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.

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• From On Beauty (2005)

  Near a liberal arts place I teach at – Wellington. You probably haven’t heard of it over here,’ said Howard with false humility, for Wellington was by far the most respected institution he had ever worked in, as close to an Ivy League as he was ever going to get. ‘Jerome’s there, isn’t he?’ ‘No, no – actually, his sister’s there – Zora. Jerome’s at Brown. Much healthier idea, probably,’ said Howard, although the truth was he had been hurt by the choice. ‘Breaking free, apron strings, etcetera.’ ‘Not necessarily.’ ‘You don’t think?’ ‘I was at the same uni as my dad at one point – I think that’s a good thing, when families are close-knit.’ The pomposity of the young man seemed to Howard to be concentrated in his jaw, which he worked round and round as they walked, as if ruminating on the failures of others. ‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Howard, generously, he felt. ‘Jerome and I, we’re just not . . . well, we have different ideas about things and . . . you and your father must be closer than us – more able to . . . well, I don’t know.’ ‘We’re very close.’ ‘Well,’ said Howard, restraining himself, ‘you’re very lucky.’ ‘It’s about trying ,’ said Michael keenly – the topic seemed to animate him. ‘It’s like, if you put the effort in. And I spose my mum’s always been at home, which makes a lot of difference, I think. Having the mother figure and all that. Nurturing. It’s like a Caribbean ideal – a lot of people lose sight of it.’  On Beauty ‘Right,’ said Howard, and walked another two streets – past an ice-cream scoop of a Hindu temple and down an avenue of awful bungalows – imagining knocking this young man’s head against a tree. The lamps were lit on every street now. Howard began to be able to make out the Queen’s Park to which Michael had referred. It was nothing like the groomed royal parks in the centre of town. Just a small village green with a colourful spot-lit Victorian bandstand at its centre. ‘Michael – can I say something?’ Michael said nothing. ‘Look, I don’t mean in any way to offend anyone in your family, and I can see we agree basically anyway – I can’t see the point in arguing over it. Really we need to put our heads together and just think of . . . well, I suppose, some way , some means of convincing both of them, you know – that this is a bloody insane idea – I mean, that’s the key thing, no?’ ‘Look, man,’ said Michael tersely, quickening his step, ‘I’m not an intellectual, right? I’m not involved in whatever the argument is regarding my father.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Naturally at Beardsley School we disapprove of some of these activities; and we rechannel others into more constructive directions. But we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face the sunshine. To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching techniques, we are more interested in communication than in composition. That is, with due respect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicate freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books. We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor. We think, Dr. Humburg, in organismal and organizational terms. We have done away with the mass of irrelevant topics that have traditionally been presented to young girls, leaving no place, in former days, for the knowledges and the skills, and the attitudes they will need in managing their lives and—as the cynic might add—the lives of their husbands. Mr. Humberson, let us put it this way: the position of a star is important, but the most practical spot for an icebox in the kitchen may be even more important to the budding housewife. You say that all you expect a child to obtain from school is a sound education. But what do we mean by education? In the old days it was in the main a verbal phenomenon; I mean, you could have a child learn by heart a good encyclopedia and he or she would know as much as or more than a school could offer. Dr. Hummer, do you realize that for the modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of less vital value than weekend ones [twinkle]?—to repeat a pun that I heard the Beardsley college psychoanalyst permit herself the other day. We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless. What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care for Greece and the Orient with their harems and slaves?” This program rather appalled me, but I spoke to two intelligent ladies who had been connected with the school, and they affirmed that the girls did quite a bit of sound reading and that the “communication” line was more or less ballyhoo aimed at giving old-fashioned Beardsley School a financially remunerative modern touch, though actually it remained as prim as a prawn. Another reason attracting me to that particular school may seem funny to some readers, but it was very important to me, for that is the way I am made.