Embarrassment

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 Filthy Animals (2021)

  When his parents split up, his dad used to call him every Thursday and on weekends. But Lionel didn’t know what to say to him, and they’d spend a couple minutes on the phone in total silence. Then his dad would ask to speak to his mom, and Lionel would give the phone over to her. Lionel wasn’t sure what you were supposed to say to other people over the phone. That time last year, when his dad came to see him after he’d tried to kill himself, had been the first time they’d seen each other in years. And what had his dad said? You look homeless. “I’ll send him an email,” Lionel said. Charles hooked his finger over the top of the pillowcase and pulled. It was looser than Lionel first thought, and the nails wedged into the wall squeaked. “I don’t think you secured this,” Charles said. “Is this just plaster?” Charles tapped the wall with his knuckles and frowned. “You’ve made your point.” Charles lowered himself to the floor. He was wearing a gray sweater and just his underwear, no socks. He stretched his legs out under the table and brushed Lionel’s ankles with his big toe. He rested his head against the cupboard doors and closed his eyes. Then he started to hum, and his toe switched back and forth over the knobs of Lionel’s ankle bones in time to the humming. “Is that what you’re working on?” Charles shook his head, but the humming grew louder, and he smirked a little. He was having fun at Lionel’s expense. “Very funny.” “You don’t know Tchaikovsky?” “Did Bach write that?” Lionel said. Charles laughed loudly, and it was like that sound from last night when he’d stood on the porch and howled. “Is Bach the only composer you know?” “I know about Chopin,” Lionel said. “He’s a composer.” “Well, with Bach and Chopin, you could probably fake your way through a dinner party.” “Is that what you do? Fake it?” “Don’t you?” Charles asked. Lionel felt stupidly hurt by that. Not because he objected in principle, but because it implied that the two of them sitting in Lionel’s kitchen was fake. Not real. “Sure,” Lionel said. “I’m a big faker.” He left the table and sat next to Charles on the floor. Closer to the window, he could hear the wind kissing the narrow gap at the top of the pillowcase. He reached up and back, his shoulder pinching a little, and pulled the broken halves of the ruler down. On the back, the blue marker had faded to black. He’d written his name there and the year he’d gotten it. Charles took the ruler from him and put the two halves together. “This has seen better days.” “Yeah,” Lionel said. Charles made to throw the ruler into the trash across the room. Lionel reached for it. “Don’t do that.” “It’s busted,” Charles said, holding the ruler out away from Lionel. “What’s the deal?”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She had better control of her body and, by extension, his body. She stretched her leg and he shifted back away from her. “Don’t lie to me.” “Who’s lying?” “What are you thinking?” She was lying flat on her back, her leg supported by Lionel. He wrapped his hand around her ankle and slid his thumb along the underside of her foot. Her skin was warm, and her feet were hard and callused, bruised. Their muscles bulged, full of thick ligaments and tendons. Grotesque, but beautiful, too. The perfect swirl of a shell, the geometry of a rock formation, the gooey symmetry of the early embryo. He pressed his thumb against her high arch and she sighed. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m not thinking.” “Good,” she said. “Don’t.” She arched slightly on the couch and then sank down. There was something loose, kind of sandy, sticking to her feet. Powder and dust maybe. It came away on Lionel’s hands, but he cupped her toes and then the balls of her feet, gripping more tightly near the ankles. She sighed at his touch and he felt momentarily powerful, as if he had evoked some feeling in her, pleasure or comfort, and then embarrassment. He could see himself in the game she was playing. He dropped her foot but it stayed perfectly level, taunting him. He tried to brush it away, but he couldn’t make it move. “I don’t like being played with,” he said. “Who’s playing who?” she asked without opening her eyes. “I’m not playing with anyone.” Sophie left the couch and knelt in front of Lionel. They weren’t in direct eye contact, but she was looking at him. He found it hard to meet her gaze. He could feel her breath on his cheeks, on his lips. She reached just past his shoulder and then cupped his head tenderly. She rested a hand on his lap, not near his dick, but on his thigh. “You could have gone home,” she said. “But you came here.” The nutty scent of the sauce, the smell of the day on her tongue. Lionel blinked. “You told me to come,” he said. “But who told you to listen?” Lionel flushed. He wanted to withdraw from her but didn’t. It was another of those moments when he had a clear choice but chose not to act. She came closer to him then, until she was kneeling on his folded legs. Her weight felt good against him. She stroked the back of his neck, and his hands tingled, as with the feather sticking out of Charles’s coat. It was like a premonition of an act.