Disgust

Passages

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

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• From The Lover (1984)

  Let me tell you what he did, too, what it was like. Well—he stole from the houseboys in order to go and smoke opium. He stole from our mother. He rummaged in closets. He stole. He gambled. My father bought a house in Entre-Deux-Mers before he died. It was the only thing we owned. He gambles. My mother sells the house to pay his debts. But it isn’t enough, it’s never enough. When he’s young he tries to sell me to customers at the Coupole. It’s for him my mother wants to go on living, so he can go on eating, so he can have a roof over his head, so he can still hear someone call him by his name. Then there’s the place she bought for him near Amboise, ten years’ savings. Mortgaged in one night. She pays the interest. And all the profit from the cutting down of the woods I told you about. In one night. He stole from my mother when she was dying. He was the sort of person who rummaged in closets, who had a gift for it, knew where to look, could find the right piles of sheets, the hiding places. He stole wedding rings, that sort of thing, lots of them, jewelry, food. He stole from Dô, the houseboys, my younger brother. From me. Plenty. He’d have sold her, his own mother. When she dies he sends for the lawyer right away, in the midst of all the emotion. He takes advantage of it. The lawyer says the will is not valid. It favors the elder son too much at my expense. The difference is enormous, laughable. I have to refuse or accept, in full knowledge of the facts. I say I’ll accept: I’ll sign. I’ve accepted. My brother lowers his eyes. Thanks. He weeps. In the midst of all the emotion of our mother’s death. He’s quite sincere. At the liberation of Paris, probably on the run for having been a collaborator in the South, he has nowhere to go. He comes to me. He’s running away from some danger, I never quite knew what. Perhaps he informed on people, Jews perhaps, anything is possible. He’s very mild and affectionate, as always after he’s committed murders or when he needs your help. My husband has been deported. He sympathizes. He stays three days. I’ve forgotten, and when I go out I don’t lock anything up. He rummages around. I’ve been keeping my rice and sugar rations for when my husband comes back. He rummages around and takes them. He also rummages around in a little closet in my bedroom. He finds what he’s looking for and takes all my savings, fifty thousand francs. He doesn’t leave a single note. He quits the apartment with the spoils. When I see him again I won’t mention it, it’s too shaming for him, I couldn’t. After the fake will, the fake Louis XIV chateau is sold for a song. The sale was a put-up job, like the will.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Claudius's wife, Valeria Messalina, was one of the most beautiful company \ Don't dab stuff women in Rome. Although he seemed fond of her, Claudius paid her no on your pimples, don't start attention, and she started to have affairs. At first she was discreet, but over cleaning your teeth: \ The result may be attractive, but the years, provoked by her husband's neglect, she became more and more the process is debauched. She had a room built for her in the palace where she enter-sickening. . . . tained scores of men, doing her best to imitate the most notorious prosti- — O V I D , THE ART OF LOVE, tute in Rome, whose name was written on the door. Any man who refused TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN her advances was put to death. Almost everyone in Rome knew about these frolics, but Claudius said nothing; he seemed oblivious. So great was Messalina's passion for her favorite lover, Gaius Silius, that she decided to marry him, although both of them were married already. While Claudius was away, they held a wedding ceremony, authorized by a marriage contract that Claudius himself had been tricked into signing. After the ceremony, Gaius moved into the palace. Now the shock and disgust of the whole city finally forced Claudius into action, and he ordered the execution of Gaius and of Messalina's other lovers—but not of Messalina herself. Nevertheless, a gang of soldiers, inflamed by the scandal, hunted her down and stabbed her to death. When this was reported to the emperor, he merely ordered more wine and continued his meal. Several nights The Anti-Seducer • 137 later, to the amazement of his slaves, he asked why the empress was not But if, like the winter cat joining him for dinner. upon the hearth, the lover clings when he is dismissed, and cannot bear Nothing is more infuriating than being paid no attention. In the process of to go, certain means must seduction, you may have to pull back at times, subjecting your target to be taken to make him moments of doubt. But prolonged inattention will not only break the se- understand; and these should be progressively ductive spell, it can create hatred. Claudius was an extreme of this behavior. ruder and ruder, until they His insensitivity was created by necessity: in acting like an imbecile, he hid touch him to the quick of his ambition and protected himself among dangerous competitors. But the his flesh. • She should refuse him the bed, and insensitivity became second nature. Claudius grew slovenly, and no longer jeer at him, and make him noticed what was going on around him. His inattentiveness had a profound angry; she should stir up effect on his wife: How, she wondered, can a man, especially a physically her mother's enmity against him; she should treat him