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He looked sideways across his chest for it and grabbed it by one leg. He dangled it, watching it tread the air like a swimmer treading water. “Don’t kill it!” I pleaded. “I thought you were scared of it.” “I am, but I don’t want to see you kill it.” I shrank back. “How about this?” he said, pulling off one of its legs. “Oh God—don’t! I hate it when people do that.” Adrian went on plucking off the legs like daisy petals. “She loves me, she loves me not…” he said. “I hate that,” I said. “Please don’t.” “I thought you hated bugs.” “I don’t like them crawling on me—but I can’t stand to see them killed either. And it makes me sick to see you mutilate it like that. I can’t watch,” and I got up and ran back to the swimming hole. “I don’t understand you!” Adrian shouted after me. “Why are you so bloody sensitive?” I ducked under the water. — We didn’t speak again until after lunch. “You’ve ruined it,” Adrian said, “with your fretting and worrying and hypersensitivity.” “OK, then drop me off in Paris and I’ll fly home from there.” “With pleasure.” “I could have told you that you’d get sick of me if I ever displayed any human feelings. What kind of plastic woman do you want, anyway?” “Don’t be daft. I just want you to grow up.” “As defined by you.” “As defined by both of us.” “Aren’t you democratic,” I said sarcastically. We began packing the car, banging tent poles and gear. It took about twenty minutes, during which we didn’t exchange a word. Finally we got in the car. “I suppose it doesn’t mean anything to you that I cared enough about you to shake up my whole life for you.” “You didn’t do it for me,” he said. “I was just the excuse.” “I never would have been able to do it without feeling as strongly about you as I did.” And then with a shudder that went through my whole body, I remembered my longing for him in Vienna. The weakness in the knees. The churning guts. The racing heart. The shortness of breath. All the things he stirred in me which had made me follow him. I longed for him as he was when I first met him. The man he had become was disappointing. “The man under the bed can never be the man over the bed,” I said. “They’re mutually exclusive. Once the man comes up from under he’s no longer the man you desired.” “What the hell are you talking about?” “My theory of the zipless fuck,” I said. And I explained it as best I could. “You mean I disappoint you?” he asked, putting his arms around me and pulling me down until my head was in his lap. I smelled the gamy smell of his dirty trousers. “Let’s get out of the car,” I said.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But here I am, past sixteen, and the world’s fairly quiet. The meter was bumpy, but the message was plain. We would have gladly groveled if only we could have found men worth groveling to. — The boys we met in college were, in a way, worse. At least John and Ron were good-natured creeps who adored us. They didn’t have minds like G.B.S. and bodies like Michelangelo’s David , but they were devoted to us, and regarded us as creatures of glittering wit and sophistication. But in college the war between the sexes began in earnest and our minds and bodies drifted farther and farther apart. 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.”

• 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)

  Though he was sexually omnivorous and on occasion preferred camels, like nine out of ten doctors, ordinarily his taste ran to women. Hermione Fingerforth was a woman—or so she liked to assume—and whenever she ran into Dorian it was not long before their lips met in a succession of interesting poses. “The skin is the largest organ of the body,” she once nonchalantly remarked to him as they were sunbathing in the nude together on the terrace of her penthouse in Flatbush. “Speak for yourself,” he declared, leaping on top of her in a sudden paroxysm of passion. “Out, out of my damned twat!” she yelled, pushing him away and shielding her much-vaunted virginity with a silver-foil sun reflector. “I take it you want me to reflect on what I’m doing,” he quipped. “Jesus Christ,” she said crossly, “men are only interested in women in spurts.” At the time, we all thought this was the funniest piece of prose ever written. There was a continuation of this dialogue, too—something about a traffic observation helicopter with two radio announcers appearing on the roof and the whole scene turning into an orgy—but this has not survived. The fragment, however, does convey something of the mood of that period in our lives. Beneath the wise-ass cynicism and pseudosophistication was the soupiest romanticism since Edward Fitzgerald impersonated Omar Khayyam. Pia and I both wanted someone to sing in the wilderness with, and we knew that John Stock and Ron Perkoff were not exactly what we had in mind. — We were both bookworms, and when life disappointed us we turned to literature—or at least to the movie version. We saw ourselves as heroines and couldn’t understand what had become of all the heroes. They were in books. They were in movies. They were conspicuously absent from our lives. History and Literature Subjectively Considered at Sixteen I Dorian Gray had locks of gold. Rhett Butler was dashing and handsome and bold.... Julien Sorel knew all about passion. Count Vronsky was charming in the Russian fashion. I’d say that there’s a handful to whom I’d gladly grovel— And everyone of them is—quite busy in a novel. II Before Juliet was sixteen, she’d reconciled two feuding houses. And Nana had done all the Paris bars with drunks and tramps and souses. Helen’s face, they say, launched a good many ships. Salome had only to shed her seven slips. Esther’s beauty saved her people. Mary’s feat is praised from every steeple. Louis’ shepherdess wife caused a nation to riot. But here I am, past sixteen, and the world’s fairly quiet.