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When he turned his face my way it was dark, indistinguishable; his back and shoulders were carving up strips of light, carving them this way and that as he twisted and bobbed. The water was dark, opaque, but it caught the sun’s gold light, the waves dragon scales writhing under a sainted knight’s halo. At last Kevin swam up beside me; his submerged body looked small, boneless. He said we should go down to the store and buy some Vaseline. “But we don’t really need it,” I said. “Let’s get it.” In the distance two gray-mauve clouds, like the huge rectangular sails of caravels, hung darkly, becalmed, immanent, behind mist. Kevin’s lips were blue and he was covered with goose bumps as he vaulted up onto the dock. His legs were smooth except for the first signs of hair above his ankles (the first place an old man’s legs go bald). He dried himself and put on a shirt. We took the outboard to the village. I went into the store with him, though I made him ask for the Vaseline. I was blushing and couldn’t raise my eyes. He pulled it off without a trace of guilt, even asked to see the medium-size jar before settling for the small one. Outside, a film of oil opalesced on the water under a great axle of red light rolling across the sky from azimuth to zenith. That little round jar of grease would be a clue for my father or his to find. Worse, it was the application of method to sex, the outward betrayal of what I wanted to consider love, the inward state. At last the sun went down and the lake seemed colder and bigger and the two of us seemed bereft. That night the two families, all of us, went out to dinner at a restaurant thirty miles away, a place where the overweight ate iceberg lettuce under a dressing of ketchup and mayonnaise, steaks under A.1. Sauce, feed corn under butter, ice cream under chocolate, where a man wearing a black toupee and a madras sports jacket bounced merrily up and down an electric organ while a frisky couple lunged and dipped before him in cloudy recollections of ancient dance steps. The waitress was at once buddy (“How we doing here?”) and temptress (“C’mon, go on”). She had meticulously carded bronze hair, an exuberant hankie exploding above a name tag (“Susie”), a patient smile and, hanging on a chain, lunettes that she wore only when writing an order or totaling the check. In one corner a colorful canopy hung over a round bar, just so the whole place could be called “The Big Top.” No one was sitting at the bar. On its tiered glass shelves, lit from below, stood rank after rank of liquor bottles, soldiers at attention and glowing with fiery spirits from within. Everything smelled of the kerosene heater and the pine-scented Airwick wafting out of the toilets.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A number of personal friends of mine, fearing that the sudden illness of the lady and a sudden discourse on Pushkin might result in a suddenly empty house, had done their best to round up the kind of audience they knew I would like to have. The house had, however, a pied aspect since some confusion had occurred among the lady’s fans. The Hungarian consul mistook me for her husband and, as I entered, dashed towards me with the froth of condolence on his lips. Some people left as soon as I started to speak. A source of unforgettable consolation was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team. Another time my wife and I had dinner with him at the Léons’ followed by a long friendly evening of talk. I do not recall one word of it but my wife remembers that Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod, the Russian ‘mead,’ and everybody gave him a different answer.” Nabokov makes a Joycean appearance in Gisèle Freund and V. B. Carleton’s James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years (New York, 1965). Pictured on pp. 44–45 is a meeting of the editorial board of the Parisian journal Mesures. Nine literati are shown gathered around a garden table, and a caption identifies the group, which includes Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan—and Jacques Audiberti, a tall, thin man standing in the back, looking down, his face in shadows, a trace of a smile suggesting some miraculous foreknowledge of the caption that twenty-eight years later would mistakenly identify him as “Audiberti,” and in thus denying the existence of the already pseudonymous V. Sirin, would summarize the vicissitudes and spectral qualities of Russian émigré life, and cast him as The Mystery Man in the Garden, a role based on the nameless man in the brown macintosh, the mystery man of Ulysses, the “lankylooking galoot” (as Bloom calls him) whose name is misunderstood by a newspaper reporter as “M’Intosh,” under which name he is immortalized. The photo is also included in TriQuarterly 17 (Winter 1970). C’est entendu?: French; that’s agreed? Lenore: although Poe wrote a poem thusly titled, the primary allusion is to the title character in one of the most popular dramatic ballads of Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794), German poet of the Sturm und Drang period. H.H. echoes the best-known line, in which Lenore and her ghostly lover ride off: “Und hurre, hurre, bop, hop, hop, hop! ...” (line 149). See also Keys, p. 141n. The allusion is ironic, since Lenore grieves over her lover. Nabokov discusses the poem in the Commentary to his Eugene Onegin translation (Vol. III, pp. 153–154). qui ... temps: French; who was taking his time. CHAPTER 15 Professor Chem: for “Chemistry.” edusively (placed!): a portmanteau word; from educible (educe: “to draw forth; elicit”; see Edusa, p. 209), coined to rhyme with effusively. By punning on Edusa’s name he manages to place her. the author: Quilty.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  In the distance two gray-mauve clouds, like the huge rectangular sails of caravels, hung darkly, becalmed, immanent, behind mist. Kevin’s lips were blue and he was covered with goose bumps as he vaulted up onto the dock. His legs were smooth except for the first signs of hair above his ankles (the first place an old man’s legs go bald). He dried himself and put on a shirt. We took the outboard to the village. I went into the store with him, though I made him ask for the Vaseline. I was blushing and couldn’t raise my eyes. He pulled it off without a trace of guilt, even asked to see the medium-size jar before settling for the small one. Outside, a film of oil opalesced on the water under a great axle of red light rolling across the sky from azimuth to zenith. That little round jar of grease would be a clue for my father or his to find. Worse, it was the application of method to sex, the outward betrayal of what I wanted to consider love, the inward state. At last the sun went down and the lake seemed colder and bigger and the two of us seemed bereft. That night the two families, all of us, went out to dinner at a restaurant thirty miles away, a place where the overweight ate iceberg lettuce