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  pay for the mug, which is free for the Choosers. This is what we would expect if Buyers do not experience spending money on the mug as a loss. Evidence from brain imaging confirms the difference. Selling goods that one would normally use activates regions of the brain that are associated with disgust and pain. Buying also activates these areas, but only when the prices are perceived as too high—when you feel that a seller is taking money that exceeds the exchange value. Brain recordings also indicate that buying at especially low prices is a pleasurable event. The cash value that the Sellers set on the mug is a bit more than twice as high as the value set by Choosers and Buyers. The ratio is very close to the loss aversion coefficient in risky choice, as we might expect if the same value function for gains and losses of money is applied to both riskless and risky decisions. A ratio of about 2:1 has appeared in studies of diverse economic domains, including the response of households to price changes. As economists would predict, customers tend to increase their purchases of eggs, orange juice, or fish when prices drop and to reduce their purchases when prices rise; however, in contrast to the predictions of economic theory, the effect of price increases (losses relative to the reference price) is about twice as large as the effect of gains. The mugs experiment has remained the standard demonstration of the endowment effect, along with an even simpler experiment that Jack Knetsch reported at about the same time. Knetsch asked two classes to fill out a questionnaire and rewarded them with a gift that remained in front of them for the duration of the experiment. In one session, the prize was an expensive pen; in another, a bar of Swiss chocolate. At the end of the class, the experimenter showed the alternative gift and allowed everyone to trade his or her gift for another. Only about 10% of the participants opted to exchange their gift. Most of those who had received the pen stayed with the pen, and those who had received the chocolate did not budge either. Thinking Like a Trader The fundamental ideas of prospect theory are that reference points exist, and that losses loom larger than corresponding gains. Observations in real markets collected over the years illustrate the power of these concepts. A study of the market for condo apartments in Boston during a downturn yielded particularly clear results. The authors of that study compared the behavior of owners of similar units who had bought their dwellings at different prices. For a rational agent, the buying price is irrelevant history—the current market value is all that

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  You consciously experienced the shift from unknown to known because you saw figure 2-1 both before and after you had the relevant knowledge to draw on. The process of construction is so habitual that you might never again see this figure as formless shapes, even if you try hard to un-see it and recapture experiential blindness. This little magic trick of the brain is so common and normal that psychologists discovered it time and time again before they understood how it worked. We will call it simulation. It means that your brain changed the firing of its own sensory neurons in the absence of incoming sensory input. Simulation can be visual, as with our picture, or involve any of your other senses. Ever have a song playing in your head that you can’t get rid of ? That audio hallucination is also a simulation. 1 Think of the last time someone handed you a red, juicy apple. You reached out for it, took a bite, and experienced the tart flavor. During those moments, neurons were firing in the sensory and motor regions of your brain. Motor neurons fired to produce your movements, and sensory neurons fired to process your sensations of the apple, like its red color with a blush of green; its smoothness against your hand; its crisp, floral scent; the audible crunch when you bit into it; and its tangy taste with a hint of sweetness. Other neurons made your mouth water to release enzymes and begin digestion, released cortisol to prepare your body to metabolize the sugars in the apple, and perhaps made your stomach churn a bit. But here’s the cool thing: just now, when you read the word “apple,” your brain responded to a certain extent as if an apple were actually present. Your brain combined bits and pieces of knowledge of previous apples you’ve seen and tasted, and changed the firing of neurons in your sensory and motor regions to construct a mental instance of the concept “Apple.” Your brain simulated a nonexistent apple using sensory and motor neurons. Simulation happens as quickly and automatically as a heartbeat. 2 For my daughter’s twelfth birthday, we exploited the power of simulation (and had some fun) by throwing a “gross foods” party. When her guests arrived, we served them pizza doctored with green food coloring so the cheese looked like fuzzy mold, and peach gelatin laced with bits of vegetables to look like vomit. For drinks, we served white grape juice in medical urine sample cups.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Everybody was exuberantly disgusted (it was perfect twelve-year-old humor), and several guests could not bring themselves to touch the food as they involuntarily simulated vile tastes and smells. The pièce de résistance, however, was the party game we played after lunch: a simple contest to identify foods by their smell. We used mashed baby food—peaches, spinach, beef, and so on—and artfully smeared it on diapers, so it looked exactly like baby poo. Even though the guests knew that the smears were food, several actually gagged from the simulated smell. 3 Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest. The discovery of simulation in the late 1990s ushered in a new era in psychology and neuroscience. Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it. Forward-looking thinkers speculate that simulation is a common mechanism not only for perception but also for understanding language, feeling empathy, remembering, imagining, dreaming, and many other psychological phenomena. Our common sense might declare that thinking, perceiving, and dreaming are different mental events (at least to those of us in Western cultures), yet one general process describes them all. Simulation is the default mode for all mental activity. It also holds a key to unlocking the mystery of how the brain creates emotions. 