of books. In one I was fortunate she’d taken the time to write me even this rejection, more than a creep like me deserved. In the other she said, “You’re not the person I would have chosen for a date, nor for a summer or semester, but yes, I will marry you. Nor do I want anything less from you. Romance is an expectation of an ideal life to come, and in that sense my feelings for you are romantic.” If someone had made me guess which reply I’d find inside the envelope, I would have chosen the rejection, since pessimism is always accurate, but acceptance would not have shocked me, since I also believed in the miraculous. I poured myself a glass of milk in the kitchen and returned to the sun-room. Her handwriting was well formed and rounded, the dots over the i ’s circles, the letters fatter than tall, the lines so straight I suspected she had placed the thin paper over a ruled-of grid. The schoolgirl ordinariness of her hand frightened me—I didn’t feel safe in such an ordinary hand. “I like you very much as a friend,” she wrote. “I was pleased and surprised to receive your lovely letter. It was one of the sweetest tributes to me I have ever had from anyone. I know this will hurt, but I am forced to say it if I am to prevent you further pain. I do not love you and I never have. Our friendship has been a matter of mutual and rewarding liking, not loving. I know this is very cruel, but I must say it. Try not to hate me. I think it would be best if we did not see each other for a while. I certainly hope we can continue to be friends. I consider you to be one of my very best friends. Please, please forgive me. Try to understand why I have to be this way. Sincerely, Helen.” Well, her phrasing was less childish than her hand, I thought, as though the letter were a composition in class that concerned me in no way.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Not all marriages are like that. Take the marriage I dreamed of in my idealistic adolescence (when I thought that Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Virginia and Leonard Woolf had perfect marriages). What did I know? I wanted “total mutuality,” “companionship,” “equality.” Did I know about how men sit there glued to the paper while you clear the table? How they pretend to be all thumbs when you ask them to mix the frozen orange juice? How they bring friends home and expect you to wait on them and yet feel entitled to sulk and go off into another room if you bring friends home? What idealistic adolescent girl could imagine all that as she sat reading Shaw and Virginia Woolf and the Webbs? I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway. — We were all stoned (but I was more stoned than everyone) when we piled into Adrian’s green Triumph and headed for a discotheque. There were five of us sardined into that tiny car: Bennett; Marie Winkleman (a very bosomy college classmate of mine whom Bennett had sort of picked up at the party— she was a psychologist); Adrian (who was driving, after a fashion); me (head back, like the first Isadora, post-strangulation); and Robin Phipps-Smith (the mousy British candidate with frizzy hair and German eyeglass frames who talked all the time about how he detested “Ronnie” Laing—something which endeared him to Bennett’s heart). Adrian, on the other hand, was a follower of Laing, had studied with him, and could do excellent imitations of his Scottish accent. At least I thought they were excellent—but then I didn’t know how Laing spoke. We zigzagged through the streets of Vienna, over the cobblestones and trolley tracks, across the muddy brown Danube. I don’t know the name of the discotheque, or the street, or anything. I go into states where I notice nothing about the landscape except the male inhabitants and which organs of mine (heart, stomach, nipples, cunt) they cause to palpitate. The discotheque was silver. Chrome paper on the walls. Flashing white lights. Mirrors everywhere. The glass tables elevated on platforms of chrome. The seats white leather. Ear-splitting rock music. Call the place whatever you like: the Mirrored Room, the Seventh Circle, the Silvermine, the Glass Balloon.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We had no money to live on, really. My fellowship to graduate school, a small trust fund I couldn’t touch for several years, and a few rapidly falling stocks my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday. Brian had dropped out of graduate school in a fit of fury with the establishment, but now he found himself having to take a job. Our life changed radically. We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl into the bourgeois box. Our idyll was over. The long walks, the studying together, the lazy afternoons in bed—all these belonged to a golden age that had passed. Brian now spent his days (and most of his nights) toiling away in a small market-research firm where he