under a dressing of ketchup and mayonnaise, steaks under A.1. Sauce, feed corn under butter, ice cream under chocolate, where a man wearing a black toupee and a madras sports jacket bounced merrily up and down an electric organ while a frisky couple lunged and dipped before him in cloudy recollections of ancient dance steps. The waitress was at once buddy (“How we doing here?”) and temptress (“C’mon, go on”). She had meticulously carded bronze hair, an exuberant hankie exploding above a name tag (“Susie”), a patient smile and, hanging on a chain, lunettes that she wore only when writing an order or totaling the check. In one corner a colorful canopy hung over a round bar, just so the whole place could be called “The Big Top.” No one was sitting at the bar. On its tiered glass shelves, lit from below, stood rank after rank of liquor bottles, soldiers at attention and glowing with fiery spirits from within. Everything smelled of the kerosene heater and the pine-scented Airwick wafting out of the toilets. Except for the circus theme, the dominant motif seemed to be hunting, demonstrated by the rifles and glassy-eyed, dusty-antlered deer heads on the wall.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  He argued a bit more, a one-sided conversation that I didn’t bother to join in. When I’d finally had enough and started for the door, Eric stormed past me and stomped off down the stairs, muttering under his breath. But he went. You see, it isn’t just a matter of getting a switch. The poplar tree belongs to our landlords. He had to ask permission to cut it. I stood out on the balcony and listened to him knocking at their door. Old man Pulaski answered. He’s almost deaf so you really have to yell when you’re talking to him, and most of the time he doesn’t bother to wear his hearing aid. That’s one of the things we really liked about the house: lots of privacy. Eric was trying to be quiet, mumbling about wanting to cut a branch from the tree. Finally, I got tired of Mr. P’s “huhs?” and “whats?” as Eric danced around the topic. I leaned over the balcony and hollered, “Eric wants to cut a switch from your poplar tree because he needs to get his ass whipped.” Eric looked up and gave me a really evil look as Mr. Pulaski laughed and said, “That true, boy?” “Yes, sir,” Eric muttered, turning every shade of red you can imagine as he kicked a rock off the sidewalk. “What did you do?” Mr. Pulaski asked, stepping out onto the porch. “I was late with my car payment,” Eric shrugged. “Nothing serious.” Suddenly a cane swung out and whapped Eric on the thigh. “It sure as hell is serious, boy! You young fellas need to learn to be responsible.” “Ouch!” Eric yelped, jumping back and rubbing his thigh. He frowned up at me even harder, like it was my fault he’d gotten hit. “You really gonna whup him, Steve?” Mr. Pulaski hollered up at me as he hobbled out into the yard, leaning on his cane. “I sure am,” I said, nodding in the affirmative. He nodded his approval. “Good for you. That poplar tree helped me raise five boys and they all turned out just fine. I think a whipping is just what this young pup needs.” Mr. Pulaski turned around and swatted Eric again with his cane. “You come with me. I’ll help you pick out a good switch, boy, one that’ll get the job done proper so you’re not out here cutting another one next week.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They wore gray coveralls and smelled like cigarettes and chlorine and something else, something sulfurous. When she’d been with Peter, she had felt a rigid, formal distance between her and the men. But after Peter, something had changed, as if the center of gravity had collapsed, and their orbit around her became unstable. They spoke to her more, stopped by her cubicle, and stood there, holding their reports rather than simply dropping them and going. They looked her in the eye, and she saw in their smudged faces something faint, flickering, like hope. At first she thought she was imagining it, that it was nothing. But one afternoon, after Peter and before Sigrid, a man named Lenny came alongside the row of cubicles and stood at the edge of her desk. He was very tall but had the sullen posture of a small boy. She looked up from her computer and waited for him to ask her what he needed. Sometimes the men did that. When they didn’t know where to go, when the directions shuttled into their cubbies made no sense, they came to her, and she would set them on the right course. But Lenny had never done that. He’d always been one of the bright ones. “Marta,” he’d said. “How’s it hanging?” “It hangs, Lenny,” Marta had said. “What can I do you for?” Lenny coughed, turned red. The nape of Marta’s neck turned hot. “Not like that. You know what I meant.” “Of course,” Lenny said. “Well, I was wondering . . .” He leaned against the cubicle wall, and it buckled under his weight. He stepped away from it. Marta felt something tighten behind her eyes. “Oh, Lenny. We maybe shouldn’t,” she said. “You know, dinner would be fine, you know, fine, dinner, we could eat dinner, you know.” “Lenny—” Marta began, but Lenny was looking at the floor, crumpling the paper in his hands. “We could go someplace in Madison, someplace real nice. We could, the two of us, go, we could.” Marta drummed her fingers on the top of her desk. She glanced over the cubicle, where she could see some of her office mates looking back at them. When she looked at Lenny, she saw him staring at her, waiting for an answer. She didn’t have it in her to say no, not with the whole world watching. So she said yes, and they went to dinner in Madison that weekend. They ate fried chicken and potato salad, and on the way home Lenny put his hand on her knee while he drove. And Marta felt sick, flushed and sick and like she wanted to just fold in on herself. Lenny’s truck smelled like wet newspaper. His big toolbox rattled behind Marta’s seat. She hadn’t been in a truck like that in years. At Marta’s house, Lenny walked her to the door, though she told him it wasn’t necessary.