4 Outside your brain, simulation can cause tangible changes in your body. Let’s try a little creative simulation with our bee. In your mind’s eye, see the bee bouncing lightly on the petal of a fragrant white flower, buzzing around as it searches for pollen. If you’re fond of bees, then the flutter of imaginary wings is right now causing other neurons to prepare your body to move in for a closer look—preparing your heart to beat faster, your sweat glands to fill, and your blood pressure to decrease. Or if you have been badly stung in the past, your brain may ready your body to run away or make a swatting motion, formulating some other pattern of physical changes. Each time your brain simulates sensory input, it prepares automatic changes in your body that have the potential to change your feeling.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Were the roses from Trevor? Had he changed his mind about his fat old girlfriend? Was this good? Was this the beginning of the new life? Renewed romance? Did I want that? My heart reared up like a frightened horse, an idiot. I went over to look at the flowers. The mirror hanging on the wall above the mantel showed a frozen corpse, still pretty. And then I noticed that the glass vase was skull-shaped. Trevor wouldn’t have sent me that. No. “Did you see who dropped these off?” I asked the doorman. “A delivery guy.” “Was he Asian?” I asked. “Old black guy. A foot messenger.” Tucked between the flowers was a small note written in girly ballpoint: “To my muse. Call me and we’ll get started.” I flipped it over: Ping Xi’s business card with his name, number, e-mail address, and the corniest quotation I’d ever read: “Every act of creation is an act of destruction.—Pablo Picasso” I took the vase off the mantel and got into the elevator, the smell of the roses like the stink off a dead cat in the gutter. Up on my floor, I opened the garbage chute in the hallway and stuffed the roses down, but I kept the card. However much Ping Xi disgusted me—I didn’t respect him or his art, I didn’t want to know him, I didn’t want him to know me—he had flattered me, and reminded me that my stupidity and vanity were still well intact. A good lesson. “Oh, Trevor!”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Natasha started to take notice. My sleepiness was good for rudeness to visitors to the gallery, but not for signing for packages or noticing if someone had come in with a dog and tracked paw prints all over the floor, which happened a few times. There were a few spilled lattes. MFA students touching paintings, once even rearranging an installation of shattered CD jewel cases in a Jarrod Harvey installation to spell out the word “HACK.” When I noticed it, I just shuffled the shards of plastic around, no one the wiser. But when a homeless woman set herself up in the back room one afternoon, Natasha found out. I’d had no idea how long the woman had been there. Maybe people thought she was part of the artwork. I ended up paying her fifty bucks out of petty cash to leave. Natasha couldn’t hide her irritation. “When people walk in, you make an impression on my behalf. You know Arthur Schilling was in here last week? I just got a call.” She thought I was on drugs, I’m sure. “Who?” “Christ. Study the roster. Study everybody’s photos,” she said. “Where’s the packing list for Earl?” Et cetera, et cetera . . . That spring, the gallery was putting up Ping Xi’s first solo show —“Bowwowwow”—and Natasha was up in arms about every little detail. She probably would have fired me sooner had she not been so busy. I tried to feign interest and mask my horror whenever Natasha talked about Ping Xi’s “dog pieces.” He had taxidermied a variety of pure breeds: a poodle, a Pomeranian, a Scottish terrier. Black Lab, Dachshund. Even a little Siberian husky pup. He’d been working on them for a long time. He and Natasha had grown close since his cum paintings had sold so well. During the installation, I overheard one of the interns whispering to the electrician. “There’s a rumor going around that the artist gets the dogs as puppies, raises them, then kills them when they’re the size he wants. He locks them in an industrial freezer because that’s the most humane way to euthanize them without compromising the look of the animal. When they thaw, he can get them into whatever position he wants.” “Why doesn’t he just poison them, or break their necks?” I had a feeling the rumor was true. When the dogs were set up, the wires connected, all the electric cords plugged in, Natasha killed the lights and turned each dog on. Red lasers shot out of their eyes. I petted the black Lab while the workers swept up the dog hair that had fallen out. Its face was silky and cold. “Please, no petting,” Ping Xi said suddenly in the darkness.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Were the roses from Trevor? Had he changed his mind about his fat old girlfriend? Was this good? Was this the beginning of the new life? Renewed romance? Did I want that? My heart reared up like a frightened horse, an idiot. I went over to look at the flowers. The mirror hanging on the wall above the mantel showed a frozen corpse, still pretty. And then I noticed that the glass vase was skull-shaped. Trevor wouldn’t have sent me that. No. “Did you see who dropped these off?” I asked the doorman. “A delivery guy.” “Was he Asian?” I asked. “Old black guy. A foot messenger.” Tucked between the flowers was a small note written in girly ballpoint: “To my muse. Call me and we’ll get started.” I flipped it over: Ping Xi’s business card with his name, number, e-mail address, and the corniest quotation I’d ever read: “Every act of creation is an act of destruction.—Pablo Picasso” I took the vase off the mantel and got into the elevator, the smell of the roses like the stink off a dead cat in the gutter. Up on my floor, I opened the garbage chute in the hallway and stuffed the roses down, but I kept the card. However much Ping Xi disgusted me—I didn’t respect him or his art, I didn’t want to know him, I didn’t want him to know me—he had flattered me, and reminded me that my stupidity and vanity were still well intact. A good lesson. “Oh, Trevor!”