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I found a notice from the unemployment office: I’d forgotten to call them. The measly payments were running out anyway, so it wasn’t a huge loss. I threw the notice in the trash. There was a postcard from my dentist reminding me to come in for my yearly cleaning. Trash. There was the bill from Dr. Tuttle for my missed appointment—a handwritten postcard on the back of an index card. “November 12th no show fee: $300.” She’d probably forgotten all about it by now. I put it aside. I threw away a coupon to a new Middle Eastern restaurant on Second Avenue. I threw away spring catalogues from Victoria’s Secret, from J. Crew, from Barneys. An old water shut-off notice from the super. More junk. I opened up last month’s debit card statement and skimmed through all the charges. I found nothing out of the ordinary—mostly ATM withdrawals at the bodega. Only a few hundred dollars at Bloomingdale’s. Maybe I had stolen the white fox fur coat, I thought. And there was a Christmas card from Reva: “During this hard time, you’ve been there for me. I don’t know what I’d do without a friend like you to weather life’s ups and downs. . . .” It was as poorly composed as the aborted eulogy she’d given for her mother. I threw it away. I hesitated to open a letter from the estate lawyer, worried that it would be a bill that I’d have to pay, which would require that I find my checkbook and go out into the world to buy a stamp. But I took a deep breath and saw stars and opened the letter anyway. It was a brief handwritten note. “I’ve tried to reach you by phone several times but it seems your mailbox is full. I hope you had a happy holiday. The professor is moving out. I think you should put the house on the market rather than look for a new tenant. Financially speaking, you’re better off selling and putting the money into stocks. Otherwise it’s just going to sit there empty.” A waste of space, he was saying. But when I closed my eyes and pictured the house in that moment, it wasn’t empty. The pastel depths of my mother’s swollen closet lured me back. I went inside and peeked out between her hanging silk blouses at the rough beige carpeting of her bedroom, the cream ceramic lamp on her nightstand. My mother. And then I traveled up the hall, through the French doors, into my father’s study: a dried plum pit on a tea saucer, his huge gray computer blinking neon green, a stack of papers he’d marked in red, mechanical pencils, yellow legal pads that flared open like daffodils.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘God, you are so vain,’ said Victoria in a wearisome way that returned to Howard some of the reality of that afternoon in the boudoir. ‘It’s a simple question. And, you know: don’t flatter yourself. I didn’t think we were going to run off into the sunset. You’re really not that great .’ These words momentarily kicked up a little psychic dust between them, but it was inert somehow, it was just noise. They didn’t know each other at all. It wasn’t like it had been with Claire. That was a case of two old friends losing their nerve at the same time, both on the last lap of their lives. And Howard had known , even as it was happening, that they were switching lanes out of fear, just to see if it felt different, better, easier, to run in this new lane – scared as they were of carrying on for ever in the lane they were in. But this girl hadn’t even stepped into the race. She wasn’t to be  On Beauty belittled for that – God knows, Howard himself had only heard the starting gun in his late twenties. But he had underestimated the strangeness of talking about the future of his life with someone for whom the future still seemed unbounded: a pleasure palace of choices, with infinite doors, in which only a fool would spend his time trapped in one room. ‘No,’ agreed Howard, because the concession did not mean anything. ‘I’m not that great.’ ‘No . . . but . . . well, you’re not awful ,’ she said, coming closer to him and then at the last minute, flipping her body so she was by his side and against the wall as he was. ‘You’re all right. Compared to some of the wankers round here.’ She nudged him in his gut with her elbow. ‘Anyway, if you are about to leave me for ever, thanks for the memento. It was very ‘‘courtly love’’ of you.’ Victoria held up a strip of photos. Howard took them in his hands without recognition. ‘I found them in my room,’ she whispered. ‘They must’ve fallen out of your trouser pocket. That suit you’re wearing now. Do you only have one suit or what?’ Howard brought the strip closer to his face. ‘You’re such a poseur !’ Howard peered closer. The images were faint, ageing. ‘I have no idea when those were taken.’ ‘Sure,’ said Victoria. ‘Tell it to the judge.’ ‘I’ve never seen them before.’ ‘You know what I thought when I saw them? Rembrandt’s portraits. Right? Not that one – but look at that one, with your hair all over your eyes. And it works because you look older in that one than that one . . .’ She was leaning into him, shoulder to shoulder. Howard touched one of his faces softly with his own thumb. It was Howard Belsey. This was what people saw as he moved through the world.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  themselves in these prime positions – Ron and Daisy – did little to conceal their joy. By contrast the second booth behind this one was despondently quiet. The stragglers’ booth across the room – with only three people in it – openly sulked. Claire too, was disappointed. Her own affections rested with other students, not at this table. Ron and Daisy’s callow, spiky humour did not amuse her. American humour in general left her cold. She never felt less at home in the States than when confronted with one of those bewildering sitcoms: people walking in, people walking out, gags, laugh tracks, idiocy, irony. Tonight, she would really have preferred to be sitting at the stragglers’ table with Chantelle, listening to that saturnine young lady’s startling accounts of ghetto life in a bad Boston neighbourhood. Claire was spellbound by this news of lives so different from her own as to seem interplanetary. Her own background had been international, privileged and emotionally austere; she had grown up among American intellectuals and European aristocrats, a cultivated but cold mix. Five languages , went the line in a very early poem, the kind of doggerel she wrote in the early seventies, And no way to say I love you . Or, more importantly, I hate you. In Chantelle’s family both expressions were slung around the house with operatic regularity. But Claire would learn nothing of all that this evening. Instead she was to be the net over which Ron and Daisy and Zora lobbed wisecracks. She settled into her cushions and tried to make the best of it. The present conversation concerned a television show so famous even Claire had heard of it (although she’d never seen it); it was being satirized by her three students, taken apart to reveal unpleasant subtexts; dark political motives were assigned to it, and complex theoretical tools used to dismantle its simple, sincere fac¸ade. Every now and then the discussion swerved and slowed down until it ran alongside actual politics – the President, the administration – at which point the door was opened and Claire invited in for the ride. She was grateful when the waiter came to take their orders. A little hesitation hovered over the ordering of drinks – all but one of her students, a grad, were under the legal limit. Claire made it clear they were free to do as they wished.  On Beauty Stupid, faux sophisticated drinks – all incompatible with a Moroccan meal – were then ordered: a whiskey and ginger, a Tom Collins, a Cosmopolitan. Claire ordered a bottle of white wine for herself.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It was strange being at a party with your sibling, standing in a corner, holding your plastic tumblers with both hands. There’s no small talk between siblings. They bopped their heads ineptly and stood slightly turned out from each other, trying to look not alone and yet not with each other. ‘There’s Dad’s Veronica,’ said Jerome, as she passed by in an unflattering s flapper dress complete with headband. ‘And that’s your rapper friend, isn’t it? I saw him in the paper.’  On Beauty ‘Carl!’ called Zora, too loudly. He was fiddling with the stereo, and now turned and came over. Zora remembered to put both hands behind her back and pull down her shoulders. Her chest looked better that way. But he did not look in that direction. He patted her chummily on the arm as usual and shook Jerome’s hand vigorously. ‘Good to see you again, man!’ he said and shot out that movie star smile. Jerome, now recalling the young man he had met that night in the park, registered the pleasant change: this open, friendly demeanour, this almost Wellingtonian confidence. In answer to Jerome’s polite question as to what Carl had been up to recently, Carl prattled on about his library, neither defensively nor particularly boastfully, but with an easy egotism that did not for a moment consider asking Jerome a similar question. He spoke of the Hip-hop Archive and the need for more Gospel, the growing African section, the problem of getting money out of Erskine. Zora waited for him to mention their campaign to keep discretionaries in class. No mention came. ‘So,’ she said, attempting to keep her own voice casual and cheery, ‘did you see my op-ed or . . . ?’ Carl, in the middle of an anecdote, stopped and looked confused. Jerome, peacemaker and trouble-spotter, stepped in. ‘I forgot to tell you I saw that in the Herald – Speaker’s Corner – it was really great. Really Mr Smith Goes to Washington . . . it was great, Zoor. You’re lucky you got this girl fighting in your corner,’ said Jerome, knocking his tumbler against Carl’s. ‘When she gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go. Believe me, I know.’ Carl grinned. ‘Oh, I hear that. She’s my Martin Luther King! I’m serious, she be – sorry,’ said Carl, looking away from them towards the outdoor balcony. ‘Sorry, I just saw someone I gotta speak to . . . Look, I’ll talk to you later, Zora – good to see you again, man. I’ll catch you both later.’ ‘He’s very charming,’ said Jerome generously, as they watched him go. ‘Actually he’s almost slick.’ ‘Everything’s going so well for him right now,’ said Zora uncertainly. ‘When he’s gotten used to it, he’ll get more focus, I think.  on beauty and being wrong

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Schrift didn’t understand. “Ackzept being a vohman,” he hissed from behind the couch. But at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman. I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s. Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth? Where was my gamekeeper? All I could see was the swindle of being a woman. I would roam through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for one woman artist to show me the way. Mary Cassatt? Berthe Morisot? Why was it that so many women artists who had renounced having children could then paint nothing but mothers and children? It was hopeless. If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood. Neither my good mother nor my bad mother could help me out of this dilemma. My bad mother told me she would have been a famous artist but for me, and my good mother adored me, and wouldn’t have given me up for the world. What I learned from her I learned by example, not exhortation. And the lesson was clear: being a woman meant being harried, frustrated, and always angry. It meant being split into two irreconcilable halves. “Maybe you’ll do better than me,” my good mother said. “Maybe you’ll do both, darling. But as for me, I never could.” SEVENTEEN Dreamwork It seems to me like this. It’s not a terrible thing—I mean it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning to do without something one really wants…. What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better. —Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook W hen it was clear to me that I’d never fall asleep, I decided to get up. As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn’t care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you. I sat upright on the bed, pinned my hair in a barrette, and took off my soiled clothes. I marched to the curtain, pushed it aside with great fake courage, and looked around. No one. I straddled the bidet and peed rivers into it, astonished at how long I’d gone without emptying my bladder. Then I washed my sore and sticky crotch and cleaned out the bidet.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Howard re-entered the room with a clap of his hands, but then the bell rang once more. ‘Bloody hell . Could you excuse us? Like Piccadilly Circus in here. Jerome! Zora?’ Howard cupped a hand to his ear like a man waiting for a response to his fake bird call. ‘Howard,’ tried Kiki, holding up the frame, ‘Howard, look at this.’ ‘Levi? No? Have to be us, then. Just excuse us one minute.’ Kiki followed Howard into the hall, where together they opened the door to the Wilcoxes, one of the rare, genuinely moneyed Wellingtonian couples of their acquaintance. The Wilcoxes owned a preppy clothes chain store, gave generously to the college, and looked like the shells of two Atlantic shrimp in evening wear. Right behind them came Howard’s assistant, Smith J. Miller, bearing a home-made apple-pie and dressed like the neat Kentucky gentleman he was. They were all ushered into the kitchen to do their best with the completely unsuitable social pairing of old-school Marxist  kipps and belsey English professor Joe Rainier and the young woman he was presently dating. There was a New Yorker cartoon on the fridge that Kiki now wished she had taken down. An upscale couple in the back of a limo. Woman saying: Of course they’re clever. They have to be clever. They haven’t got any money . ‘Just go through, go through,’ brayed Howard, making the signal for directing sheep across a country road. ‘People in the living room, or the garden’s lovely . . .’ A few minutes later they were alone once more in the hall. ‘I mean, where’s Zora – she’s been going on about the bloody party for weeks and now neither hide nor hair – ’ ‘She’s probably gone to get some smokes or something.’ ‘I think at least one of them should be present. So people don’t think we keep them in some kind of child sex prison camp in the attic.’ ‘I’ll go and deal with it, Howie, OK? You just get everybody what they need. Where the hell is Monique? Wasn’t she meant to be bringing somebody?’ ‘In the garden jumping up and down on bags of ice ,’ said Howard impatiently, as if she might have figured this out for herself. ‘Bloody ice-maker fucked up half an hour ago.’ ‘Fuck.’ ‘Yes, darling, fuck .’ Howard pulled his wife towards him and put his nose in between her breasts. ‘Can’t we just have a party here? You and me and the girls?’ he asked, tentatively squeezing the girls. Kiki drew back from him. Although peace had broken out in the Belsey household, sex had not yet returned.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Zora blushed and pressed her stubby nails deep into the meat of her palms. ‘Fat ladies need love too,’ said Carl philosophically, and took a cigarette from inside his hoodie, where it had been tucked behind his ear. ‘You best be going, huh,’ he said and lit up. He seemed bored with her now. Zora was filled with the sad sense that something precious had escaped. Somehow with her blethering she had made Mozart vanish and his pal Sussawhatsit too. ‘People to see, places to go, sho’ nuff,’ he said. ‘Oh, no . . . I mean, I’ve just got a meeting. It’s not really – ’ ‘Important meeting,’ said Carl ruminatively, taking a moment to envision it. ‘Not really . . . more like a meeting about the future, I guess.’ Zora was on her way to Dean French’s office to empty her hypothetical future into his lap. She was particularly concerned about her failure to get into Claire Malcolm’s poetry class last semester. She hadn’t yet seen the boards, but if it happened again then that could have a very adverse affect on her future, which needed to be discussed, along with many other troubling aspects of  On Beauty her future in all its futurity. This was the first of seven meetings that she had taken it upon herself to schedule for the initial week of the semester. Zora was extremely fond of scheduling meetings about her future with important people for whom her future was not really a top priority. The more people were informed of her plans the more real they became to her. ‘The future’s another country, man,’ said Carl mournfully, and then the punchline seemed to come to him; his face surrendered to a smile. ‘And I still ain’t got a passport.’ ‘That’s . . . is that from your lyrics?’ ‘Might be, might be.’ He shrugged, rubbed his hands together, although it wasn’t cold, not yet. With deep insincerity he said, ‘It was nice talking to you, Zora . It was educational.’ He seemed angry again. Zora looked away and fiddled with the zip of her tote. She had an unfamiliar urge to help him. ‘Hardly – I didn’t say a word, practically.’ ‘Yeah, but you listen well. That’s the same thing.’ Zora looked up at him again, startled. She couldn’t remember ever being told that she listened well. ‘You’re very talented, aren’t you?’ murmured Zora without thinking about what in God’s name she meant. She was lucky – the words slipped under a passing delivery truck. ‘Well, Zora – ’ He clapped his hands; was she ridiculous to him? ‘You keep studyin’.’ ‘Carl. It was nice to meet you again.’ ‘Tell that brother of yours to call me. I’m doing another show at the Bus Stop – you know, it’s down Kennedy, on Tuesday.’ ‘Don’t you live in Boston?’ ‘Yeah, and?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  One of his former employees, the scion of a distinguished family, suggested I spend a few months in the residence of his impoverished cousins, a Mr. McCoo, retired, and his wife, who wanted to let their upper story where a late aunt had delicately dwelt. He said they had two little daughters, one a baby, the other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect. I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down—possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins. His family, he said, had fled to a farm he owned, and had taken the car, but a friend of his wife’s, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate me. A lady who lived opposite Mrs. Haze’s had lent McCoo her limousine, a marvelously old-fashioned, square-topped affair, manned by a cheerful Negro. Now, since the only reason for my coming at all had vanished, the aforesaid arrangement seemed preposterous. All right, his house would have to be completely rebuilt, so what? Had he not insured it sufficiently? I was angry, disappointed and bored, but being a polite European, could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in that funeral car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of me. I saw him scamper away, and my chauffeur shook his head with a soft chuckle. En route, I swore to myself I would not dream of staying in Ramsdale under any circumstance but would fly that very day to the Bermudas or the Bahamas or the Blazes. Possibilities of sweetness on technicolor beaches had been trickling through my spine for some time before, and McCoo’s cousin had, in fact, sharply diverted that train of thought with his well-meaning but as it transpired now absolutely inane suggestion.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Five times the light beneath the Moon had been rekindled and quenched as oft, since we had entered on the arduous passage, when there appeared to us a Mountain, dim with distance; and to me it seemed the highest I had ever seen. We joyed, and soon our joy was turned to grief: for a tempest rose from the new land, and struck the forepart of our ship. Three times it made her whirl round with all the waters; at the fourth, made the poop rise up and prow go down, as pleased Another, till the sea was closed above us.” 1. Probably the Cardinal Nicholas of Prato, who was, in 1304, sent to Florence by Benedict XI to endeavour to reconcile the hostile factions. His efforts proving futile, he laid the city under an interdict; and several local disasters that occurred shortly after, such as the fall of a bridge and a great conflagration, were attributed to the curse of the Church. This interpretation is better than taking Prato as the town ten miles north-west of Florence: for this place appears to have been on friendly terms with Florence.2. In the summer-time, when the days are longest.3. Elisha, having seen Elijah carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire, was mocked by little children, who were devoured by bears, as a punishment for having scoffed at him (2 Kings ii. 11, 12, 23, 24).4. Eteocles and Polynices, sons of Œdipus, King of Thebes, quarrelled over the succession to the throne. This dispute gave rise to the war of the Seven against Thebes, in the course of which the brothers slew each other in single combat. Their hatred continued after death, for, according to Statius (Thebaid xii), the very flame of their funeral pyre was divided.5. The Wooden Horse, in which were concealed the Greeks who opened the gates of Troy to their countrymen, thus raising the siege And causing Æneas and his followers to leave the city.—Deidamia, daughter of Lycomedes, King of Scyros, at whose court Thetis had left her son Achilles in female disguise, to prevent his taking part in the expedition against Troy (see Purg. ix). After Deidamia had become enamoured of Achilles and borne him a son, Ulysses discovered the hero’s secret and induced him to sail for Troy, whereupon Deidamia died of grief.—The Palladium, a statue of Pallas, was stolen by Ulysses because the fortunes of Troy were supposed to depend on it.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  There’s no reason at all why we can’t be friends now. I’d like to be. If you’d still like to,’ said Kiki, and felt ridiculous, like a schoolgirl. She was new to this. The friendship of other women hadn’t mattered to her in a long  the anatomy lesson time. She’d never needed to think about it, having married her best friend. Her hostess smiled impassively at her. ‘I’m sure I would.’ ‘Good! Life’s just too short for – ’ began Kiki. Carlene was already nodding. ‘I very much agree. Much too short. Clotilde!’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Not you, dear. Clotilde! ’ ‘Emerson,’ said Howard haltingly. ‘But I won’t see you, will I? You’re going to Fleming.’ ‘Why are you going to Emerson? You never go to Emerson.’ It seemed to Howard that all of his family were overly interested  On Beauty in this question. They stood in a semicircle, putting on their coats, awaiting his reply. ‘Some ex-students of mine wanted – ’ began Howard but Zora was talking over him. ‘Well, I’m head of table – I asked Jamie Anderson. I’m late, actually – I gotta run.’ She came forward to kiss her father on the cheek, but Howard drew back from her. ‘Why would you ask Anderson? Why wouldn’t you ask me?’ ‘ Dad , I went with you last year.’ ‘ Anderson? Zora, he’s a complete fraud. He’s barely post-adolescent. He’s moronic, actually, that’s what he is.’ Zora smiled – she was flattered by this show of jealousy. ‘He’s really not that bad.’ ‘He’s ridiculous – you told me how ridiculous that class is. Post-Native American protest pamphlets or whatever it is. I just don’t understand why you would want to – ’ ‘Dad, he’s OK. He’s . . . fresh – he’s got new ideas. I’m taking Carl too – Jamie’s interested in oral ethnicity.’ ‘I bet he is.’ ‘Dad, I have to go.’ She kissed him gently on his cheek. No hug. No rubbing of his head. ‘Wait up!’ said Levi. ‘I need a ride!’ and followed his sister to the door. And now Kiki was to abandon him too, without a goodbye. But then, on the threshold, she turned back and came towards Howard and held his arm at the slack bicep. She pulled his ear close to her mouth. ‘Howard, Zoor adores you. Don’t be dumb about this. She wanted to go with you, but people in the class have been suggesting she gets some kind of . . . I don’t know . . . favourable treatment.’ Howard opened his mouth to protest, but Kiki patted his shoulder. ‘I know – but they don’t need an excuse. I think some people are being pretty nasty. She’s been upset by it. She mentioned it in London.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘But why didn’t she talk about it with me?’ ‘Honey, to be honest, you seemed a little self-absorbed in London.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When I think of all the energy, all the misplaced artistic aggression which my mother channeled into her passion for odd clothes and new decorating schemes, I wish she had been a successful artist instead. Three generations of frustrated artists: my grandfather fucking models and cursing Picasso and stubbornly painting in the style of Rembrandt, my mother giving up poetry and painting for arty clothes and compulsive reupholstering, my sister Randy taking up pregnancy as if it were a new art form she had invented (and Lalah and Chloe following after her like disciples). There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist. My grandfather, as I’ve said, used to paint over my mother’s canvases instead of going out to buy new canvas. She switched to poetry for a while, to escape him, but then met my father who was a song writer and stole her images to use in lyrics. Artists are horrible. “Never, never get involved with a man who wants to be an artist,” my mother used to say, who knew. Another interesting sidelight is that both my mother and my grandfather have a way of dismissing the efforts of anybody who seems to be having a good time working at something or having a moderate success at it. There is, for example, a middling-to-good novelist (whose name I won’t mention) who happens to be a friend of my parents. He has written four novels, none of them distinguished in style, none of them bestsellers, and none prizewinners, but nevertheless, he seems fairly pleased with himself and he seems to be enjoying the status of resident sage at cocktail parties and writer-in-residence at some junior college in New Jersey whose name escapes me. Maybe he actually likes writing. Some strange people do. “I don’t know how he keeps grinding them out,” my mother will say, “he’s such an ordinary writer. He’s not stupid, he’s nobody’s fool….” (My mother never calls people “intelligent”; “not stupid” is as far as she will commit herself.) “…But his books are so ordinary…and none of them has really even made money yet….”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Is it Monty Kipps? I heard he ‘‘objected’’,’ said Claire bitterly, and made her fingers quote, unnecessarily, Jack felt, ‘to Belsey’s Affirmative Action Committee working on campus. God, he hasn’t  the anatomy lesson even been here a month! Is he the new authority around here now or something?’ Jack blushed. He could blackmail with the best of them, but he could not involve himself very deeply in personal conflict. He also had a profound respect for public power, that compelling quality that Monty Kipps had in spades. If only, as a young man, Jack’s way of expressing himself had been a tad sprightlier, a shade more people-friendly (if one could have imagined, even abstractly, the possibility of having a beer with him), he too might have been a public person in the manner of Monty Kipps, or like Jack’s own late father, a senator for Massachusetts, or like his brother, a judge. But Jack was a university man from the cradle. And when he met people like Kipps, a man who straddled both worlds, Jack always deferred to them. ‘I cannot have you talking about a colleague of ours in that way, Claire, I just can’t. And you know that I can’t name names. I am trying to save you a lot of pointless pain here.’ ‘I see.’ Claire looked down at her small brown hands. They were quivering. The dome of her speckled grey-and-white head faced Jack, downy, he thought, like the feathers in a bird’s nest. ‘In a university . . .’ began Jack, preparing his best impression of a parson, but Claire stood up. ‘I know what happens in universities, Jack,’ she said sourly. ‘You can tell Zora congratulations. She made the class.’  ‘I need a homey, warm, chunky, fruit-based, wintery kind of a pie,’ explained Kiki, leaning over the counter. ‘You know – tasty-looking.’ Kiki’s little laminated name tag tapped on the plastic sneeze-guard protecting the merchandise. This was her lunch hour. ‘It’s for my friend,’ she said bashfully, incorrectly. She hadn’t  On Beauty seen Carlene Kipps since that strange afternoon three weeks ago. ‘She’s not too well. I need a down home pie, do you know what I mean? Nothing French or . . . frilly.’ Kiki laughed her big lovely laugh in the small store. People looked up from their speciality goods and smiled abstractly, supporting the idea of pleasure even if they weren’t certain of the cause. ‘See that?’ said Kiki emphatically, pressing her index finger on the plastic, directly above an open-faced pie. The surrounding pastry was golden and in the centre sat a red and yellow compote of sticky baked fruit. ‘ That’s what I’m talking about.’ A few minutes later Kiki was striding up the hill with her pie in its recycled cardboard box, tied with a green velvet ribbon. She was taking business into her own hands. For there had been a misunderstanding between Kiki Belsey and Carlene Kipps.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  However, in recollection, I suppose, of my hopeless hauntings of public parks in Europe, I was still keenly interested in outdoor activities and desirous of finding suitable playgrounds in the open where I had suffered such shameful privations. Here, too, I was to be thwarted. The disappointment I must now register (as I gently grade my story into an expression of the continuous risk and dread that ran through my bliss) should in no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic, tragic but never Arcadian American wilds. They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart’s buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes—que dis-je, of semi-extinct dragons!—while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike. I am exaggerating a little. One summer noon, just below timberline, where heavenly-hued blossoms that I would fain call larkspur crowded all along a purly mountain brook, we did find, Lolita and I, a secluded romantic spot, a hundred feet or so above the pass where we had left our car. The slope seemed untrodden. A last panting pine was taking a well-earned breather on the rock it had reached. A marmot whistled at us and withdrew. Beneath the lap-robe I had spread for Lo, dry flowers crepitated softly. Venus came and went. The jagged cliff crowning the upper talus and a tangle of shrubs growing below us seemed to offer us protection from sun and man alike. Alas, I had not reckoned with a faint side trail that curled up in cagey fashion among the shrubs and rocks a few feet from us.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Let’s go to Amherst,’ said Carlene Kipps urgently. She gripped Kiki’s hand. ‘Oh, honey, I’d love to go some time! It would be such a treat to see paintings like that, not in a museum. Wow . . . that’s such a kind offer, thank you. Something to look forward to.’ Carlene looked alarmed. ‘No, dear, now – let’s go now. I have the keys – we could get the train and be there by lunch. I want you  the anatomy lesson to see the pictures – they should be loved by somebody like you. We’ll go right away when this is wrapped. We’ll be back for tomorrow evening.’ Kiki looked out of the exit doors at another sidelong sweep of snow. She looked at the sunken, pale face of her friend, felt the wobbling hand in her own. ‘Really, Carlene, another time I’d love to go, but . . . it’s not really the weather – and it’s a little late to start out – maybe next week we could organize a trip, properly, and . . .’ Carlene Kipps let go of Kiki’s hand and turned back to her present wrapping. She was annoyed. They left the store soon after. Carlene waited under an awning, while Kiki stood out in the wet to hail a cab. ‘You’ve been very kind and helpful,’ said Carlene formally as Kiki opened the passenger door for her, as if they were not both getting in the same cab. The ride home was tense and quiet. ‘When do all your people get back?’ asked Kiki, and had to ask it twice because it was not heard, or there was a pretence of not hearing. ‘It will depend on how long Monty is needed,’ replied Carlene grandly. ‘There is a church there that he does a lot of work with. He won’t leave until they can spare him. His sense of duty is very strong.’ Now it was Kiki’s turn to be annoyed. They parted at Carlene’s house, Kiki choosing to walk the rest of the way back. Pushing through the slush, she was struck by the growing, upsetting conviction that she had made a mistake. It had been stupid and perverse to greet such passionate spontaneity with complaints about the weather and the hour. She felt it to be a kind of test, and now she saw she had failed it. It was exactly the kind of offer Howard and the kids would have thought absurd, sentimental and impractical – it was an offer she should have taken up. She spent the late afternoon in a snappy sulk, testy with her family and uninterested in the peace lunch (one of many of the past few weeks) that Howard had cooked for her. After the meal she put on her hat and gloves and walked back round to Redwood Avenue. Clotilde  On Beauty