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “Come in, come in,” he said, stepping aside to usher me into the inner office, a soundproofed cube with one wall all glass looking out on a garden and a small replica of the Kamakura Buddha, gilt everywhere save for a lap full of new snow. “See that log and that hatchet?” the doctor said, pointing to a palisaded enclosure just to the right of the garden. “My patients dub the log Mom or Dad as the case may be, usually Mom, and then have a grand ol’ time hacking away at her.” His small blue eyes, veined in red, rotated dryly in their sockets to take in my reaction to the idea of murder—except his act of “observation” was so stagy it preempted the need for another response. There was nothing about this actor that couldn’t be read from the top balcony. I declined the analytic couch’s invitation to the voyage and chose an earthbound chair that faced the desk. Not that I wasn’t eager to test the couch’s splendors, which I instinctively (and I hazard astutely) equated with those of sexuality. It was just that I felt somewhat abashed by the couch’s very explicitness, as though it were someone’s beautiful mother who wouldn’t cross her legs, who had even decided to flaunt her most intimate charms. That was just how musky and startling I found the couch, which so shamelessly resembled itself in a thousand cartoons, although now I understood the cartoons had done nothing so much as to sensitize me to its heroic and decidedly unfunny actuality.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke.… My hands were always in the air. In eighth grade I had appeared in the class pageant. We all wore togas and marched solemnly in to a record of Schubert’s “Unfinished.” My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d not sat cross-legged on the gym floor but resting one hand on a hip like the White Rock girl.… A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final “g” in “fucking.” III Since Edmund White was born in 1940, he lived in round-number allegorical relation to the last six decades of our recent quick-change century. No intelligence stands readier to remember with perfect pitch a period whole-cloth: who else can tell us so exactly how its citizens then talked, dressed, contracepted, proceeded politically? So, at age forty, just at the start of the sexually liberated eighties (in 1982, the year after HIV first sent its silent tentacles among the erotically adventurous in Manhattan and San Francisco), White offered the world a seemingly autobiographical novel. It appears to map a boy’s coming to terms not simply with solitude, not just with his social destiny, but with a completely aestheticized vision only some scholastical and witty kid could so utterly perfect. The novel shows a child learning to face then exploit not just homo-sex, but sex in general. This work of principled sweep and great observational power also champions the centrality of Art as a governing quest. It offers this view with a faith that must recall Proust’s life project, his attempt to hold all of time, its characters at synchronous ages, all its warring textures, in one head, one work. But crucially, White also places the Erotic on a level of expressive possibility alongside the pursuit of work itself. “Love and Work.” Freud promised us two choices, in that order. But here sex replaces romantic love, even while groping elsewhere for it. If Love, in modern life, is really Sex, then Sex, undertaken with concentration and ambition enough, can ascend to Work, can’t it? The erotic is ranked, by the young man at the center of this fiction, as a great Darwinian organizing force for the good. We are told by White in 1982—using the voice of an erotically and cerebrally advanced fifteen-year-old facing his inaugural analyst—that life’s great divide really seems between those who are sexual, are “getting it” on a regular basis, and the others, lonely and—because silent—powerless:

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  So he erased his writing, turned to them. He pulled up the PDF with the class roster and instructions and saw that he was supposed to have them sign in. But he had not gone to the departmental office to pick up the slip for them to sign. “Does anyone have . . . ?” he motioned as if to write on air, and one of the students, tallish in some sort of gray sweatsuit, ripped a sheet of paper from his notebook and held it out between two fingers. Lionel took the sheet and then, realizing he’d forgotten to bring a pen, looked up and scribbled in the air again. The same boy rolled his eyes and offered Lionel his pen. Lionel took it, wrote the name and number of the course across the top of the sheet, then drew a line down the center and wrote two column headings: name and student id #. The boy wrote his name with a scratching swiftness and handed it over his shoulder. He wrestled himself out of his sweatshirt. His hair was oily and dirty blond, and he had greasy pit stains on the T-shirt he wore underneath. He had what looked to be four-day stubble. He stretched in his chair. The paper went back and up the next row, but then one of the boys said, “Uh, this isn’t like, secure.” “What do you mean?” Lionel asked. “Our ID numbers. Like, they’re right here. I could take a pic and use them.” The boy held the sheet up and gestured at it with his pen. “Do you plan to take a picture and use them?” “No, but I could. That’s the point. This isn’t secure. This is kind of a violation of privacy.” “I see your point,” Lionel said. “But, honor system, right? Nobody steal anyone’s identity.” There was a petty, pitying kind of amusement in the room at that joke. But the boy with the security issue wasn’t pleased. He squinted down at the sheet of paper and said, “Do you mind if I don’t? Like, I don’t feel comfortable.” “Sure,” Lionel said. “Okay. Whatever you want.” The boy signed his name and passed the sheet to the next boy, who looked at it for a moment while holding his ID card aloft in his right hand, as if making up his mind about whether or not to write down his number. Lionel felt like he had lost some control over the room, like he’d just failed a test of his own. But after a moment the boy did write down his name and number, and the paper went on, with people adding their details, until it was clear that the only person without an ID number was the boy who had complained.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I grasped but little of this fencing match, so much more deadly than those of the arena, and felt only a somewhat arrogant disdain for the tyrant at bay, philosopher's pupil that I then was. Wisely counseled by Attianus, I kept to my work without meddling too much in politics. That first year in office differed little from the years of study. I knew nothing of law but was fortunate in having Neratius Priscus for colleague in the tribunal. He consented to instruct me, and remained throughout his life my legal counselor and my friend. His was that rare type of mind which, though master of a subject, and seeing it, as it were, from within (from a point of view inaccessible to the uninitiated), nevertheless retains a sense of its merely relative value in the general order of things, and measures it in human terms. Better versed than any of his contemporaries in established procedures, he never hesitated when useful innovations were proposed. It is with his help that I have succeeded in my later years in putting certain reforms into effect. There were other things to think of. My Spanish accent had stayed with me; my first speech in the tribunal brought a burst of laughter. Here I made good use of my intimacy with actors, which had scandalized my family: lessons in elocution throughout long months proved the most arduous but most delightful of my tasks, and were the best guarded of my life's secrets. In those difficult years even dissipation was a kind of study: I was trying to keep up with the young fashionables of Rome, but in that I never completely succeeded. With the cowardice typical of that age, when our courage is wholly physical, and is expended elsewhere, I seldom dared to be myself; in the hope of resembling the others I sometimes subdued and sometimes exaggerated my natural disposition. I was not much liked. There was, in fact, no reason why I should have been. Certain traits, for example my taste for the arts, which went unnoticed in the student at Athens, and which was to be more or less generally accepted in the emperor, were disturbing in the officer and magistrate at his first stage of authority. My Hellenism was cause for amusement, the more so in that ineptly I alternated between dissimulating and displaying it. The senators referred to me as "the Greekling." I was beginning to have my legend, that strange flashing reflection made up partly of what we do, and partly of what the public thinks about us. Plaintiffs, on learning of my intrigue with a senator's wife, brazenly sent me their wives in their stead, or their sons when I had flaunted my passion for some young mime.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They walked up the street together, the three of them. The sky was iridescent with cold. Out to their right, a shelf of white steam from the industrial park and the last of the academic buildings giving way to retail space and a few scraggly houses where the undergrads lived. To the left, the botanical gardens, Bascom’s high hill. Lionel hung back a little behind Sophie and Charles. They were talking about the rehearsal again. Sophie seemed kinder about it now. She listened to Charles with narrowed eyes. “It could be good for me,” Charles said. “Like, really good.” “Sure,” Sophie said. Their shoes scraped over the dry sidewalk. No trace of snow or ice here. The branches hanging over the sidewalk moved in the breeze from the cars. “I’m not being a bitch. I really mean it.” “Whatever, Sophie.” “Tell me about the piece.” “I really don’t feel like hearing you make fun of it,” he said quietly. “It’s embarrassing.” “If you’re embarrassed, it’s not because I made fun of it—not that I did. I mean, I said nothing about it, Charlie.” Charles grunted. Lionel felt a pang of sympathy for him. There were a million tiny ways to make someone feel bad about something that didn’t involve saying anything directly. “Come on,” Sophie said. She pulled on Charles’s arm, but he wouldn’t budge. They were passing into downtown proper then. Instead of going directly across East Campus Mall, Sophie wanted them go through the archways at the liberal arts building. Into its slanted catacombs. She pulled Charles, and while he continued to resist her, he shifted his hips slightly, pointing himself in her direction. Lionel followed, wondering still why he had let Sophie convince him that it was a good idea that he go back to her place for dinner. She had said to him, upon leaving the café, Don’t make it weird! It’ll be weird if you leave now. Charles had said nothing, had not looked at Lionel as they went down the stairs outside and into the snowy quad. Evening was rapidly closing in on them, and because Lionel didn’t want to make it weird, didn’t have anywhere else to be, he had walked with them without saying he’d follow them all the way. He had said yes only in action, reserving the right to change his mind and vanish while they were distracted. The liberal arts building was a pyramid of nested concrete rectangles connected by an interior set of stairs rising at steep angles, as if meant to discourage a siege by unruly masses. It posed an accessibility nightmare. In the summer, students used the steep interior walls for ramps, leaping up on the railings with their skateboards and bikes. People roamed the outside layers, setting up picnics in the shade of the buildings while they watched swallows and gulls shoot from terrace to terrace.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  What and who he was attend a while, and you shall understand that it was even I, the writer of mine own Metamorphosie and strange alteration of figure. Hymettus, Athens, Isthmia, Ephire Tenaros, and Sparta, being fat and fertile soiles (as I pray you give credit to the bookes of more everlasting fame) be places where myne antient progeny and linage did sometime flourish: there I say, in Athens, when I was yong, I went first to schoole. Soone after (as a stranger) I arrived at Rome, whereas by great industry, and without instruction of any schoolmaster, I attained to the full perfection of the Latine tongue. Behold, I first crave and beg your pardon, lest I should happen to displease or offend any of you by the rude and rusticke utterance of this strange and forrein language. And verily this new alteration of speech doth correspond to the enterprised matter whereof I purpose to entreat, I will set forth unto you a pleasant Grecian feast. Whereunto gentle Reader if thou wilt give attendant eare, it will minister unto thee such delectable matter as thou shalt be contented withall. THE FIRST BOOKE THE FIRST CHAPTER How Apuleius riding in Thessaly, fortuned to fall into company with two strangers, that reasoned together of the mighty power of Witches. As I fortuned to take my voyage into Thessaly, about certaine affaires which I had to doe (for there myne auncestry by my mothers side inhabiteth, descended of the line of that most excellent person Plutarch, and of Sextus the Philosopher his Nephew, which is to us a great honour) and after that by much travell and great paine I had passed over the high mountaines and slipperie vallies, and had ridden through the cloggy fallowed fields; perceiving that my horse did wax somewhat slow, and to the intent likewise that I might repose and strengthen my self (being weary with riding) I lighted off my horse, and wiping the sweat from every part of his body, I unbrideled him, and walked him softly in my hand, to the end he might pisse, and ease himself of his weariness and travell: and while he went grazing freshly in the field (casting his head sometimes aside, as a token of rejoycing and gladnesse) I perceived a little before me two companions riding, and so I overtaking them made a third. And while I listened to heare their communication, the one of them laughed and mocked his fellow, saying, Leave off I pray thee and speak no more, for I cannot abide to heare thee tell such absurd and incredible lies; which when I heard, I desired to heare some newes, and said, I pray you masters make me partaker of your talk, that am not so curious as desirous to know all your communication: so shall we shorten our journey, and easily passe this high hill before us, by merry and pleasant talke.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My father was never tan. He had a huge belly; his glasses weren’t horn-rim or translucent pink plastic (the two acceptable styles) but black with bronze metallic wings; he seldom drank cocktails; he didn’t act as if he were onstage—he had no attractive affectations. Although my stepmother had risen socially as high as one could rise in that world, she’d done so on her own. My father never took her anywhere; she was as free as a spinster and as respectable as a matron. When she was with us at the cottage during the summer, she forgot about society and helped my father with his steps or his painting, she read as much as I did, arranged for good meals and rusticated. Once in a while, one of her elegant friends would drop by for lunch, and suddenly the house was electrified by the energy of those women—their excitement, their approval, their laughter, their thrilling small talk, an art as refined (and now as rare) as marquetry. My father would beam at these guests and pat their hands and pour them thimblefuls of brandy after their doll-size luncheons. Then they’d limp away in a broken-down car, millionairesses in old cardigans covered with cat hairs, their wonderful vibrant voices their only badge of breeding. My father was courtly but dim. I was even dimmer. I read so much in the house (on the bed in my room, on the couch in the living room, on the shaded bench at the foot of the dock) that I hadn’t gotten a tan. At least my clothes were right (my sister had seen to that), but I felt all dressed up with no place to go.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He reached behind Lionel for his coat. As he was putting it on, Sophie lay back down and closed her eyes. “I made you a nice dinner, didn’t I?” “It was great,” Lionel said. “When are you going to thank me for the rest of it?” she asked, and Lionel frowned. Charles was kneeling to put on his boots. He shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.” “For letting you have Charlie. When are you going to thank me for that?” she asked, and Lionel flushed. His mouth went dry. And he looked to Charles and then back to Sophie. He felt ill. Charles stood up, awkwardly. He winced. Lionel thought of his knee. “That seems,” Lionel started to say, “I don’t know, Sophie. That seems. Bad.” Charles put on his hat and pulled the door open. “You don’t have to,” Lionel said. “Jesus Christ. Nobody’s going to make you suck their dick. I can drive you,” Charles said. He nudged Lionel toward the door, and Sophie called after them. “Lionel, your manners,” she said. • • • HE WAS RIGHT about the air being comforting. There was so much cold black air that he could scarcely imagine a time when it wasn’t this way, when winter wasn’t this deep. He inhaled. Charles was stomping out ahead of him. “I’m sorry,” Lionel said. “You really don’t have to drive me.” Charles stopped and turned. He wet his lips, though they dried immediately in the cold. “I don’t get you,” he said. “I don’t get you.” “What’s to get?” Charles stared at him in open amazement, and Lionel felt a little rush of pride. “Right,” he said. Back to stomping in the cold. He could be so childish. Lionel jogged a little bit to catch up to him. He playfully bumped their shoulders together. “Come on,” Lionel said. “Come on,” Charles mocked, but he was thawing. They were tracing the route back to campus, which meant that Lionel could see the mountain of warm air over the trees. It hadn’t moved despite having earlier given the impression of moving toward them. Or perhaps this was a second mountain, a second wave of warm air pushed up out of the silos in the distance. “Why do you keep looking over there?” Charles asked. “What’s over there?” “Oh, I like the way the warm air looks,” Lionel said. “Like a mountain.” “What mountain?” Charles asked. The mountains of Tennessee. Math camp, yes, the sound of rain striking the tin of the outhouses. The perfect, succulent light of late summer in the cabins, riddled with dust motes. Running between the trees. Rain, so much rain. Their papers covered in scrawl, their handwriting silly, messy. The trim beards of the counselors. Their warm hands steering Lionel, age five, a scraped knee on the gravel path, down to the canoes, where they were forbidden to go.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “You know what that means? Or don’t they teach you that in junior year?” “Okay, Steve,” Phil said, standing between him and Mason. “We get it. Off-limits. It’s your house. You get to set the rules.” Too late, Mason realized it had been a mistake to come to Steve’s house so he hightailed it up the stairs. In the kitchen Dr. Osner was scooping Breyers ice cream into two bowls. “Everything all right?” Dr. Osner asked. “Yes, sir,” Mason answered. “Everything is fine.” He hoped Dr. Osner wouldn’t recognize him from that day his brother had dragged him to his office, his face swollen with a toothache. His brother’s girlfriend worked for Dr. Osner, but no one was supposed to know they were going together. Something about Christina’s family being Greek and Jack’s being Irish. Their secret was safe with him. He had plenty of secrets, and he kept them all to himself. He grabbed his jacket and was out of there, glad his dog was spending the night at Phil’s house. What really bothered him was that he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong when he’d danced with that girl. He’d caught a glimpse of her doing the Lindy with some boy who barely came up to her chin and he’d liked the way she looked, liked the dimple in her cheek when she smiled, the long hair flying. He just got a feeling that it would be nice to hold her. When he did, she didn’t talk, didn’t say a word. And neither did he. Just the music and the feel of her in his arms. Yeah. That was all. She didn’t flirt, didn’t play games, just moved with him. Just that. MiriSuzanne was spending the night at Robo’s house on Byron Avenue. So Natalie’s father drove Miri home. Miri was sure when Mr. and Mrs. Boros named their daughter “Roberta” they never expected her to be called Robo. She enjoyed having Dr. O to herself. “What’s new and exciting, Miss Mirabelle?” He had a special name for her, but when it came to new and exciting she couldn’t tell him about the mystery boy, so she didn’t say anything. “Still working on the school paper?” Dr. O asked, and he seemed really interested. “Yes, but we never get to cover any exciting stories. Just the same old Christmas pageant and the annual food drive.” “Say you were interviewing me,” he said. “What would you ask?” “I’d ask what made you become a dentist.” He laughed. “Really, you’re interested in teeth?” “I’m interested in people.” “That’s what I like about being a dentist,” he said. “My patients.” Miri was his patient. So was the rest of her family. “Were you always checking your friends’ teeth when you were young, saying, ‘Open wide’?” He laughed again. “I was more interested in music. But my brothers were dentists. They encouraged me to go to dental school. We practiced together for a while.” “Where are they now?” He hesitated.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  In the distance two gray-mauve clouds, like the huge rectangular sails of caravels, hung darkly, becalmed, immanent, behind mist. Kevin’s lips were blue and he was covered with goose bumps as he vaulted up onto the dock. His legs were smooth except for the first signs of hair above his ankles (the first place an old man’s legs go bald). He dried himself and put on a shirt. We took the outboard to the village. I went into the store with him, though I made him ask for the Vaseline. I was blushing and couldn’t raise my eyes. He pulled it off without a trace of guilt, even asked to see the medium-size jar before settling for the small one. Outside, a film of oil opalesced on the water under a great axle of red light rolling across the sky from azimuth to zenith. That little round jar of grease would be a clue for my father or his to find. Worse, it was the application of method to sex, the outward betrayal of what I wanted to consider love, the inward state. At last the sun went down and the lake seemed colder and bigger and the two of us seemed bereft. That night the two families, all of us, went out to dinner at a restaurant thirty miles away, a place where the overweight ate iceberg lettuce under a dressing of ketchup and mayonnaise, steaks under A.1. Sauce, feed corn under butter, ice cream under chocolate, where a man wearing a black toupee and a madras sports jacket bounced merrily up and down an electric organ while a frisky couple lunged and dipped before him in cloudy recollections of ancient dance steps. The waitress was at once buddy (“How we doing here?”) and temptress (“C’mon, go on”). She had meticulously carded bronze hair, an exuberant hankie exploding above a name tag (“Susie”), a patient smile and, hanging on a chain, lunettes that she wore only when writing an order or totaling the check. In one corner a colorful canopy hung over a round bar, just so the whole place could be called “The Big Top.” No one was sitting at the bar. On its tiered glass shelves, lit from below, stood rank after rank of liquor bottles, soldiers at attention and glowing with fiery spirits from within. Everything smelled of the kerosene heater and the pine-scented Airwick wafting out of the toilets. Except for the circus theme, the dominant motif seemed to be hunting, demonstrated by the rifles and glassy-eyed, dusty-antlered deer heads on the wall.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  To whome I answered, As for such benefits as I have received of the famous City of Thessaly, I yeeld and render the most entire thanks, but as touching the setting up of any statues or images, I would wish that they should bee reserved for myne Auntients, and such as are more worthy than I. And when I had spoken these words somewhat gravely, and shewed my selfe more merry than I was before, the Judges and magistrates departed, and I reverently tooke my leave of them, and bid them farewell. And behold, by and by there came one running unto me in haste, and sayd, Sir, your cousin Byrrhena desireth you to take the paines according to your promise yester night, to come to supper, for it is ready. But I greatly fearing to goe any more to her house in the night, said to the messenger, My friend I pray you tell to my cousine your mistresse, that I would willingly be at her commandement, but for breaking my troth and credit. For myne host Milo enforced me to assure him, and compelled me by the feast of this present day, that I should not depart from his company, wherefore I pray you to excuse, and to defer my promise to another time. And while I was speaking these words, Milo tooke me by the hand, and led me towards the next Baine: but by the way I went couching under him, to hide my selfe from the sight of men, because I had ministred such an occasion of laughter. And when I had washed and wiped my selfe, and returned home againe, I never remembred any such thing, so greatly was I abashed at the nodding and pointing of every person. Then went I to supper with Milo, where God wot we fared but meanly. Wherefore feigning that my head did ake by reason of my sobbing and weeping all day, I desired license to depart to my Chamber, and so I went to bed. THE FIFTEENTH CHAPTER How Fotis told to Apuleius, what witchcraft her mistresse did use. When I was a bed I began to call to minde all the sorrowes and griefes that I was in the day before, until such time as my love Fotis, having brought her mistresse to sleepe, came into the chamber, not as shee was wont to do, for she seemed nothing pleasant neither in countenance nor talke, but with sowre face and frowning looke, gan speak in this sort, Verily I confesse that I have been the occasion of all thy trouble this day, and therewith shee pulled out a whippe from under her apron, and delivered it unto mee saying, Revenge thyself upon mee mischievous harlot, or rather slay me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  It was just that I felt somewhat abashed by the couch’s very explicitness, as though it were someone’s beautiful mother who wouldn’t cross her legs, who had even decided to flaunt her most intimate charms. That was just how musky and startling I found the couch, which so shamelessly resembled itself in a thousand cartoons, although now I understood the cartoons had done nothing so much as to sensitize me to its heroic and decidedly unfunny actuality. My first sight of the analytic couch constituted the primal scene, for only its existence jarred me into recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes, but these communications cleverly ignore nonsexuals, those pale, penniless, underdeveloped bodies, blue nipples flung like two test drops of ink from a new pen across the blotting paper of a chest, or high, hairless buttocks, unmolded by hands into something lovely, something enticing, left pure and formless like butcher’s lard. The patient who always preceded me was the lady in the Persian-lamb coat; she left behind the peculiar perfumed smell of the paper tissues she wept into, a weak solution of those chemical towels handed out after lobster in family restaurants, and the heavier, more aggressive and I suppose offensive smell of her stubbed-out cigarettes (eight or nine in the sterling-silver cupped hand that served as the ashtray). These smells and the ghosts of smoke circulating through the sunlight, colloidal souvenirs, seemed to be the echoes of a just-completed drama by Racine in which lambent passions had glowed within the glass chimney of formal measures, in which all the action must occur offstage and is merely reported here and the only permissible emotions are the great ones—incestuous longings, guilt, and the impulse to murder—whereas the dimmer, more usual feelings of sloth, boredom, spleen, irritability are airily dismissed. For psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash. Dr. O’Reilly was not a good listener. He was always scooping up handfuls of orange diet pills and swallowing them with a jigger of scotch. As a great man and the author of several books, he had theories to propound and little need to attend to the particularities of any given life—especially since he knew in advance that life would soon enough yield merely another illustration of his theories. To save time, O’Reilly unfolded his ideas at the outset and then rehearsed them during each subsequent session since, as he explained, although these notions could easily enough penetrate the conscious mind, they soaked less readily into the hairy taproot of the unconscious.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Should I enter my old house? As in a Turgenev story, a torrent of Italian music came from an open window—that of the living room: what romantic soul was playing the piano where no piano had plunged and plashed on that bewitched Sunday with the sun on her beloved legs? All at once I noticed that from the lawn I had mown a golden-skinned, brown-haired nymphet of nine or ten, in white shorts, was looking at me with wild fascination in her large blue-black eyes. I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have, but she retreated in haste and the music stopped abruptly, and a violent-looking dark man, glistening with sweat, came out and glared at me. I was on the point of identifying myself when, with a pang of dream-embarrassment, I became aware of my mud-caked dungarees, my filthy and torn sweater, my bristly chin, my bum’s bloodshot eyes. Without saying a word, I turned and plodded back the way I had come. An aster-like anemic flower grew out of a remembered chink in the sidewalk. Quietly resurrected, Miss Opposite was being wheeled out by her nieces, onto her porch, as if it were a stage and I the star performer. Praying she would not call to me, I hurried to my car. What a steep little street. What a profound avenue. A red ticket showed between wiper and windshield; I carefully tore it into two, four, eight pieces.