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She came over the following Sunday, nervous and smelling of a new perfume that reminded me of gummy worms, said nothing about the odd assortment of furniture and decorations in my apartment or my six-month disappearance, my lack of cell phone, the stacks of mildewed books lining the wall of the living room. She just said, “So, it’s been a while, I guess,” sat down where I pointed, at the Goodwill afghan that I’d spread out like a picnic blanket across the floor, and rattled on about her new position at her company. She described her boss as a “CIA tool,” rolling her eyes and emphasizing certain technical terms in her description of her duties. At first I couldn’t tell if they were aphorisms about sex positions. Everything about her seemed troublingly pornographic—her matte foundation, her darkly outlined lips, that perfume, the poised stillness of her hands. “Innovative solutions.” “Anatomy of workplace violence.” “Strong objectives.” She wore her hair in a lose chignon, my tiny pearl earrings budding from her earlobes like drops of milk, simultaneously perverse and innocent, I thought. She also wore my white eyelet blouse and a pair of jeans I’d given her. I felt no longing or nostalgia for the clothes. The jeans had frayed at the cuffs, an inch too long on Reva’s legs. I thought to suggest to her to have them professionally hemmed. There was a place on Eighty-third. “I just read this story in the New Yorker,” she said, and pulled the rolled-up issue out of her enormous purse. The story was called “Bad at Math.” It was about an adolescent Chinese American in Cleveland who bombs the PSAT, jumps off his two-story junior high school, and breaks both his legs. After the school guidance counselor pressures the boy’s family into group therapy, his parents tell him they love him in a supermarket parking lot and they all start to cry and wail and fall on their knees, while all the other shoppers wheel their carts past and pretend like nothing amazing is going on. “Listen to this opening,” Reva said. “‘For the first time, they said the words. I think it pained them more than the cracking of my shins and femurs.’” “Go on,” I said. The story was terribly written. Reva read aloud. Ping Xi appeared in my mind as I listened. I imagined his small, dark eyes staring at me and squinting, one pinching shut as his paint-stained hand, outstretched with a brush, measured me for proportions. But that was all I could remember. He struck me as a reptilian, small-hearted being, someone placed on the planet to strike a chord with similar people, people who distracted themselves with money and conversation rather than sink their hands and teeth into the world around them. Shallow, I guess. But there were worse people on this Earth.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Our tour was hardly a leisurely pleasure jaunt. If we looped and zigzagged and went round in circles, it was because our itinerary took its shape not from landmarks or Michelin three-star attractions, but from my own vertiginous moods—and, to a lesser extent, Adrian’s. We zigzagged from depression to depression, looped around drunken sprees, circled good moments. Our itinerary had no geographical rhyme or reason, but of course, I can only see that in retrospect when I list the sites we visited. We touched down in Salzburg long enough to visit Mozart’s Geburtshaus, stuff ourselves with Leberknödel, sleep fitfully and then continued on to Munich. We meandered through Munich and the Alps beyond, visited various castles built by Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, climbed the winding road to Schloss Neuschwanstein in a sudden drenching downpour, toured the castle with an army of potato-shaped hausfraus in orthopedic shoes who elbowed past us making guttural noises in their mellifluous tongue and turning beet-red with pride in their glorious national heritage of Wagner, Volkswagens, and Wildschwein. I remember the countryside around Neuschwanstein with almost nightmarish clarity: the picture-postcard Alps, the clouds hooked on the jagged mountaintops, the arthritic fingers of old snow sculpturing the Arětes, the silent horns of the peaks confronting the smoky blue sky, the velvety green meadows in the valleys (beginner ski slopes in winter), and the chalet-roofed brown and white houses placed as in a children’s game. Germany’s most famous castle is not in Schwetzingen or Speyer, Heidelberg or Hamburg, Baden-Baden or Rotenburg, Berchtesgaden or Berlin, Bayreuth or Bamberg, Karlsruhe or Kranichstein, Ellingen or Eltz—but in Disneyland, California. Amazing how much Walt Disney and Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria resemble each other mentally. Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein is a phony nineteenth-century evocation of a Middle Ages that never existed. Disney’s castle is a phony of a phony. I was particularly entranced by Ludwig’s centrally heated plaster grotto between bedroom and study, his plaster stalactites and stalagmites illuminated with neon-green spotlights, his murals of Siegfried and Tannhäuser (featuring fat blond goddesses with breasts as smooth as epoxy resin and blond-bearded warriors reclining in leafy glens on mossy rocks). I was hypnotized by Ludwig’s portrait with its paranoid eyes. And everywhere throughout the Schloss there was evidence of all that is corniest, most sentimental and nauseating about German culture—especially that boasting self-congratulatory belief in the spirituality of their “race": we are a geistig people, we feel deeply, we love music, we love the woods, we love the sound of marching feet…. Notice the cupids and doves hovering around Tannhäuser who reclines on a gray plaster rock leaning his painted satin elbow on the overmodeled drapery which flows from Venus’ overfed haunches. But notice especially how in this castle, these paintings, this country (as in Disneyland)—nothing is left to the imagination. Each leaf is crisply outlined and shaded; each breast points its literal nipple at you like an idiot’s eye; each feather in Cupid’s wing is quiveringly palpable. No imagination—that’s what makes a beast.