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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Lewis gave him a calculating nod, and retreated without a word. We went on into the room on the left of the front door. Library seemed a grand term for a room that, like all the rooms in the house, was modest-sized; but it was stuffed with books. Some were housed in a handsome break-fronted bookcase with Gothic windows; others furnished shelves and tabletops, or were stacked up like hypocaust pillars across the floor. If the room had once been panelled, it was no more. The walls were white, and above the door a pink and grey pediment had been painted, perhaps as a trompe l’oeil relief; within it classical figures posed, and it was almost with embarrassment that I noticed that exaggerated phalluses protruded in each case from toga and tunic. ‘Funny little chaps, aren’t they?’ said Charles, who was hohumming his way towards a chair. ‘Come and sit down, my dear, and we can have some chit-chat. I’ve had no one to talk to for ages, you see.’ We sat on either side of the empty grate in which a huge jug of bulrushes and peacock feathers stood. Above the mantelpiece, with its little brass carriage clock, hung a life-size chalk drawing of a black boy, just the head and shoulders, a slight smile and large, speaking eyes conveying happiness and loyalty. ‘So, have you been at the Corinthian Club today?’ ‘No—I prefer to go in the evenings. I’ll drop in after I leave here.’ ‘Hmm. There’s more going on in the evenings, wouldn’t you say. Actually, I think it can get too crowded. And some of the people are so rude and hasty, don’t you find? Some young thug called me an old wanker the other day. What do you do—argue or try to be witty? I said I’m way past that, I can assure you. But he didn’t smile, you know. It’s so terrible when people don’t smile. It seems to be a new thing …’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I asked. She was blank-faced. "Oh, I thought you were wearing a great big badge saying I AM GAY in enormous letters." "I . . . " I stumbled, laughed and blushed for some reason in my turn. "I wasn't absolutely sure if Paul knew—I assumed . . ." "You don't want to worry about that," she said, as the drinks were brought and the waiter stooped into our conversation. "Paul loves you anyway." I was terribly pleased to know this. "Well, I like him very much," I said, raising and holding my glass as if drinking to him. "It's very flattering, because when we first met he made me feel rather a fool." "You perhaps had too much to drink," she said, dipping to the mocha-freckled froth of her coffee with the same fastidious air that she had turned on the bar as a whole. And of course, as to the drink, she was probably right. "He was quite stern again today. I suppose he wanted me to start off on a proper work-footing." She smiled. "At least you had work to do. Down in the hall I was dropping asleep over my George Meredith." "He is a rather yawny author." "Oh, I'm glad I'm not wrong." "Well, if you are we're both wrong. Which is very unlikely." She glanced around the room, photographs of a fifties football team (whose right half was now the morose, memorialising landlord), one of those fake paintings of settecento cardinals enjoying a joke. "What work was he getting you to do?" "Well, stuff on this grand catalogue of his. It has to be finished by next spring, apparently, in the English version first. Orst produced such quantities of work, and the provenances are a nightmare. I'm speaking as if I knew what I was talking about, but of course I don't, which makes it more interesting in a way, even though I'm not doing research myself, I'm just checking the English text." "It sounds as if that might be a little bit yawny too." "Fortunately I'm a terrific pedant, a fallible pedant, I'm sure, but I know how to spell words like daguerreotype and de Nuncques, and I love noticing when 1869 has come out as 1896 or even 1968." "You speak Flemish very well indeed, for an Englishman." "Thank you. My mother's mother was Dutch, and we had a certain amount of it at home when I was little." "Yes, that's right—You speak Flemish with an English Dutch accent!" "Aha," I said, slightly rattled. "I didn't realise your middle name was Professor Higgins." She leant forward with a serious look. "No one really expects Paul's catalogue to be finished by the spring," she said, almost embarrassed by him, or perhaps on his behalf. "It's actually a bit of a famous joke. It was supposed to be published at least five years ago; but for some reason he can't bring himself to finish it."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was the sense of a passion that had taken the fateful turn into fixation, exploited by its own compelling mechanism long after its subject was gone. It was quite a surprise after all this to find a group of pupils from St Narcissus on the upper floor, junior boys cross-legged in their capes and gaiters forming a semi-circle around the art master, a dynamic broad man built like a prop forward. I loitered on the further side of the room, looking with an adult eye at a row of tiny, almost invisible silverpoint drawings, but curious as a boy about the others and what they were being told. The master was explaining a set of landscapes: I heard how Orst had returned every year to the hamlet in the Ardennes where his childhood summers had been spent, and how he liked to escape from the studio and paint out in the forests and on the heathy uplands; how, in particular, he returned to a lonely woodland pond, which he had painted twenty or thirty times in different lights and at different seasons. I learned more about St Narcissus, too, than I had gleaned from the chants and odd emphatic phrases of lectures that crossed the back garden; I recognised the methodical presentation, the excessively clear light thrown on obscure subjects, the mixture of free speculation and arbitrary learning that make up a good old-fashioned education; I saw the reasonable self-satisfaction of the master and the concentration of the boys who were not afraid to speak their minds when questioned, and not broken by a reproof. And I thought of Luc out on this same lesson two or three years back, attentive but independent, giving the best answers, a big boy already in the dressy black uniform he had worn until so lately, until whatever it was that happened happened . . . every teacher's darling, surely (though this one looked a little fierce for darlings). "What colour is this pond? Stevens?" "Grey, sir." "No. Van Damme?" "Lead-coloured, sir." "Correct. And what are these trees? Stevens?" "Are they Douglas firs, sir?" "Firs will do, thank you, Stevens." The faint terror of being back in school, but now as a forgetful grown-up among teenagers primed like guns, overcame me, and I slipped back downstairs, leaving the ponds for another day. Paul Echevin was coming up, but something made me shrink and look down as we passed, as though I might go unseen in the oaky half-darkness; a second later I hated having flunked the meeting I had already pictured to myself with pleasure, even excitement. "Edward!" He had turned with a hand on the banister. "Oh, hello . . . " I wasn't sure what to call him. "You didn't tell me you were coming in."