sweated over the computers, anxiously awaiting their answers to such earthshaking questions as whether or not women who have had two years of college will buy more detergent than women who have graduated from college. He threw himself into market research with the same manic passion that he had for medieval history or anything else. He had to know everything; he had to work harder than anybody else, including his boss—who sold the business for several million dollars in cash not long after Brian checked into the psycho ward. The whole operation was later shown to be a fraud. But by that time, Brian’s boss was living in an old castle in Switzerland with a new young wife and Brian had been “certified.” For all his brilliance, Brian didn’t know (or didn’t want to know) what a con man his boss was. He often used to sit watching the computers until twelve o’clock at night. Meanwhile I sweated in the stacks of Butler Library writing a ridiculous thesis on dirty words in English poetry (or, as my uptight thesis adviser had titled it: “Sexual Slang in English Poetry of the Mid-eighteenth Century”). Even then I was a pedantic pornographer.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I’ve no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn’t have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn’t automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah. Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family. I think of them living in places where they can’t work, where they can’t speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and thinks herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right? A grim picture. Not all marriages are like that. Take the marriage I dreamed of in my idealistic adolescence (when I thought that Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Virginia and Leonard Woolf had perfect marriages). What did I know? I wanted “total mutuality,” “companionship,” “equality.” Did I know about how men sit there glued to the paper while you clear the table? How they pretend to be all thumbs when you ask them to mix the frozen orange juice? How they bring friends home and expect you to wait on them and yet feel entitled to sulk and go off into another room if you bring friends home? What idealistic adolescent girl could imagine all that as she sat reading Shaw and Virginia Woolf and the Webbs?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  There is no winning the past. No number of forewords will make me at peace with the years between Fear of Flying and now. Writing about her and her legacy just makes me even more uncomfortable than I was before. This foreword should be a celebration of her work, of my mother’s place in the pantheon of second-wave feminists, but I fear it’s not. Perhaps this is just my own personal failure, but my mother used to butcher that Ernest Hemingway quote about sitting at the typewriter and opening a vein. Here’s every nepo baby’s open secret—no matter how hard we work, no matter how good our work might be, the tormenting gift of celebrity and notoriety passed down from our parents nullifies everything we do. Some of us admit this. Most of us don’t. So it’s not without a good deal of trepidation that I sit down fifty years later to write the foreword to a book that has become larger than me and larger than her. I never knew my mother before her outsized success. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, Fear of Flying was very much a part of my mom’s life and legacy. I was born inside the house of her fame and have never gotten outside of it. The year 1973 was a big year for women and sexual freedoms. The United States Supreme Court decided that “A person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The right to choose, the right to end a pregnancy, and the advent of oral contraception in the 1960s changed the game for women. Sex and pregnancy were no longer inextricably linked. Fear of Flying was a piece of this new zipless freedom. But progress hasn’t been a straight line for American women. In the decades since Fear of Flying was published, a lot of the things my mother and her peers thought would happen have not. Women are still not close to equality with men. Women of color make about sixty cents to every dollar a white man makes. There is no Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Women are not protected. The world of free love and equality that my mom and her peers dreamed of shimmered briefly on the horizon but never came fully into being. There were backlashes and whiplashes and Ronald and Nancy Reagan pulling the solar panels off the White House. We never got the equality we were promised.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “Sorry,” she said and went into the bathroom to blow her nose. I lay down and turned to face the back of the sofa, snuggled against the fox and beaver furs. Maybe I could sleep now, I thought. I closed my eyes. I pictured the fox and the beaver, cozied up together in a little cave near a waterfall, the beaver’s buckteeth, its raspy snore, the perfect animal avatar for Reva. And me, the little white fox splayed out on its back, a bubble-gum pink tongue lolling out of its pristine, furry snout, impervious to the cold. I heard the toilet flush. “You’re out of toilet paper,” Reva said, rupturing the vision. I’d been wiping myself with napkins from the bodega for weeks—she must have realized that before. “I could really use a drink,” she huffed. Her heels clacked on the tile in the kitchen. “I’m sorry to come over like this. I’m such a mess right now.” “What is it, Reva?” I groaned. “Spit it out. I’m not feeling well.” I heard her open and close a few cabinets. Then she came back with a mug and sat down in the armchair and poured herself a cupful of gin. She wasn’t crying anymore. She sighed once morosely, and then once again violently, and drank. “Ken got me transferred. And he says he doesn’t want to see me anymore. So that’s it. After all this time. I’ve had such a day, I can’t even tell you.” But there she was, telling me. Five whole minutes spent on what it was like to come back from lunch and find a note on her desk. “Like you can break up with someone over memo. Like he doesn’t care about me at all. Like I’m some kind of secretary. Like this is a matter of business. Which it is not!” “Then what was it, Reva?” “A matter of the heart!” “Oh.” “So I go in and he’s like, ‘Leave the door open,’ and my heart is pounding because, you know? A memo? So I just close the door and I’m like, ‘What is this? How can you do this?’ And he’s like, ‘It’s over. I can’t see you anymore.’ Like in a movie!” “What did the memo say?” “That I’m getting a promotion, and they’re transferring me to the Towers. On my first day back to work after my mom died. Ken was at the funeral. He saw the state I was in. And now suddenly it’s over? Just like that?” “You’re getting a promotion?” “Marsh is starting a new crisis consulting firm. Terrorist risks, blah blah. But did you hear what I said? He doesn’t want to see me anymore, not even at the office.” “What a dick,” I said robotically. “I know. He’s a coward. I mean, we were in love. Totally in love!” “You were?” “How do you just decide to turn that off?”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I blinked my eyes open and turned to face the perfumed haze on the armchair. I squinted and focused. Reva was wearing a dress I recognized from a J. Crew catalogue the year before: a raw silk shift in a shade of pink I could only describe as “taffy.” Orange-hued lipstick. “Don’t get defensive, but you’re kind of off these days,” she said. “You’ve been sort of distant. And you’re just getting thinner and thinner.” I think that bothered Reva more than anything. She must have felt that I was cheating in the game of skinniness, which she had always worked so hard to play. We were about the same height, but I wore a size 2 and Reva wore a 4. “A six when I’m PMSing.” The discrepancy between our bodies was huge in Reva’s world. “I just don’t think it’s healthy to sleep all day,” she said, popping a few sticks of gum in her mouth. “Maybe all you need is a shoulder to cry on. You’d be surprised how much better you’ll feel after a good cry. Better than any pill can make you feel.” When Reva gave advice, it sounded as though she were reading a bad made-for-TV movie script. “A walk around the block could do wonders for your mood,” she said. “Aren’t you hungry?” “I’m not in the mood for food,” I said. “And I don’t feel like going anywhere.” “Sometimes you need to act as if.” “Dr. Tuttle can probably give you something to get rid of your gum addiction,” I told her flatly. “They have pills for everything now.” “I don’t want to get rid of it,” Reva replied. “And it’s not an addiction. It’s a habit. And I enjoy chewing gum. It’s one of the few things in my life that makes me feel good about myself, because I do it for my own pleasure. Gum and the gym. Those are like my therapy.” “But you could have the medication instead,” I argued. “And spare your jaw from all that chewing.” I didn’t really care about Reva’s jaw. “Uh-huh,” she replied. She was looking straight at me, but was so entranced by her gum chewing, her mind seemed to drift off. When it returned, she got up and spat her gum out in the kitchen trash can, came back, lay down on the floor and started doing rhythmic crunches, crinkling the midsection of her dress. “We all have our own ways to cope with stress,” she said, and rambled on about the benefits of habitual behaviors. “Self-soothing,” is how she described it. “Like meditation.” I yawned, hating her. “Sleeping all the time isn’t really going to make you feel any better,” she said. “Because you’re not changing anything in your sleep. You’re just avoiding your problems.” “What problems?”