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  she’d say. As a professor, my father was good at guiding people to their own conclusions. He was dispassionate, sulky, even a little snide at times. I took after him. My mother did say once we were both “stone wolves.” But she herself had a cold aura, too. I don’t think she realized it. None of us had much warmth in our hearts. I was never allowed to have any pets. Sometimes I think a puppy might have changed everything. My parents died one after the other my junior year of college—first my dad from cancer, then my mother from pills and alcohol six weeks later. All of this, the tragedy of my past, came reeling back with great force that night I woke up in the supply closet at Ducat for the last time. It was ten at night and everyone had gone home. I trudged up the dark stairway to clean out my desk. There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing. I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life. I found a shopping bag in the break room and packed up my coffee mug, the spare change of clothes I kept in my desk drawer along with a few pairs of high heels, panty hose, a push-up bra, some makeup, a stash of cocaine I hadn’t used in a year. I thought about stealing something from the gallery—the Larry Clark photo hanging in Natasha’s office, or the paper cutter. I settled on a bottle of champagne—a lukewarm, and therefore appropriate, consolation. I turned off all the lights, set the alarm, and walked out. It was a cool early-summer night. I lit a cigarette and stood facing the gallery. The lasers weren’t on, but through the glass I could see the tall white poodle that looked out onto the sidewalk. It was baring its teeth, with one gold fang glinting in the light of the streetlamp. There was a red velvet bow tied around its little bouffant hairdo. Suddenly, a feeling rose up in me. I tried to squash it down, but it nestled into my bowels. “Pets just make messes. I don’t want to have to go around picking dog hairs out of my teeth,” I remembered my mother saying. “Not even a goldfish?” “Why? Just to watch it swim around and die?”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I’d figured that out as soon as I could do the math. Stretch marks, loose skin, scars across her belly she said looked like “a raccoon had disemboweled her,” glaring at me as if I’d wrapped my umbilical cord around my neck on purpose. Maybe I did. “You were blue when they cut me open and pulled you out. After all the hell I went through, the consequences, your father, and the baby goes and dies? Like dropping a pie on the floor as soon as you pull it out of the oven.” The only intellectual exercise my mother got was doing crossword puzzles. She’d come out of the bedroom some nights to ask my father for hints. “Don’t tell me the answer. Just tell me what the word sounds like,” she’d say. As a professor, my father was good at guiding people to their own conclusions. He was dispassionate, sulky, even a little snide at times. I took after him. My mother did say once we were both “stone wolves.” But she herself had a cold aura, too. I don’t think she realized it. None of us had much warmth in our hearts. I was never allowed to have any pets. Sometimes I think a puppy might have changed everything. My parents died one after the other my junior year of college—first my dad from cancer, then my mother from pills and alcohol six weeks later. All of this, the tragedy of my past, came reeling back with great force that night I woke up in the supply closet at Ducat for the last time. It was ten at night and everyone had gone home. I trudged up the dark stairway to clean out my desk. There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing. I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life. I found a shopping bag in the break room and packed up my coffee mug, the spare change of clothes I kept in my desk drawer along with a few pairs of high heels, panty hose, a push-up bra, some makeup, a stash of cocaine I hadn’t used in a year. I thought about stealing something from the gallery—the Larry Clark photo hanging in Natasha’s office, or the paper cutter. I settled on a bottle of champagne—a lukewarm, and therefore appropriate, consolation. I turned off all the lights, set the alarm, and walked out. It was a cool early-summer night. I lit a cigarette and stood facing the gallery. The lasers weren’t on, but through the glass I could see the tall white poodle that looked out onto the sidewalk. It was baring its teeth, with one gold fang glinting in the light of the streetlamp. There was a red velvet bow tied around its little bouffant hairdo.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “See, we should have buried her. At least you still have your parents somewhere. Like, they haven’t been burned to ashes. At least they’re in the ground, their bones are still there, I mean, in one place. You still have that.” “Pull over,” I told her. I’d spotted a McDonald’s up ahead. “Let’s go through the drive-through. Let me buy you breakfast.” “I’m on a diet,” Reva said. “Let me buy me breakfast then,” I said. She pulled into the parking lot, got in line. “Do you visit them? Your parents’ graves?” she asked. Reva mistook my sigh of frustration for an expulsion of buried sadness. She turned to me with a high whining, “Mmm!” frowning in sympathy, and leaned on the horn by accident. It honked like a wounded coyote. She gasped. The person in the car ahead of us gave her the finger. “Oh, God. Sorry!” she yelled, and honked again in apology. She looked at me. “There’s food at home. There’s coffee, everything.” “All I want is coffee from McDonald’s. That’s all I ask. I came all this way.” Reva put the car into park. We waited. “I can’t even tell you how disturbing it was at the crematorium. It’s the last place you want to be when you’re in mourning. They give you all this literature about how they burn the bodies, like I really need to know. And in one of the pamphlets, they describe how they cremate dead babies in these little individual ‘metal pans.’ That’s what they call them—‘metal pans.’ I can’t stop thinking about that. ‘Pans.’ It’s so gross. Like they’re making personal pan pizzas. Isn’t that just awful? Doesn’t that make you sick?” The car ahead pulled forward. I motioned for Reva to drive up to the intercom. “Two large coffees, extra sugar, extra cream,” I said and pointed to Reva to repeat the order. She did, and ordered herself an Oreo McFlurry. “You can sleep over if you want,” Reva said, driving up to the first window. “It’s New Year’s Eve, you know.” “I have plans in the city.” Reva knew I was lying. I looked at her, daring her to challenge me, but she just smiled and passed my debit card to the woman in the window. “I wish I had plans in the city,” Reva said. We pulled up to the next window and Reva handed me my coffees. The lids smelled like cheap perfume and burnt hamburger. “I can call you a cab back to the station after the reception,” Reva went on, her voice high and phony as she spooned her McFlurry into her mouth. “Ken is coming, I think,” she said. “And a few other people from work. Do you want to stay for dinner at least?” Speaking with her mouth full was another thing I couldn’t stand about Reva. “I need a nap first,” I said. “Then I’ll see how I feel.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Stacks and stacks of Cosmo and Marie Claire and Us Weekly. The only movement in the living room was the swirling screensaver on Reva’s enormous Dell, which sat on a little side table in the corner and was mostly obscured by a drying rack weighed down with Ann Taylor sweater sets and Banana Republic dress shirts, matching bras and panties. A half dozen discolored white sports bras. Pairs and pairs of flesh-colored nylons. “Reva!” I called out, kicking through a pile of brightly colored sneakers in the living room. In the kitchen, a dried-out sheet cake with finger gouges in it sat on the counter next to a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and sugar-free maple syrup. There were stacks of dirty dishes in the sink. A small trash can overflowed with junk-food packaging and apple cores. Half a toaster waffle smeared with peanut butter, a murky bag of baby carrots. Crushed cans of Diet 7UP filled a cardboard box next to the trash can. Diet 7UP cans everywhere. A glass of orange juice with fruit flies floating on the surface. Her cabinets contained exactly what I’d expected. Herbal laxative teas, Metamucil, Sweet’N Low, stacks of canned Healthy Choice soups, stacks of canned tuna. Tostitos. Goldfish crackers. Reduced fat Skippy. Sugar-free jelly. Sugar-free Hershey’s Syrup. Rice crackers. Low-fat microwave popcorn. Box after box of yellow cake mix. When I opened the freezer, smoke billowed out. The thick frosted inside was crowded with fat-free frozen yogurt. Sugar-free Popsicles. A cloudy bottle of Belvedere. Déjà vu. Reva’s new favorite cocktail, she’d told me—had I been on Infermiterol?— was low-calorie Gatorade and vodka. “You could drink this all day and never get dehydrated.” “Reva, if you’re hiding from me, I will find you,” I called out. Her bedroom was hardly any bigger than her king-size mattress, which she’d told me she’d inherited from her parents when her mother got sick “and so they got two doubles because my dad couldn’t sleep at night with all her fidgeting.” Green numbers on a digital alarm clock glowed between cans of Diet 7UP on the bedside table. It was 4:37. I smelled peanut butter and again, the bitter tang of vomit. The comforter was Laura Ashley, folded back from the bed. Food stains on the sheets. I looked under the bed, found only shoes, more magazines, empty little yogurt containers, paper bags from Burger King punched flat like deflated footballs. In the drawer of her bedside table, a purple vibrator, a diary with a waxy green cover, a purple eye mask, a pack of cherry Lifesavers, a Polaroid of her mother wearing a Tigger costume, smiling shyly, her eyes caught midblink, sitting on that plastic-covered sofa in Farmingdale, a five-year-old Reva dressed as a tiny Winnie-the-Pooh on her knee, Reva’s mother’s hand cradling her fuzzy yellow potbelly. I picked up the diary and looked inside. It was just a daily log of numbers, mathematical sums and subtractions, the final results

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness. Communities were on the lookout for bad moms who should be put in prison. About the same time as Marsha’s prosecution, Bridget Lee gave birth to a stillborn baby in Pickens County, Alabama. She was charged with capital murder and wrongfully imprisoned. Lee, a church pianist, mother of two, and bank bookkeeper, had gotten pregnant after an extramarital affair. Scared and depressed, the thirty-four-year-old hid her pregnancy and hoped to secretly put the child up for adoption. But she went into labor five weeks before her due date, and the baby was stillborn. She didn’t tell her husband about the stillbirth, which aroused suspicion. The disreputable circumstances surrounding Lee’s pregnancy were enough to influence the pathologist who conducted the autopsy to conclude that the stillborn baby was born alive and was then suffocated by Lee. Months after Lee was arrested and charged with capital murder, six additional pathologists examined the body and unanimously concluded that neonatal pneumonia had killed the child—it was a classic stillbirth with very common features. This new information led the prosecutor to drop the charges, sparing Ms. Lee a capital trial and, potentially, the death penalty. The discredited pathologist left Alabama but continues to serve as a practicing medical examiner in Texas. In hundreds of other cases, falsely accused women never received the forensic help they needed to avoid wrongful convictions. A few years earlier, before representing Marsha Colbey, we took on the case of Diane Tucker and Victoria Banks. An intellectually disabled black woman living in Choctaw County, Alabama, Ms. Banks was accused of killing her newborn child even though police had no credible basis for believing she had ever been pregnant. Banks had allegedly told a deputy sheriff that she was pregnant to avoid time in jail for an unrelated matter. When she was seen months later with no child, police accused her of killing her infant. Disabled and without adequate legal assistance, Ms. Banks was coerced into pleading guilty to killing a child who had never existed along with her sister, Ms. Tucker. Because she was facing capital murder charges and a potential death sentence, she made a deal to accept a prison sentence of twenty years.