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “Are you touching yourself, Bill?” “Yes, I’m rubbing myself while I imagine kissing you. I want to keep on kissing you. Alice, tell me how it feels.” “Wonderful. Our lips are so wet they glide against each other.” “Uh-huh,” he murmured. “And your tongue darts out—oh—it’s hard—like your cock.” It was my voice, but it was Alice who was thinking up the words. “Oh ...” His breathing had changed. From the tapes Candy had played for me, I was familiar with this transition. At a certain point, usually minutes from orgasm, a man’s breathing changes and his responses become shorter and less coherent. “Your tongue parts my lips and slips inside my mouth where it’s warm and wet. And then just as I start to suck on your tongue, you pull back and withdraw,” I said. “But. .. you go after me ...,” he told me. “Yes ... I grab on to your tongue with my teeth and draw it back into my mouth. Your tongue fills up my whole mouth.” “Suck on it... suck ... on my tongue ...,” he pleaded. “Yes . . . I’m sucking on it, going up and down on your tongue. It’s filling up my whole mouth. I let you slip almost all the way out and then suck you back inside again. God, I wish your tongue could come, right now, inside my mouth,” I whis pered. “Ohh ... God ...” It was the first time I’d really listened to a man come. Not seen him and felt him, but heard his release through the sounds he made. “Was it all right?” I asked, suddenly shy. Bill sounded content. “Yes . . . yes, it was wonderful, but next time, I want to make you come too. All right, Alice?” He’d thrown me off balance. “Yeah. Okay. Good-bye, Bill.” I shivered and hung up the phone. DAMIAN GRACE The Man Who Ate Women । don’t drink much these days, but five years ago, when this tawdry incident happened, I was at a time in my life when I drank heavily almost every night. The prevailing wisdom in my social circle was that you couldn’t have a good time without al cohol, and we all considered ourselves harmless social drinkers. If you’d asked me the definition of an antisocial drinker, I guess I’d have described someone who throws up on your shoes or crosses the double yellow line and turns you into roadkill. Any way, the point I’m trying to make is that I was loaded. It happened at one of John Kindle’s infamous weekly house parties, the ones where he would invite maybe a dozen people and fifty or sixty people would show up. Kindle was a college buddy of mine who had told us all that the Internet was going to be the Next Big Thing. We had ignored his advice while he was busy putting his money where his mouth was, and now he never had to work again.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  truth of her own imperfections descended on her. She was buried under all the feelings she had hoped and prayed and failed to avoid by choosing to be naked with this particular man, this grotesque. To distract herself she began to fuck him, or at least to try. His stomach was too large and his cock too small. She couldn’t manage it. He smiled at her fumblings and made soothing sounds in the back of his throat. He drew her down on the bed and rested her head on his meaty shoulder. He stroked her hair. She grew restless again, uneasy. Things weren’t progress ing as planned. They should have been doing it by now. She wanted to. She’d made the decision and now she wanted to follow through. The knot of tension was growing ever larger between her legs. She didn’t question it any longer. “Do I excite you?” he asked her. Yesyesyesyes, oh yes, she said, although she didn’t believe it until later. He raised his head and looked at her. His face was as big as God’s. Then his great mass rose up, until he was over her, in conceivably huge, like Mother Earth herself. He will crush me, she thought, and didn’t care. He spread her legs and pulled her, ah, it could be done! onto his prick, his little pizzi cato, his feather-finger. She came as he entered her. He began to rock. He stretched her wide, as far as she could open, to accommodate his mighty circumference. His stom ach, that huge and hairy globe, rubbed and pounded every inch of her from her center to her knees, while his prick danced in and out like a tongue. When she grew too wet and wide to hold him inside he fell out of her, and it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, because he kept rubbing her until they both peaked again, when, exhausted and spent, they fell asleep within each other’s arms.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It should be ready quite soon; and then we’ll put it out to one or two of those little basement cinemas in Soho where there are people we know. I don’t suppose you ever go to such places.’ So now my rather prickly line sprang back and snagged on my own moral woollies. I was embarrassed and laughed. ‘Well, yes, I have sometimes been to them.’ ‘I think they’re jolly good value,’ Charles went on in candid, reasonable tones. ‘I mean, you pay your what is it, fiver, and nine times out of ten you’ll see something that really takes your fancy.’ ‘I confess I go to them more for the off-screen entertainment,’ I archly bragged. ‘Ah yes … well …’ ‘In fact, I first got off with my current friend in a cinema in Frith Street. He was very shy afterwards about admitting that it had been him—in the dark, you know. He’s a very shy boy, actually, but in those places people seem to lose their inhibitions.’ Charles was not paying attention, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been telling this story. I still wasn’t wholly sure it had been Phil that I had felt up that day in the basement of the Brutus. Blushing, abstruse, he would not, when I put it to him, confirm or deny it. If it had been him, then he seemed to want it forgotten; if not, then he showed an odd readiness to be incorporated into some half-apprehended fantasy of my own. If it had been him, that squalid and exaggerated little episode must alter my understanding of him, open up the faintly sickening possibility of there being another Phil, whom I could not account for. He might have been at the Brutus at this very moment—or at the Bona or the Honcho or the Stud … ‘It’s always gone on, of course,’ Charles recalled. ‘We had little private bars, sex clubs really, in Soho before the war, very secret. And my Uncle Edmund had fantastic tales of places and sort of gay societies in Regent’s Park—a century ago now, before Oscar Wilde and all that—with beautiful working boys dressed as girls and what-have-you. Uncle Ned was a character …’ Charles sat beaming. ‘I’m always forgetting how sexy the past must have been—it’s the clothes or something.’ ‘Oh, it was unbelievably sexy—much more so than nowadays. I’m not against Gay Lib and all that, of course, William, but it has taken a lot of the fun out of it, a lot of the frisson. I think the 1880s must have been an ideal time, with brothels full of off-duty soldiers, and luscious young dukes chasing after barrow-boys.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  In fact, the three of them were sitting naked in the Pastor’s basement within fifteen minutes of Pali’s arrival, coming into the house after the drive from the seminary in town with Gregg. The Pastor, bounding down the stairs in his bathrobe, invited Pali to join them for their afternoon invigorating Swedish sauna. Before you could say, Uff dal, Pali was on a high pine bench pouring spring water from a wooden dipper, watching eucalyptus-scented steam rise between him and his nude hosts. Pali wore a towel, having been brought up a mod est Christian Samoan. “I would have thought that being Polynesian,” said the Pas tor, plumbing his bottomless well of ignorance, “you wouldn’t have hangups about nudity and such things.” “We were brought up never to swim on Sundays and al ways to wear a T-shirt to the beach,” answered Pali. “Oh, how we must have fucked you poor bastards up the ass,” moaned the Pastor, standing on floor level and looking into the shadow under Pali’s towel, thinking of missionaries. Pali took a moment to ponder this. His embarrassment at the casual nudity forced him to keep his eyes above the Pastor’s jawline, and he refused to acknowledge Pastor Knarffssen’s erection. From the Pastor’s pale, boyish body, with its slim hips and small ass, there curving upward toward his chest sat a great fat colorless prick that glistened around the head as pre- cum dribbled onto the blond floor. “Actually most of the Christian missionaries to Samoa came from Rarotonga,” was Pali’s response. The Pastor tweaked the head of his prick, making it pink, and coated the round shaft with a palm full of stuff. The smallness of the Pastor’s torso made the long curve of his hard- on all the more incredible. But Pali’s discretion was boundless. Even a stiff dick with a heartbeat, trembling between his an kles in the steam, would not alter his respectful attention to his mentor’s words. The Pastor sat down on the bench at Pali’s feet with a sigh. “Gregg, why don’t you do your exercises?” he suggested. Gregg was not immune to the charms of the Pastor’s mem ber—it was the Pastor’s one physically alluring quality. But to day, he felt shy around Pali. Rather than taking the Pastor’s hidden cue, he began instead to actually exercise. Gregg started with stretches. He sat on the high bench op posite Pali. Spreading his legs, he touched his fingers to the tips of his toes. The sauna was quiet with only the sound of Gregg’s breathing and the creaking bench—and Pastor Knarffssen’s yanking. Gregg and the Pastor together glanced at the dark brown nipples on Pali’s broad chest softening in the heat.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  She was blank-faced. "Oh, I thought you were wearing a great big badge saying I AM GAY in enormous letters." "I . . . " I stumbled, laughed and blushed for some reason in my turn. "I wasn't absolutely sure if Paul knew—I assumed . . ." "You don't want to worry about that," she said, as the drinks were brought and the waiter stooped into our conversation. "Paul loves you anyway." I was terribly pleased to know this. "Well, I like him very much," I said, raising and holding my glass as if drinking to him. "It's very flattering, because when we first met he made me feel rather a fool." "You perhaps had too much to drink," she said, dipping to the mocha-freckled froth of her coffee with the same fastidious air that she had turned on the bar as a whole. And of course, as to the drink, she was probably right. "He was quite stern again today. I suppose he wanted me to start off on a proper work-footing." She smiled. "At least you had work to do. Down in the hall I was dropping asleep over my