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Presently, the lady herself—sandals, maroon slacks, yellow silk blouse, squarish face, in that order—came down the steps, her index finger still tapping upon her cigarette. I think I had better describe her right away, to get it over with. The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich. Patting her bronze-brown bun, she led me into the parlor and we talked for a minute about the McCoo fire and the privilege of living in Ramsdale. Her very wide-set sea-green eyes had a funny way of traveling all over you, carefully avoiding your own eyes. Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow; and uncoiling herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept making spasmodic dashes at three ashtrays and the near fender (where lay the brown core of an apple); whereupon she would sink back again, one leg folded under her. She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul; women who are completely devoid of humor; women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished. I was perfectly aware that if by any wild chance I became her lodger, she would methodically proceed to do in regard to me what taking a lodger probably meant to her all along, and I would again be enmeshed in one of those tedious affairs I knew so well. But there was no question of my settling there. I could not be happy in that type of household with bedraggled magazines on every chair and a kind of horrible hybridization between the comedy of so-called “functional modern furniture” and the tragedy of decrepit rockers and rickety lamp tables with dead lamps. I was led upstairs, and to the left—into “my” room. I inspected it through the mist of my utter rejection of it; but I did discern above “my” bed René Prinet’s “Kreutzer Sonata.”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "And when the Queen could see that Prince Gerald's jealousy had hardened his penis to extremity, when he was all but ready to discharge his passion without the aid of any stimulant, then she set me to bathing him and satisfying him. "I can't tell you how degrading this was to me. His body was nothing but my enemy. And yet I was to fetch a bowl of warm water, a sea sponge, and with my teeth only to hold it, bathe his genitals. "He was positioned on a low table for this, kneeling obediently as I washed his buttocks, dipped the sponge again, bathed his scrotum and finally his penis. But the Queen wanted more than this. I must now use my tongue to cleanse him. I was horrified, and shedding tears like any Princess. But she was adamant. With my tongue I licked his penis, the balls, and then delved into the crack of his buttocks, even entering into his anus, which had a sour, almost salty taste to it. "All the while he showed his obvious pleasure and longing. "His buttocks were sore, of course. And it gave me great satisfaction that the Queen seldom spanked him anymore herself, but rather had it done by his groom before he was brought into her presence. So he didn't suffer for her; rather he suffered in the Slaves' Hall, ignored by those around him. Yet it was mortifying to me that my tongue stroking his welts and red marks gave him pleasure. "Finally, the Queen ordered him to kneel up, his hands behind his back, and told me I should now fully reward him. I knew what this meant, yet I pretended I did not. She told me to take his penis in my mouth and drain it. "I can't explain how I felt then. I felt I could not do it. And yet within seconds I had obeyed, so afraid of displeasing her as I was, and his thick penis was pushing against the back of my throat, my lips and jaws aching as I tried to suck it properly. The Queen gave me instructions, to make my strokes long, to use my tongue, and to go faster and faster. She spanked me unmercifully as I obeyed, her smacking blows in perfect rhythm with my sucking. At last his seed filled my mouth. I was commanded to swallow it. "But the Queen was not at all pleased with my reticence. She said that I must show no disinclination towards anything." Beauty nodded, remembering the Prince's words to her in the Inn, that even the lowly must be served for his pleasure.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Spot these types early on by seeing whether they are capable of having an idea of their own. An inability to disagree with you is a bad sign. The Moralizer. Seduction is a game, and should be undertaken with a light heart. All is fair in love and seduction; morality never enters the pic- ture. The character of the Moralizer, however, is rigid. These are people who follow fixed ideas and try to make you bend to their standards. They want to change you, to make you a better person, so they endlessly criticize and judge—that is their pleasure in life. In truth, their moral ideas stem from their own unhappiness, and mask their desire to dominate those around them. Their inability to adapt and to enjoy makes them easy to rec- ognize; their mental rigidity may also be accompanied by a physical stiff- ness. It is hard not to take their criticisms personally so it is better to avoid their presence and their poisoned comments. The Tightwad. Cheapness signals more than a problem with money. It is a sign of something constricted in a person's character—something that keeps them from letting go or taking a risk. It is the most anti-seductive ladies began to laugh and to say that the man concerned hardly deserved the name of gentleman; and many of the men felt as ashamed as he should have been, had he ever had the sense to recognize such disgraceful behavior for what it was. —BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE, THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER, TRANSLATED BY GEORGE BULL Let us see now how love is diminished. This happens through the easy accessibility of its consolations, through one's being able to see and converse lengthily with a lover, through a lover's unsuitable garb and gait, and by the sudden onset of poverty. . . . • Another cause of diminution of love is the realization of the notoriety of one's lover, and accounts of his miserliness, bad character, and general wickedness; also any affair with another woman, even if it involves no feelings of love.