George Meredith." "He is a rather yawny author." "Oh, I'm glad I'm not wrong." "Well, if you are we're both wrong. Which is very unlikely." She glanced around the room, photographs of a fifties football team (whose right half was now the morose, memorialising landlord), one of those fake paintings of settecento cardinals enjoying a joke. "What work was he getting you to do?" "Well, stuff on this grand catalogue of his. It has to be finished by next spring, apparently, in the English version first. Orst produced such quantities of work, and the provenances are a nightmare. I'm speaking as if I knew what I was talking about, but of course I don't, which makes it more interesting in a way, even though I'm not doing research myself, I'm just checking the English text." "It sounds as if that might be a little bit yawny too." "Fortunately I'm a terrific pedant, a fallible pedant, I'm sure, but I know how to spell words like daguerreotype and de Nuncques, and I love noticing when 1869 has come out as 1896 or even 1968." "You speak Flemish very well indeed, for an Englishman." "Thank you. My mother's mother was Dutch, and we had a certain amount of it at home when I was little." "Yes, that's right—You speak Flemish with an English Dutch accent!" "Aha," I said, slightly rattled. "I didn't realise your middle name was Professor Higgins." She leant forward with a serious look. "No one really expects Paul's catalogue to be finished by the spring," she said, almost embarrassed by him, or perhaps on his behalf. "It's actually a bit of a famous joke. It was supposed to be published at least five years ago; but for some reason he can't bring himself to finish it."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I woke in horror and disbelief at having overslept and missed the beginning of an important exam. Half an hour late already, and none of my clothes ironed, nothing remembered, all movement slowed and spasmodic . . . Then I woke again and groaned at the vestigial gleam of my father's watch-dial—"illuminous" I had called it as a child, taking it from his wrist and hanging it on a lamp to recharge its brilliance. Five and twenty (as he always quaintly turned it and as I sometimes affected to do), five and twenty past four: the worst wastes of the night at last admitting the possibility of dawn. There was some noise in the room, intermittent rustles and distant scratches, the same as always, or perhaps with a squeak of caution at the slumbering Gulliver in their midst. I decided I didn't mind, worried briefly and blankly about my life and everything I was doing, and then I found it was quarter to eight and the window-square was illuminous with excluded sunshine. Businesslike Matt was already up and out and I had the holiday impulse to catch the best of the day as well. Then I ran the scene of a chance meeting through my mind and paled with sickly embarrassment. I kept a regular check from the sunroom, but the tenants of Les Goelands were clearly making the most of their unhindered, unsuspecting Sunday morning. A bell from St Ernest rang demandingly and then stopped and still they slept on, or woke perhaps with drowsy smiles and gummy kisses and hotly did again what they had done before they slept. It wasn't till after ten that a window opened, and Patrick came on to the porch with a mug of coffee and stood scratching the back of his head and looking unexpectantly at the sea. I tried to make out this famous dick, but he was wearing baggy old cords as he had been the first time I saw him, and a sweatshirt with writing on, not tucked in. I didn't really care; it was Luc's cock I cared about and endlessly imagined. In my fantasies it changed, sometimes modest and strong, sometimes lolloping and heavy-headed, its only constants an easy foreskin, a certain presence, and a heather-honey beauty to it. He stepped out from the house behind Patrick and stood for a moment with an arm round his shoulder.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Tentatively, she opens her mouth, darts out her tongue, runs her lips over the shaft. She is expecting something rough, something that feels like stubble. She is surprised by his smoothness, and she lifts her head up and covers him, her hair falling over him as he moans a high-pitched sound she has never heard before, blending into the chirps and rustles all around them. Suddenly, Eddie pushes himself farther into her mouth with a small grunt and she tastes something faintly metallic at the back of her throat. “Whew,” he says, pulling away from her. “You sweet thing. Where’d you learn that?" She feels heat rise from her breasts to her cheeks. Without even looking, she knows that a blotchy red rash has spread across her chest and neck, a map to her inner world. She al ways turns blotchy when she feels anything complicated. She fights back the urge to gag at the drop of thick slippery fluid trickling down her throat. “I almost came,” he said with a grin. “Naughty girl.” He slides down her body, his stomach pressed against her own, and thrusts into her. Jennie braces herself and grits her teeth, waiting for the pain. Will there be blood between her legs? Will he find out she’s a virgin and recoil? Jennie knows this: Eddie Fish does not want her to be a virgin. For the rest of her life, boyfriends and husbands will ask about her first time, and the name Eddie Fish—that unfortunate moniker— will forever be whispered in a progression of beds. Who was you first? Eddie Fish. And how was it, my darling? It was—it was what it was. He has pushed all the way inside her and she feels nothing. No pain, no magic. Her insides have widened to accommodate him as if a door has always been open, as if a room inside her has been drafty, just waiting to be entered. Her breath seems loud to her ears, and her heart pounds erratically as Eddie moves to the rhythm of music only he can hear. She tries to time her heart, her breath, to his. Ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum. A tribal forest beat. The hairs on his thighs tickle her and she fights an urge to break into hysterical giggles. Her stomach is hot beneath him, an interior soup. She twists her head to the left and sees Eddie’s hand flat against the dirt, his wrist encircled by a thin strand of leather that she remembers Lisa Wallach brought him from Brazil. The leather strand had magical powers, Lisa told him, and he would have very bad luck if he unknotted it himself. Jennie wonders if Eddie Fish will wear that strand of leather until it disintegrates.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Luc's mother answered my short but frantic-sounding ring; I stepped into an interior I had never guessed at, and which I saw at once was the shrine and workshop of an obsession. She must have been the most prolific needlewoman in Belgium. The hall, and then the sitting-room she pushed me into, were festooned with her work. Large-scale hangings, or saggings, depicting the sort of subjects—ships, timbered inns, corps de ballet—that are favoured in jigsaw puzzles for their monotonous difficulty rather than their beauty, were the mere backdrop for floral firescreens, beaded and bobbled tablecloths and sofas so heaped with wildly coloured cushions as to leave only the tiniest area for the sitter's bottom. I ambled round amongst it all, giving speechless shrugs of appreciation, my gaze running for relief up to the high ceiling, though even there a woven affair, implying an almost Victorian suggestibility, extended like a growth down the chains of the chandelier. Following her politely through to the kitchen to get coffee I glimpsed the dyeing pantry, where hanks of red and orange wool hung dripping into buckets and giving off a raw smell. Her manner was vague, disappointed and accidentally bitchy, so that I excused her rudeness or took it as a joke. Nearly six feet tall, in a mauve crocheted frock, with long lilac-stockinged legs and buckled witch's shoes, hair neat and lifeless round a small, pale-powdered face, brisk, apprehensive, humourless, painfully artistic: I saw the absurdity of her at once but thought I might grow to find her sadly sympathetic. When I declined a tiny sugared cake she said, "Yes, you should lose weight, ten pounds at least, no cake for you", and put out just one for herself with the calm propriety of someone who would never be fat the way I was getting already. "I am very busy," she told me: "I am working on a new altar-cloth for the Cathedral. You mustn't keep me for too long." I smiled and said, "Of course not." I began to wonder if Luc too might be very tall and skinny.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "The poor child has been so slowed down with drugs, Maurice," said Mrs Vivier, "it is hardly surprising if his work has suffered." It was an unexpected flash, which Echevin appreciated even as he smothered it. "You'd have to ask our friend Edward about that," he said. Maurice turned to me after a second's bafflement, and I hastily confessed that I was indeed Marcel's English tutor, and was doing what I could to . . . "He's getting on fine," I said loyally. "What he needs most is confidence." (And there was the simple substance of a million end-of-term reports.) Maurice ducked to his soup, and took several spoonfuls rapidly and without appreciation, as if it were the school food he must be used to. "So when are you going to let us have him back?" That was when the coin dropped for me; within a few moments the two of us had been revealed to each other as colleagues of a kind, though he stood at the centre of the great self-exalting machine, whilst I was picking up the damaged and difficult fragments that its noisy shuttling shook loose. Perhaps at dusk, with closer attention, I would be able to see him from my window, pacing the illuminated classroom and holding forth on Yeats. "I'm so sorry," I said. "I hadn't realised that you were at St Narcissus." I hadn't realised, in fact, that the staff of a Jesuit school need not all be cold-eyed clergymen. "We'll see how he's doing at the end of the spring," said Echevin. I was so keen to ask about Luc that I fell completely silent. I felt that if I even mentioned his name I would turn crimson, or my fly would burst open, ricocheting buttons off the wine-glasses, or the Athena on my tie would turn and give a wink. I wouldn't use that lolling monosyllable itself, of course; it would be "the Altidore boy" or some such crisply pastoral phrase. I drank with a need, and was touched to find that Echevin, who was a cautious drinker himself, remembered my habit and reached out to me frequently with the sharp, appley wine I had guzzled and praised on my first visit. "Helene tells me you've had some great excitement at the Museum, Paul," said Inge. "I didn't quite follow it . . ." His expression lightened beautifully: here was a man familiar to the point of weariness with his own job, his own rather airless and enervating cabin, suddenly wresting open the corroded port-hole and taking deep breaths of his forgotten purpose.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Yes, amazing." He was a hundred times more wonderful than Agustin. The pictures of him were rubbish. Despite my looming humiliation I was thinking that he wasn't wearing any clothes, only that towel, and that he was about to take it off I stood up and felt the warmth coming off his chest and face, and saw that his arms, even so, had gooseflesh. "This is my friend Patrick, by the way, who, whom I have told you about." Meeting them both was like meeting filmstars, their aura and beauty put weights on your tongue. Patrick shook my hand too and nodded and said he was pleased to meet me; he spoke English easily, though without Luc's tendency to parody an English accent. Matt had been observing this and I shot him a warning glance over Patrick's shoulder. Perhaps if he didn't acknowledge me the day could be saved; each of them was busy at his locker. I wanted to be out of there and hidden in the water: at the same time I longed to dawdle and see Luc naked—I had to see that. Matt came across and said, "Hello, my friend", and swiped a hand across my shoulder and down my upper arm in a laid-back greeting. "Hi," I said huskily. "Crazy swimming-trunks," he said, and then under his breath, "Your own?"—and winked as he turned away. Luc noticed and said, "Does Edward know Matt?" in a tone of surely affected bemusement. "Yeah, these are the guys I was telling you about," said Matt. "The ones I met down on the beach that weekend." "Oh . . . I . . ." "Yeah, he's the guy I was telling You about," said Luc tediously. "I said there was this young man on the beach at my friend Patrick's house and . . . You know, the house next door?" "How extraordinary," I said. "Do you mean you were both at this tiny place no one's ever heard of at the same time? you see I've forgotten the name again." It all depended on Matt's next sentence; I don't know why I thought I would be let down except for my jealousy of his friendship with the lads and my hang-over paranoia and the heresy of last night. I was holding on to a look of distracted marvelment. "Yeah, that time we broke into the old house." Patrick looked up with triumph, even admiration: "So you did break into the house?" and Luc frowned at me. "You mean you both?" I would have blustered and given myself away if Matt hadn't ended his game and said, "Not him, no—I was with an old friend of mine." "We never saw him," said Luc coolly. "Or her."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I wandered about for a minute, idly flicking through the clothes on the rails. There were a lot of idiosyncratic items of a kind you'd never wear but that a colour-blind trendster might carry off at a party or club; there was plenty of leather, with weirder cuts and zips than my own dear old jacket; and there was a strong vein of Englishry, Tattersall checks and thunder-and-lightning tweeds. I tried one of the jackets on but it made me feel like Jimmy Edwards. A third assistant, who was very nervous but had learnt the basic cant of salesmanship and stuck to it through thick and thin, kept telling me it really suited me. I put it back on the rail and in the mirror beside me was my rival. I looked down quickly and then slyly peeped and saw that his smile extended beyond his own admiration of the black denim jacket he was trying and called ironically for my opinion of it too. "Hello there," he said. "We keep on meeting." I turned and gave him a black stare that I couldn't keep from weakening into residual good manners. "Yes, don't we just." "You remember I ran into you twice. You're English, aren't you? you're usually with that tall, fair Belgian boy. Amazing-looking kid." I felt sick of being complimented on the beauty of my companions. "I can't remember what his name is." He turned sideways to check the cut of the jacket and show me his compact backside—perfectly acceptable in itself but irrevocably horrible by dint of being his. "Hans," I said. He raised his chin and frowned in the mirror as if to say he didn't for a moment believe me. "We really ought to have a drink some time," he said, with the same menacing naturalness. "You know, two Brits abroad, mutual interests . . ." "I'm afraid I don't drink," I said, probably with a trace of beer on my breath. Probably he'd seen me in the bar when I was far gone. "Amazing shop this, isn't it? It's like a fairy grotto." He looked at me archly. "What do you do, actually?" "I'm a writer." I turned to see how my friends were getting on. "I don't do much at the moment," he said. "Well, I work out." He smiled and peeled off the jacket. I thought for a disgusting moment he was going to start working out right there. He pulled a bill-fold from his shirt-pocket and handed me a card. "If you change your mind," he explained confidently. I shook my head but he held it out till I took it, with invisible fumigation tongs, and walked off down the shop with it. To my confusion it didn't say "I am a noxious berk" but "Rodney young—Researcher".

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I'll explain it in a minute," I said, springing up with the look of comic distraction that signified "Need to go", and slipping out of the room. I had a feeling there must be a downstairs loo, and I didn't want to give anyone time enough to tell me about it. Up I went, in swift strides, past the bathroom and then on to the further flight, keeping to the inner edges of the talky old treads. The door of Luc's room was ajar, I slid round it and was halfway to the desk before I fully understood that I wasn't alone, that Patrick Dhondt was sprawled on the bed in his black school breeches, reading a book. "How ridiculous!" I said. "I was looking for the bathroom." I felt myself going as red as I have ever been, disastrously compromised. He looked at me with faint surprise. "Hel-lo!" I exclaimed. "How are you?" "Very good," he said, and then smiled. He was unquestionably in possession of the room, of the bed. I backed towards the door, and he looked down to his book, in part to hide a flush and grin of his own. "It's downstairs," he said. I got hot thinking about it now—one of those torturing moments you masochistically recall from time to time for the rest of your life. I unzipped the side-pocket of my bag, took the photographs out and climbed into bed. Why hadn't he been in school? Why did I have to be the bore who took Luc from him for an hour? What had they said to each other afterwards, when Luc jogged back upstairs and ragged on the bed with him? Or had they just dismissed me from their minds, leant close together and solemnly begun to kiss? Luc's hand . . . I choked the vision off, and sorted out all the pictures that had Patrick in: I didn't want to see him, or the girl. Two snaps of Mrs Altidore at work on a tapestry and smiling dimly had struck me none the less as having some subtly accusing quality, and had already been eliminated. I tightened a magic circle round the young man. The picture in which he appeared like a faun of the dunes disappointed me now. I looked at the others that I'd tended to neglect, even the silly shots with the soles of two feet gigantic in the foreground and the supine body unfocused beyond had some information value. could one read the soles of the feet as one could a palm? Was that dirt-filled crack the line of destiny, that callused declivity the line of love? He had long prehensile toes, I remembered from the Baths—and he had told me he ran very fast over short distances. I couldn't quite imagine it; whenever I saw him he was moving with the confident slowness of the beautiful. Even his jogging was somehow in slow motion.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  falling over him as he moans a high-pitched sound she has never heard before, blending into the chirps and rustles all around them. Suddenly, Eddie pushes himself farther into her mouth with a small grunt and she tastes something faintly metallic at the back of her throat. “Whew,” he says, pulling away from her. “You sweet thing. Where’d you learn that?" She feels heat rise from her breasts to her cheeks. Without even looking, she knows that a blotchy red rash has spread across her chest and neck, a map to her inner world. She al ways turns blotchy when she feels anything complicated. She fights back the urge to gag at the drop of thick slippery fluid trickling down her throat. “I almost came,” he said with a grin. “Naughty girl.” He slides down her body, his stomach pressed against her own, and thrusts into her. Jennie braces herself and grits her teeth, waiting for the pain. Will there be blood between her legs? Will he find out she’s a virgin and recoil? Jennie knows this: Eddie Fish does not want her to be a virgin. For the rest of her life, boyfriends and husbands will ask about her first time, and the name Eddie Fish—that unfortunate moniker— will forever be whispered in a progression of beds. Who was you first? Eddie Fish. And how was it, my darling? It was—it was what it was. He has pushed all the way inside her and she feels nothing. No pain, no magic. Her insides have widened to accommodate him as if a door has always been open, as if a room inside her has been drafty, just waiting to be entered. Her breath seems loud to her ears, and her heart pounds erratically as Eddie moves to the rhythm of music only he can

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Knock- Knock- Knock- “Uh, yes?” “Can I come in?” my roommate Stephanie asks. “No!” “Then can I borrow some milk?” “Borrow whatever the fuck you want!” “Well, thank fuckin’ you!” She yells safely, stomping away. Ice-cold fake pussy juice is dripping from the puddle on my desk onto my lap. My pecker, soft as a jellyfish at this point, is burrowing backward into my flesh as my teeth start to chatter. Gee. If Mom could see me now, wouldn’t she be proud? I’m in serious need of a game plan. I rock my chair back and forth until I’m close enough to reach Fleshlight. Both of my hands are slick with lube but I manage to pull it onto my lap, where I “squeegie” some lubricant from the puddle between my legs back into the coin-slot eye. I wipe my left hand on my shirt and put the bottom back on before too much more can drip out. I breathe deeply in that calming yoga way and casually flip through the pages of Juggs, trying to pretend that it’s a warm, sunny Saturday and not forty degrees in my room. Now con centrate on the girl washing her truck in Montana. Nice. Cute butt—and butthole, I see. A very nice pink eye. Mmm, boobs. My trusty lust is taking over. I pick up the thing. I tip it over my dick. I slide it over the head. It’s tacky. Kinda like a chick who isn’t quite wet. My dick kind of bends cuz I’m only like 80 per cent hard. To remedy the situation, I let go a warm string of steamy saliva onto my shaft. Shoulda done that instead of leak ing that freezing lubricant all over the place. I turn back to the virgin cutie on page nine. There’s a red line on her shoulder that her bra strap has left. “Babe,” I tell her, “you’re cute!” A couple of insurance pumps with my trusty right hand and, yes! Solid as a friggin’ rock!

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Knock- Knock- Knock- “Uh, yes?” “Can I come in?” my roommate Stephanie asks. “No!” “Then can I borrow some milk?” “Borrow whatever the fuck you want!” “Well, thank fuckin’ you!” She yells safely, stomping away. Ice-cold fake pussy juice is dripping from the puddle on my desk onto my lap. My pecker, soft as a jellyfish at this point, is burrowing backward into my flesh as my teeth start to chatter. Gee. If Mom could see me now, wouldn’t she be proud? I’m in serious need of a game plan. I rock my chair back and forth until I’m close enough to reach Fleshlight. Both of my hands are slick with lube but I manage to pull it onto my lap, where I “squeegie” some lubricant from the puddle between my legs back into the coin-slot eye. I wipe my left hand on my shirt and put the bottom back on before too much more can drip out. I breathe deeply in that calming yoga way and casually flip through the pages of Juggs, trying to pretend that it’s a warm, sunny Saturday and not forty degrees in my room. Now con centrate on the girl washing her truck in Montana. Nice. Cute butt—and butthole, I see. A very nice pink eye. Mmm, boobs. My trusty lust is taking over. I pick up the thing. I tip it over my dick. I slide it over the head. It’s tacky. Kinda like a chick who isn’t quite wet. My dick kind of bends cuz I’m only like 80 per cent hard. To remedy the situation, I let go a warm string of steamy saliva onto my shaft. Shoulda done that instead of leak ing that freezing lubricant all over the place. I turn back to the virgin cutie on page nine. There’s a red line on her shoulder that her bra strap has left. “Babe,” I tell her, “you’re cute!” A couple of insurance pumps with my trusty right hand and, yes! Solid as a friggin’ rock!

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The lighting of this dingy, dignified underground bath is not in keeping with its décor. Originally, old photographs show, branched neo-classical lampadaries spread a broad glare over the water, whilst at the corners shell-shaped cups threw an orangey glow upwards on to the grandiose mouldings of the ceiling. Until lately you could buy in the foyer upstairs a postcard, dating from not long after the war, showing white young men in the voluminous, mildly obscene, unelasticated swimming drawers of yore, about to jump in, and the sleek heads of those who had already done so dotted down the crowded lanes. On the back it said ‘The Corinthian Club, London: The Swimming Baths (25 yards). Founded in 1864, the present fine building, housing a gymnasium, social rooms, and 200 bedrooms for young men, dates from 1935.’ (James had immediately seen that this caption should be read with the clipped, optimistic tone of a Pathé news announcer.) In the recent past, however, coinciding with the outlay on a few tins of brown gloss paint, and the filling in of some of the cracks which continuous small subsidence and shifting of the ground brought about, the pool lighting had been redesigned. Away with the wholesome brightness of Sir Frank’s original conception, and in with a suggestive gloom, blond pools of light contrasting with surrounding shadow. Small, weak spots let into the ceiling now give vestigial illumination, like that in cinemas, over the surrounding walkway, and throw the figures loitering or recovering at either end into silhouette, making them look black. Blacks themselves become almost invisible in the bath, the navy blue tiles, once cheery, now making it impossible to see, even with goggles, for more than a few feet under water. The luminous whiteness of the traditional swimming-pool is perversely avoided here: the swimmers loom up and down unaware of each other, crossing sometimes in the soft cones of brightness. All this makes the pool seem remote from the rest of the world, but the impression is lessened by the P A system which interrupts its continuous relay of music—insipid pop on weekdays, classical on Sundays—to call members to the phone or to reception. It is the camp voice of Michael that one normally hears, wringing the wildest insinuations out of words such as guest and occupant. Those who know his ways greet each announcement with a delight unshared by the novice; in my first week at the club the disdainful announcement that ‘Mr Beckwith has a man in reception’ had brought a round of silly laughter as I walked, blushing, from the gym.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Let's call it a day," I said, and we both sprang up. He had a look of anxious excitement that made me feel both protective and de trop. I thought in a way I should meet his father; there should be some mutual recognition and professional understanding, as it were, over Luc's head. Then as we got half-way down the stairs I was simply embarrassed to be a stranger towards whom distracting courtesy would need to be shown at a moment of family greeting and tension. But Luc, though he was ahead of me and so precious to me as I let him go, didn't forget me. He leapt down the last four steps and, as his father looked up from a muttered exchange with his mother just inside the open front door, wrapped an arm round his neck and kissed him on the lips. Then he half-turned and extended his other arm towards me. "This is Edward," he said; I came forward with a silly expression of shyness and pride, as if I were someone he wanted to marry. His father and I exchanged only a few sentences, bantering around his absence and uncertain responsibilities, reassuring ourselves with the facts of Luc's excellence at English and the inevitability of his good results. I was startled by Martin Altidore's appearance. He was so young. though I knew he was younger than his wife I had still somehow expected a burgherly figure out of one of the family portraits; but there was nothing of their prudence or their warning glint of power. He was darker than Luc, more animal and compact (Luc's legginess came from his mother), but with the same long nose and almost the same big lips. And he was in the same stretch of life as me—well, a little further on, but surely only forty. His dark suit was beautifully cut, his off-white shirt and blood-coloured tie were silk. You knew at once he was a fucker. If I'd met him in a bar I'd have wanted him. I was trying to please him, playing to some cockteasy quality he had—charm I suppose, a kind of shallow intimacy; something Luc incuriously lacked—and at the same time to stay in with Luc; and then to be good to his mother, half-forgotten just outside our little male ring. Chapter 12