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  For a moment, a life like that didn’t sound bad at all, so I got up off the sofa and took an Infermiterol, brushed my teeth, went into my room, took off all my clothes, got into bed, pulled the duvet up over my head, and woke up sometime later—a few days, I guessed—gagging and coughing, Trevor’s testicles swinging in my face. “Jesus Christ,” he was mumbling. I was still adrift, dizzy. I closed my eyes and kept them closed, heard the crackling of his hand jerking his spit-covered penis, then felt him ejaculate on my breasts. A drop slid down a ridge between my ribs. I turned away, felt him sit on the edge of the bed, listened to his breathing. “I should go,” he said after a minute. “I’ve been here too long again. Claudia will start to worry.” I tried to lift my hand to give him the finger, but I couldn’t. I tried to speak but I groaned instead. “VCRs are going to be obsolete in a year or two, you know,” he said. Then I heard him in the bathroom, the clink of the seat hitting the tank, a spattering of piss, a flush, then a long rush of water at the sink. He was probably washing off his dick. He came back in and got dressed, then lay down behind me on the bed, spooned me for about twenty seconds. His hands were cold on my breasts, his breath hot on my neck. “This was the last time,” he said, as though he’d been put out, as though he’d done me some huge favor. Then he lurched up off the bed, making my body bounce like a buoy on an empty sea. I heard the door slam. I got up, pulled on some clothes, took a few Advil, and dragged the duvet from the bedroom to the sofa. There on the coffee table was a DVD player, still in its box. The sight of it disgusted me, the receipt tucked under the lid. Paid in cash. Trevor would have known I didn’t own any DVDs. I put on the Home Shopping Network. In a haze, I ordered a rice cooker from the Wolfgang Puck Bistro Collection, a cubic zirconia tennis bracelet, two push-up bras with silicone inserts, and seven hand-painted porcelain figurines of sleeping babies. I’d give them to Reva, I reasoned, to condole her. Finally, exhausted, I drifted off just a centimeter from my mind, and spent the night on the sofa in fitful half sleep, my bones digging hard into the sagging cushions, my throat itchy and sore, my heart racing and slowing at intervals, my eyes flicking open now and then to make sure I was really alone in the room. Six IN THE MORNING, I called Dr. Tuttle. “I’m having an insomnia flare-up,” I said, which was finally true. “I can hear it in your voice,” she said. “I’m low on Ambien.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (Be Good to Your Stomach), and I hated the Germans for always thinking about their damned stomachs, their Gesundheit—as if they had invented health, hygiene, and hypochondria. I hated their fanatical obsession with the illusion of cleanliness. Illusion, mind you, because Germans are really not clean. The lacy white curtains, the quilts hanging out the windows to air, the housewives who scrub the sidewalks in front of their houses, and the storekeepers who scrub their front windows are all part of a carefully contrived facade to intimidate foreigners with Germany’s aggressive wholesomeness. But just go into any German toilet and you’ll find a fixture unlike any other in the world. It has a cute little porcelain platform for the shit to fall on so you can inspect it before it whirls off into the watery abyss, and there is, in fact, no water in the toilet until you flush it. As a result German toilets have the strongest shit smell of any toilets anywhere. (I say this as a seasoned world traveler.) Then there’s the filthy rag of a public towel, hanging over a tiny wash basin which has only a cold water tap (for you to dribble cold water over your right hand—or whichever hand you happen to use). I did quite a lot of thinking about toilets when I lived in Europe. (That was how crazy Germany made me.) I once even attempted a classification of people on the basis of toilets. “The History of the World Through Toilets” (I optimistically wrote at the top of a clean page in my notebook) “an epic poem???” British: British toilet paper. A way of life. Coated. Refusing to absorb, soften, or bend (stiff upper lip). Often property of government. In the ultimate welfare state even the t.p. is printed with propaganda. The British toilet as the last refuge of colonialism. Water rushing overhead like Victoria Falls, & you an explorer. The spray in your face. For one brief moment (as you flush) Britannia rules the waves again. The pull chain is elegant. A bell cord in a stately home (open to the public, for pennies, on Sundays). German: German toilets observe class distinctions. In third-class carriages: rough brown paper. In first class: white paper. Called Spezial Krepp. (Requires no translation.) But the German toilet is unique for its little stage (all the world’s a) on which shit falls. This enables you to take a long look, choose among political candidates, and think of things to tell your analyst. Also good for diamond miners trying to smuggle out gems by bowel. German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything. Italian: