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)

  ‘It’s always more moving and impressive than you expect,’ James said, as so often echoing my own feelings; but our solidarity brought us to the edge of difficult terrain. What he would want to talk about would be the suppressed or (in his usual term) deflected sexuality of the opera. We must all have recognised it, though it would have had an importance, even an eloquence, to James and me that would have been quite lost on my grandfather. He had spent all his adult life in circles where good manners, lofty savoir-faire and plain callousness conspired to avoid any recognition that homosexuality even existed. The three of us in our hot little box were trapped with this intensely British problem: the opera that was, but wasn’t, gay, the two young gay friends on good behaviour, the mandarin patriarch giving nothing of his feelings away. I decided to brave it, and said: ‘It’s an odd piece, though, partly the sex thing, of course. Claggart’s bit about beauty and handsomeness could win a prize for general ghastly creepiness. He’s sort of coming out with it and not coming out with it at the same time.’ My grandfather hesitated diplomatically before saying: ‘That was very much Forster’s line actually. Though I don’t think it’s generally known.’ ‘Did you meet Forster?’ James blurted in reverence and surprise. ‘Oh, only occasionally, you know. But I do clearly recall the first night of Billy Budd. Britten himself was in the pit, of course. It made a fairly big impression, though I remember opinion was very divided about it. Many people understandably didn’t altogether care for the Britten-Pears thing.’ James looked blank and I frowned, but my grandfather went on. ‘There was a party afterwards that Laura and I went to and I had quite a long chat with old Forster about the libretto.’ ‘What was he like?’ asked James. My grandfather smiled wearily—he did not care to be interrupted. Then James looked mortified. ‘He seemed satisfied with it, but there was something distinctly contrary about him. I was quite surprised when he openly criticised some of the music. Claggart’s monologue in particular he thought was wrong. He wanted it to be much more … open, and sexy, as Willy puts it. I think soggy was the word he used to describe Britten’s music for it.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Paul looked with amused reproval at his son. "Marcel knows all about it from his, I'm not allowed to say girlfriend, friend, Sibylle de Taeye, the daughter of the Minister of Culture, who is something of an Egeria to young Luc, I gather." And Marcel blushed as he had weeks before when I'd blundered into this patch. Of course she wasn't his girlfriend—he was up against some pretty stiff competition if that was his idea; he was blushing to have his fantasy disclosed. "She's not my girlfriend," he said. "She is very sweet to you though, isn't she?" said Paul optimistically. "No she's not!" said Marcel, and a big tear gathered in his eye. I thought, just you wait till your next lesson. The vocabulary of the orgy. You're going to tell me everything just as you had it from Sibylle. Later I was reading about Edgard Orst's now demolished villa, which had stood so conspicuous and so secretive on the edge of a suburban housing park. Paul had given me an English journalist's account of a visit to it in 1904: We were privileged last month to be received by M. Edgard Orst at the Villa Hermes, his splendid new residence-cwm-atelier, whose designs our readers will no doubt recall from their publication in these pages some little while since. Indeed, the house has been three years in the building, and though M. Orst has regretted the delay, it cannot be denied that every detail of the structure and its appointments speaks of the most especial care in both design and execution; the artistic visitor will be bound to exclaim with us, "How should it have been done sooner?" In external appearance the Villa is tall and somewhat forbidding, its severity of openings and the plainness of the elevations, however, being mitigated by the fine patterns that are scored into the stucco along the coigns and lintels, the whole being given the most delightful brightness by virtue of being painted a dazzling white. Atop the foremost gable, of course, stands the figure of the alert young deity whom M. Orst has invoked as the guardian of his house—an admirable piece in bronze gilt from his own studio. Arriving a little before the appointed time, and having dwelt on the exterior, we rang the bell and were obliged to wait for some minutes before the opening of the door. This door itself, let it be said, is a thoroughly imposing one, massively enriched with nails and fine furniture; and it gave rise to not a few reflections on the solitude into which M. Orst has chosen to retire, and on the strength, so to speak, of the fortifications which he has thought necessary to protect that solitude from an undeniably curious world. For in M. Orst, unlike other artists of the "Symbolist" school—we think of that exquisite dramatist of the impalpable, M. Maurice Maeterlinck, with his avowed enthusiasms for the beer-hall, the velodrome, and the ring—in M.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We were still dry, to my dismay, and I stood with my hands in my pockets while Helene fiddled with a ring on her left hand. "You're engaged!" I said; and she blushed when she said yes. That happy confusion, coupled with some remote tribal relief that in that case I wouldn't have to marry her myself, and indeed was honour-bound not to flirt with her, made me suddenly warm to her. "Are you an art historian, I suppose?" Again the solemn discomposure. "No, no. Oh, you mean the Museum. No, I just help out there from time to time when Paul asks me to." How often I misread a face, an attitude, and credited strangers with intimidating powers they didn't have or want. "I do bits and pieces. Baby-sitting I don't mind at all, and helping with censuses. I've done secretarial work for my father, and even invigilated exams. But no, I'm nothing really." "You like jobs where you can read a book." "They are the best," she said, with a shy chuckle. There was something so sensible and tender about her that I began to feel quite jealous of her husband after all, her husband to be. I thought of asking her about him, although I tended to mistrust the accounts young women gave of their intendeds, their wonderful jobs and looks. But in rushed Mrs Vivier with the claret-cup and glasses on a tray. At which Maurice looked up and said, "I've just noticed your Orst tie." "Oh yes," I said, smoothing it over the largely imaginary stomach that it caparisoned. "So Paul's selling these now, is he?"—at which Echevin merely hummed. "It's the Athena, isn't it? Not here, though, not next door. It's in the Town Museum, surely?" He stood up and peered at the tie—on which Orst's Athena was indeed reproduced with a certain additional gold and glitter and with the illusory depth of a hologram. "What is it William Butler Yeats says? 'Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting for a train, Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head' . . . " He looked up, stirred by his own brief delivery. "Waiting a train," I said. "Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting for a train." "Yes, it's waiting a train—no for." He looked uncertain, not altogether pleased. "It's an aphetic form of awaiting; or perhaps more strictly an aphaeretic one," I went on like a complete arsehole. "You know, deliberate docking of the first syllable." "I can see you're going to have to watch yourself with your quotations, dear," said Inge, with a mild air of vindication. I glanced self-deprecatingly around the room, actually quite shocked myself to have brought this blare of kitsch into a place where real Orsts, of incomparable delicacy, were hung. We sat down to dinner without Marcel. "Gone to the pictures with a friend," Echevin said. "Bloodbath 4, I think it's called.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I stood there grinning out of sheer alarm and an odd sense of shame, and then went slowly on towards the house. I peered about defiantly, but I felt my surroundings had instinctively sided with Old Gus. The austere facades were clouded for me by this brief injustice; their vigilant high windows looked on an offender, someone who brought no credit to them. I answered them back, but for a moment I hated the street and the long perspective of failure to which it had condemned me. I stopped to collect myself and spurred myself on with the beautiful new idea of an outing. I would borrow Matt's jeep for a day, pick up Luc quite early, showered, talced, full of curiosity and a sense of privilege, and drive out to some historic town for lunch, a walk, both of us admitting boredom in the brown old museum, conversation freed of the inhibitions of the Altidores' dining-room and their starchy ancestors. To be out in the storm-crossed countryside together, both rising to the occasion with new charm and candour! And then—best leave it there. I sprang up the steps and pressed the bell with a zing that felt slightly manic. His mother opened the door, clasping a knitted orange shawl round her throat and almost over her mouth. "Quick, quick," she said. "We've all got colds." "What, all two of you?" "I got it from going out in the rain, and now he seems to have got it from me." You stupid old nit, I thought, just don't go out in the rain. I thought of him almost like Dawn in his latter days, he must be kept from the least infection. "I'm so sorry." "You may prefer to cancel your lesson." "No, no," I said with a hasty cough, a covert self-inspection as to whether I didn't myself have a slight sniffle. She shooed me into the dining-room, still with the shawl swept across her face. She was very pathetic in it, like an elderly actress playing a veiled houri. Then she flitted off, leaving me with my darling's forebears. There were those I saw each time, who hung facing me and behind Luc, and whose features I tried absently to map on to his in a kind of genetic photofit; and the others, behind where I sat, whom I looked at for a moment now. There was the interesting Guillaume, with a thin grey book in his hands, but a dull picture. Why didn't he get our mutual friend Orst to paint him rather than this conventional journeyman, whose muddy signature was already obscured by candle-smoke? And balancing him, his wife Anona, the Princess Cirieno, no less, a fine-featured woman with sexy eyes but equally subdued to the sobriety of her new family. And after them, nobody; it was as though they had hidden their faces. "Are you going to be painted?" I asked as I heard Luc come in.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Oh good, look actually you're just really sort of crushing in between me and my friend's knees here. We're having a rather important conversation." Gerard stood back and looked at Luc with the brief cynical calculation I remembered before when he asked about other people's sex-lives. It struck me he probably didn't have one of his own. "Okay, this is Luc, this is Gerard." I noticed Luc took his cue from me, and merely nodded. And then, my incurable weak politeness: "Gerard plays in the Ghezellen van der whatsit. They're all going to dress up as animals." "Oh!" I watched him ponder this, then reach out and touch the bombard case. "And what is this, please?" "It's his bombard. Now if you don't mind . . ." But Gerard was already pushing back the clasps and revealing the instrument, broken in three and secure in its velveteen hollows. "Splendid, thanks very much," I said. Luc was perversely intrigued. "Is it a kind of oboe?" "Yes, it's actually a bass shawm, which is an early kind of oboe. It's modelled on a fifteenth-century one which you can see in the Town Museum." "So you had it made." "That's right." Luc dawdled his fingers along the thick dark stem, around the flared bell and over the set of reeds, which were long and curved and bleached like an old pipe. "You look as if you enjoy instruments," said Gerard fatuously. "I used to play the oboe," said Luc. "In the school orchestra. But I gave it up." "I can't bear it when people give up instruments," I muttered, mortified that he had never told me. "I mean what's the fucking point of learning them, it's all such a waste." Poor Luc was quite abashed at this and mumbled sorry: since he wasn't at school any more . . . Gerard seemed to sense some advantage and pressed on with an account of the Happy Entry of Philip the Good in 1440. I had a nightmarish feeling that he was going to deliver the whole lecture on ceremonial antiphons that I had had a couple of months before. But Luc broke in childishly with "Does it make a lot of noise?" "As a matter of fact", said Gerard, "it's the loudest instrument there has ever been. It used to be used for raising alarms." He gave his hooting laugh, took out two of the sections and looked mischievously around the bar. "I absolutely forbid you to play that thing in here," I said. And fortunately the juke-box was activated at that moment, the Beach Boys came spinning through, and Gerard having got his drink and said how Luc was welcome to try his bombard some time, moved off. I thought I'd rather hurt him with my brusqueness.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Oregon," I said, wondering if it sounded as wrong to him as it did to me. I remembered doing Our Town as the school play, only Dawn being able to sustain the accent amid a medley of Yogi Bear and something oddly like Yorkshire. "Oh great. That's the Rocky Mountains, right?" "We have the Rockies." Though doubts immediately formed. "And lumberjacks, don't tell me, that's really wild." "Uh-huh. Though I'm a student, remember." "Right! That's very sexy. But you must know one or two lumberjacks?" "Well, one or two, I guess." And I heard myself give a guilty laugh, as if I really were confessing to some rough weekends in the Oregon woods. I reached for my burger, and balanced it up in my hand so as not to shed the loose onion-rings and swell of ketchup. "That's great. So what do you major in?" I'd no idea there was so much background in phone-sex. I heard a little catch in his breath and wondered if that was what he got off on. "Oh, let's not talk about boring old work!" I said, beginning to feel more at home in my accent, which had swerved irresponsibly southwards and seemed to have settled on hunky Bobby in Dallas for its model. There was a pause, in which I could hear faint rustling sounds. I took a bite of tepid beef and bread. "Well, Ed," and the voice was slower and more serious. "Aren't you gonna tell me what you look like, and you know, what you're doing to yourself?" I chewed frantically. "Sure, sure. Well, what shall I start with?" "You're blond, I think your friend said?" "I'm blond. Very blond as a matter of fact. And I'm pretty muscular, like, I work out a lot, swim a lot, all that shit." I seemed to be turning into Rex Stout. "Yeah, I've got a washboard stomach." "A washbore?" "That's right." "Oh . . ." "Or so the guys all say." "Tell me what you weigh, Ed," he breathed, as though just to hear the figure would be the same as having my real weight on top of him. I knew I couldn't do the conversion from stones to pounds. I supposed 140 pounds must be 10 stone, which was so much lighter than me as to sound almost anorexic. "One hundred sixty-five pounds," I said masterfully. "I think I really like you, Ed." "Thanks very much." I took it as a compliment to me as well as to the person I'd invented, whom I found I'd started to rather fancy too. I wondered who my interlocutor was. I didn't mind this phase of arch foreplay—my innocence of the whole system seemed to make me more genuine. "What's your name, by the way?"

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And I may point out that this vogue, had it been remotely serious, had a considerable body of work on which to draw-from Up From Slavery to Let Me Live, from The Auto-Biography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Cane, to Black Boy to Invisible Man to Blues Child Baby to 11Je Bluest Eye to Soledad Brother. An incomplete list, and difficult: but the difficulty is not in the casting. 55 6 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK My buddy, Ava Gardner, once asked me if I thought she could play Billie Holiday. I had to tell her that, though she was certainly "down" enough for it-courageous and honest and beautiful enough for it-she would almost certainly not be allowed to get away with it, since Billie Holiday had been widely rumored to be black, and she, Ava Gardner, was widely rumored to be white. I was not really making a joke, or, if I was, the joke was bitter: for I certainly know some black girls who are much, much whiter than Ava. Nor do I blame the black girls for this, for this utterly inevitable species of schiz ophrenia is but one of the many manifestations of the spiritual and historical trap, called racial, in which all Americans find themselves and against which some of us, some of the time, manage to arrive at a viable and honorable identity. I was really thinking of black actors and actresses, who would have been much embittered if the role of Billie Holiday had been played by a white girl: but, then, I had occasion to think of them later, too, when the tidal wave of "black" films arrived, using such a staggering preponderance of football players and models. I had never been a Diana Ross fan, and received the news that she was to play Billie with a weary shrug of the shoulders. I could not possibly have been more wrong, and I pray the lady to accept fr om me my humble apologies-for my swift, and, alas, understandably cynical reaction. For, indeed, the most exasperating aspect of Lady Sings the Blues, for me, is that the three principals-Miss Ross, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor-are, clearly, ready, willing, and able to stretch out and go a distance not permitted by the film. And, even within this straitjacket, they manage marvelous moments, and a truth which is not in the script is sometimes glimpsed through them. Diana Ross, clearly, respected Billie too much to try to imitate her.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The house was very gloomy inside. I was aware that it was a romantic kind of Victorian house, which accounted for the dark oak and stained glass of the hall. At first I could hardly see and was impressed by the confidence with which Dawlish moved around. He had the busy air of someone unused to dealing with children but determined to make a go of it. His voice was high and enthusiastic, with the lost vowel-sounds of an earlier age. We sat in a big muddly room at the back, a sitting-room-cum library that merged into a conservatory with doors open on to a derelict-looking garden. Again I had the sense of his being utterly, blindly at home here, whilst I was stepping cautiously between stacks of books, parchment-shaded standard lamps, little cluttered desks with only an inch or two left to write on. He sank on to the end of a sofa that was slumped and shaped to his person, and gestured me to a hard button-backed chair that resembled a corseted lady. "It's very kind of you to ask to see me, Sir Perry," I said. "My Auntie Tina sends you her . . . best regards" (I couldn't quite come out with "love"). "How is the dear woman?" he said, with a shrewd, humorous look that suggested we both thought she was a bit of a fool. "Very well, thank you." (This was far from being the case, I recalled at once: in fact she'd just had a cancer of the throat diagnosed.) "What a gifted family you are. Novels and belles-lettres: that's your aunt. Lovely singing: that's your father. And now poetry too. You must feel you live on Mount Parnassus." I looked away, abashed by the tribute, and running my eye along the bookshelf beside me: George Merrifield's Love and Earth, Ochre by Violet Riviere, Robert Nichols's Amelia, More Verses by Wayland Strong. The dust lay thick along their tops, like blue-grey felt, but still . . . real books, by real poets. I knew Merrifield's sonnet on "Cider" from Poets of Our Time; indeed Graves claimed I had cribbed from it in my own "Autumn"; but to see the full majestic volume of the man's work was to come a step nearer to the fountainhead. I noticed a thin book of V. L. Edminson's and thought perhaps Sir Perry could clear up a bitter dispute between Graves and me as to V. L. Edminson's sex . . . "Do you walk on the common?" he asked. "Oh yes, sir, we're always going up there. I particularly like it at sunset. It can be quite glorious then."

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  less freak show. Ah, now there’s a wholesome lass washing her pickup truck in someplace like Montana. She’s wet and soapy and smiling this huge shit-eating grin in every shot, rubbing her boobs against the windshield of the truck so the photogra pher can get a shot from inside the cab. Yoga breath turns into panting. I reach into my backpack for Fleshlight and hastily unscrew the top. Christ. Why vanilla? I realize it would be better to run it under hot water, but the roommates are all sitting around out there. I flip back to the “virgin’s” lovely hymen-clad flower. She’s smiling this smile that says, “Hi, perv!” while holding her eighteen-year-old hooters out to the camera. “Get ting a hard-on?” She giggles. “Go on, take it out. Whack off for me, baby.” She’s also muttering, “Pathetic creep,” under her breath, but I concentrate on her saying, “Go a step further, Joey. Undo your belt, sweetie. Your jeans, sugar lump. Your briefs, thumper.” “Okay,” I answer. “That’s better,” she coos as I scoot my pants down below my knees. “Now get your toy and lube up....” It’s not easy. I remove the bottom lid as well as the top in or der to remove the hard plastic tube from inside the soft, saccha rine “vulva.” I’m afraid of ripping it—as if it were a hymen or something—but eventually I wrestle it free. I put Fleshlight on the desk with its unfortunate pink coin-slot eye staring at the ceiling like a bored patient at an ophthalmologist’s office, and snap the lid open on the lubricant. I aim into the coin-slot eye and get most of it in, but when I lift Fleshlight off the desk, the lubricant empties out the back end. It startles me and the thing falls from my hand, bouncing off the edge of my desk, off my thigh, and rolls onto the floor about six inches past arm’s reach. I rock my chair sideways. Damn. I stretch, stretch more ...

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well"; he shrugged and burbled something about tempus something, which I took with a sympathetic smile. "Things start coming back to you at my age. I've been writing a lot about dead friends—and about my brother Tristram, he would have been a great poet, of course." He gazed at the floor. should I ask about Tristram? "We all jolly well had to be writers, and thank the Lord we all started young. I don't know if you know, but well, Tennyson . . . " And off he went into an account of the Dawlishes, the bishops, the generals, the poets, Swinburne, Henry James, Robert Bridges (his godfather), young T. S. Eliot, that certainly put the Manners Family of Kent in its place, and held me enthralled in the musty gloom. Even so, after twenty minutes, I felt my concentration ebbing, my features locked in a kind of sneer of astonishment, my poems in their plastic folder still clutched in my lap, like the programme to a different concert. I felt painfully ignorant of Swinburne and Henry James; we didn't do T. S. Eliot till next year. I was flattered but also somehow hurt that he had misjudged me and poured this well-rehearsed torrent of stuff over me. Later we went into the kitchen together, as if not quite sure what we'd find there, and managed to make a pot of tea. Again it seemed an honour to be doing these homely things with a great man, and so soon after meeting him: it would have been less impressive if he had had the servants I'd expected. There was no suggestion of cake. At last he made me hand over "The Months" and leaving me to browse went off to a chair at the brighter end of the room. I got out the Merrifield volume, which bore the inscription "To Perry Dawlish from 'the Old Rogue'—George Merrifield, May Day 1928: knowing that he will go far . . . " I turned to the list of contents, hoping to find "Cider", which I knew by heart anyway (it was the unobvious rhyme of oozing with refusing in the sestet that I had stolen); but it wasn't in Love and Earth, which was perhaps an earlier collection. I realised for the first time just how large Merrifield's output was.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “My brother would wait till I was asleep,” I went on. “Asleep or passed out drunk. He’d sneak into my room with a foot’s length of sausage and prod with it at my face. He’d talk to me the whole time. ‘Won’t you nibble on it? Little love bite? Lick the tip. Just lick the tip, that’s all I ask.’ I’d wake up with splotches of grease all over my cheeks and chin. I’d stink of pa prika all day long. One drunk night, I took the sausage from him and clasped it to me fiercely. I held it like a teddy bear. He had to get pictures. He made duplicates, put the shots in every one’s locker at school. Even my girlfriend’s. She could never look at me again.” “That’s awful,” Hampton said. “That’s nothing,” said Foster. “My brother hit twelve and went crazy for jerking off. He’d take hour-long showers and jerk it three or four times. He was a regular jizz factory. You could never get it all out of the tub. He’d clog up the drain with it. I’d find little rubbery filaments of his spunk all over my ankles.” “I never went in for doing it in the shower,” I said. “Oh I did,” Hampton said. “Still do. Bet I’ve used more Pert on my cock than my head.” “One time,” Foster was saying, “I had to get in there. Had to brush my teeth. I had a date. I picked the bathroom lock with a coat hanger. He knew I was in there. Didn’t care. The whole time in the mirror, I could see his silhouette through the curtain. Oh, he was working it. Milling it. Talking to himself the whole damn time: ‘Getting close now. Getting close! Get ting close!' He was keeping me up on his progress. By the time I’d rinsed and spit, he was saying, ‘That was a nice one. That wasn’t too bad.’ Out on my date, I couldn’t think about any thing else.” “That’s awful,” I said. I knew I was out of the running.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Long story short, I needed a new plan. By the time we sat down for dinner, I’d resolved to focus on the task at hand—getting a job—and leave the class tourism for later. My bearing lasted another two minutes. After we sat down, the waitress asked whether I’d like tap or sparkling water. I rolled my eyes at that one: As impressed as I was with the restaurant, calling the water “sparkling” was just too pretentious—like “sparkling” crystal or a “sparkling” diamond. But I ordered the sparkling water anyway. Probably better for me. Fewer contaminants. I took one sip and literally spit it out. It was the grossest thing I’d ever tasted. I remember once getting a Diet Coke at a Subway without realizing that the fountain machine didn’t have enough Diet Coke syrup. That’s exactly what this fancy place’s “sparkling” water tasted like. “Something’s wrong with that water,” I protested. The waitress apologized and told me she’d get me another Pellegrino. That was when I realized that “sparkling” water meant “carbonated” water. I was mortified, but luckily only one other person noticed what had happened, and she was a classmate. I was in the clear. No more mistakes. Immediately thereafter, I looked down at the place setting and observed an absurd number of instruments. Nine utensils? Why, I wondered, did I need three spoons? Why were there multiple butter knives? Then I recalled a scene from a movie and realized there was some social convention surrounding the placement and size of the cutlery. I excused myself to the restroom and called my spirit guide: “What do I do with all these damned forks? I don’t want to make a fool of myself.” Armed with Usha’s reply—“Go from outside to inside, and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes; oh, and use the fat spoon for soup”—I returned to dinner, ready to dazzle my future employers. The rest of the evening was uneventful. I chatted politely and remembered Lindsay’s admonition to chew with my mouth closed. Those at our table talked about law and law school, firm culture, and even a little politics. The recruiters we ate with were very nice, and everyone at my table landed a job offer—even the guy who spit out his sparkling water. It was at this meal, on the first of five grueling days of interviews, that I began to understand that I was seeing the inner workings of a system that lay hidden to most of my kind. Our career office had emphasized the importance of sounding natural and being someone the interviewers wouldn’t mind sitting with on an airplane. It made perfect sense—after all, who wants to work with an asshole?—but it seemed an odd emphasis for what felt like the most important moment of a young career. Our interviews weren’t so much about grades or résumés, we were told; thanks to a Yale Law pedigree, one foot was already in the door.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I fear he even finds me a dull dog. June 18, 1925 : On Friday I had a meeting with Sir Arthur Cavill—early evening at the Reform, whisky-and-soda, talk about nothing in particular. He appeared almost embarrassed to touch on the purely routine matters we were supposed to discuss. I liked him—austere, detached at first, fastidiously bachelorly—& was not surprised when keen feelings flashed under the surface of his conversation. At the end, after many formalities, he talked briefly about Meroe, & the first time he had seen the pyramids there. It was as if both of us, lightly warmed with drink, suddenly felt our spirits freed. For a moment we were very far away from Pall Mall, & though little was said we shared an exalted almost tender glance. June 23, 1925 : Last night a bizarre encounter. I was at Sandy’s studio in the afternoon when without a word he & Otto tore off their clothes & clambered on to the roof. I sat around reading about Lawrence of Arabia and Queen Marie of Rumania in the Times Literary Supplement until I had mustered the insouciance to join them. They are brown as what—Corsicans?—all over, but of course I need not have felt ashamed. Otto seemed to respect me more when he saw how sunburned I was. ‘We must go to the Tropics,’ he said to Sandy, ‘and run around like the darkies.’ I wished we were there too. It felt selfconscious & absurd lying up on the leads as if we were laundry, & there was something so prurient about the nudity when I compared it to days on tour when all our party wd stop at a river, & the men strip off their shirts & drawers to wash them & spread them on the boulders to dry. I nursed those little idylls to myself, & thought of sitting among the bushes with my pipe while the men dived & splashed, or roamed through the muddy shallows. Then we were many miles from civilisation; here I made strategic play with the tepee of the paper while Otto & Sandy brazened it out in a strange discipline of their own. In the evening we wandered down to Regent Street. All along by the Café Royal people were swarming around & there was a mood (which was quite oriental) of clamour & grime with underneath it a great passive summery calm. Life in England is so little of the streets that it was delicious to loiter. There were fantastical characters about, & several girlish young men, at intervals, waiting & waiting.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  On my first day of golf practice, I showed up in dress shoes, thinking that was what golf shoes were. When an enterprising young bully noticed before the first tee that I was wearing a pair of Kmart brown loafers, he proceeded to mock me mercilessly for the next four hours. I resisted the urge to bury my putter in his goddamned ear, remembering Mamaw’s sage advice to “act like you’ve been there.” (A note about hillbilly loyalty: Reminded of that story recently, Lindsay launched into a tirade about how much of a loser the kid was. The incident occurred thirteen years ago.) I knew in the back of my mind that decisions were coming about my future. All of my friends planned to go to college; that I had such motivated friends was due to Mamaw’s influence. By the time I was in seventh grade, many of my neighborhood friends were already smoking weed. Mamaw found out and forbade me to see any of them. I recognize that most kids ignore instructions like these, but most kids don’t receive them from the likes of Bonnie Vance. She promised that if she saw me in the presence of any person on the banned list, she would run him over with her car. “No one would ever find out,” she whispered menacingly. With my friends headed for college, I figured I’d do the same. I scored well enough on the SAT to overcome my earlier bad grades, and I knew that the only two schools I had any interest in attending—Ohio State and Miami University—would both accept me. A few months before I graduated, I had (admittedly, with little thought) settled on Ohio State. A large package arrived in the mail, filled with financial aid information from the university. There was talk of Pell Grants, subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans, scholarships, and something called “work-study.” It was all so exciting, if only Mamaw and I could figure out what it meant. We puzzled over the forms for hours before concluding that I could purchase a decent home in Middletown with the debt I’d incur to go to college. We hadn’t actually started the forms yet—that would require another herculean effort on another day. Excitement turned to apprehension, but I reminded myself that college was an investment in my future. “It’s the only damned thing worth spending money on right now,” Mamaw said. She was right, but as I worried less about the financial aid forms, I began to worry for another reason: I wasn’t ready. Not all investments are good investments. All of that debt, and for what? To get drunk all the time and earn terrible grades? Doing well in college required grit, and I had far too little of it. My high school record left much to be desired: dozens of absences and tardy arrivals, and no school activities to speak of.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “A dollar,” the man says. “It says a quarter.” “It’s a dollar,” the man says. He does not return Allen’s smile. Fumbling with his wallet, Allen pulls out a five-dollar bill and takes five tokens—too bashful to ask for change. © “Touch,” she says. She is looking right at him, she can see him. This is not how Allen Fein remembers past visits, not with the women staring back. There are four women seated on a carpeted platform, and all, eying him, make the same offer. “Touch,” they say. “Touch.” Well, three of the women say it. The fourth—sitting in a cheap plastic lawn chair, too wide for it, her thighs, cut in half, drooping, like her breasts, in languid arcs toward the floor—is reading a book. She’s got glasses on and is holding a page, ready to turn it, and Allen knows the motion will be slow and lazy, as weary as her posture. They are all naked, or almost so. The second woman wears a bra, the third panties, and the fourth has the book and glasses. It is the first one who is, to Allen, beautiful. He has not set foot in a peep show since boyhood, but he re calls almost everything from then. He remembers shivering so badly that his teeth chattered, his hands pressed between his legs for warmth. He’d been afraid that he might freeze to death, actually expire from excitement. And he’d often in dulged this nightmare, squandered precious viewing time on the darker fantasy of dropping dead right there in the booth. Allen remembers the old setup. The sound of a token drop ping and then the labored spin of gears. He remembers the strip of light at the bottom of the window frame as the wooden

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But no such restraints need apply to you. Why, within half an hour of finishing your day’s work you could be in some back room, buggering away like nobody’s business.’ I quite enjoyed these sarcastic smacks. ‘Anyway, I don’t have to make my mind up yet. I said I’d let him know in a few days. It’s partly that I’ve never done anything like this—you know, there must be so many professional biographers. I’m completely inappropriate.’ ‘Do you think he doesn’t know that? He knows he could set any of the latter-day Mrs Asps on to it. He’s chosen you because he thinks you will understand. After all, you saved his life once; now he wants you to do it again.’ ‘Don’t get carried away with the poetic justice of the whole thing,’ I requested. ‘Look, I’ve got nothing on, and I’ve made the carpet all wet.’ ‘All right. But I thought I’d better set you straight on this one. I’m late for my visits as it is—boils, babes, buboes, they’re all being kept waiting. That shows you how important I think it is.’ ‘Okay, dear. I’ll speak to you soon.’ ‘Okay. Just think what fun it will be choosing your author’s photograph for the dust-jacket.’ ‘Mm—I hadn’t thought of that.’ We were both laughing as we hung up. Three days later I left St Paul’s station, and skirting round the back of the Cathedral headed for Skinner’s Lane. The weather was still hot, but windless and grey: there was a glare in the sky, but I cast no shadows on the pavement. The lane itself and the house were smaller than in my thoughts. I rang the bell and prepared myself and my expression for the curt reception by Lewis and the subsequent pleasure of Charles in seeing me and knowing that I would take on the work. Over the phone I had agreed at least to look at some of the material; I was to tell him in a month if I thought that I could turn it into a book. ‘I know it’s queer,’ he had said. ‘I’m not famous. But the book could be.’ As before, nothing happened, so I rang again, stepping back as I did so into the street, in the way that callers do, both to nerve themselves for an encounter and to lessen the embarrassment that comes from being one of the street users who is seeking admittance to the private realm of the house. The windows were as opaque as before, but because I now knew what waited behind them I looked at them as if I could see through them into the friendly cluttered library and the silent dining-room. There was still no response, and I found myself complaining under my breath, ‘You did say four o’clock.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Oh, up in Kentish Town. There’s a staff house there—it’s known as the Embassy. Because of all the foreign staff,’ he explained needlessly. We went along by the huge Edwardian façade of the hotel, and I glanced nervously up at its convulsed top stages: balconies, bows, gables, turrets, executed in a sickly mixture of orange brick and dully shining beige faience. Then we cut down a narrow street that sheared at an angle across the corner of the hotel site and revealed the undecorated plainness of its back parts. Phil pulled open a door with a window in it, and we penetrated into a horrible area of store-rooms, rumbling boilers and stacked wicker laundry-baskets. It was like the subterraneous parts of the worst schools we used to play matches against. There were frequent fire doors which closed the corridor into hot, brightly lit sections. When we climbed to the floor above, which was the main floor of the hotel, we were treading for a few yards on patterned hotel carpet, and there were brass wall-lamps and prints of eighteenth-century London. Then we were in the service area again. We passed by the open door of a kind of rest-room: the curtains were drawn, and there was a semi-circle of once stylish wooden-armed easychairs, of the kind where the seat cushions collapse through the supporting rubber straps, and a television, in front of which a man in the hotel’s dark blue uniform was squatting. The air was dead with smoke and there were large, bar-room ashtrays on the floor, piled high with fag-ends. ‘Hi, Pino!’ said Phil. The man looked round; he had very curly dark hair, dull, handsome Spanish looks—about thirty years old. ‘Hey Phil! How you work this thing? Is not on.’ He slapped the sides of the cabinet with the palms of his hands, as though trying to revive a drunk. Then looking round again and seeing me, he got up. ‘Pino, this is Will. He’s just a friend of mine.’ We shook hands. ‘You a friend of Phil’s?’ he asked, as though to confirm what a good fellow I must be. ‘Phil is very nice boy. Is very very nice boy.’ He rocked about grinning and laughing at this, sliding a light punch at Phil’s chest and capering backwards. ‘Phil elp me this mornin with the bang.’ Though he was much Phil’s senior, he behaved like a child in his presence, and Phil, able at last to show me a place where he belonged, responded by showing how accustomed he was to this person I did not even know. ‘You helped him with the what?’ I asked. ‘The van. I’m teaching him to drive the hotel van. But you’re not much good, are you, Pino?’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I don’t think race comes into it, does it? I mean, Abdul is black and the others aren’t … but I don’t want any rot about that. Abdul loves doing that sort of thing—and he’s actually jolly good at it. He’s a pure exhibitionist at heart.’ ‘I must say I was rather amazed by the whole affair—you know, seeing half the staff of a famous London Club about to copulate in front of the camera.’ ‘I think you’ll find a good many of them do it—though not always on film, I agree. They’re a close little team, there at Wicks’s, and they like to do what I want. But then I got them all their jobs,’ he added. It was one of those moments when I had the feeling, chilling and flustering at the same time, that Charles was a dangerous man, a fixer and favouritiser. In the world beyond school, though, perhaps one could have what favourites one wanted. ‘Even so …’ I shrugged. ‘Do you have any idea what will happen to the film?’ ‘Well, it’ll have to be edited and everything of course, which is actually frightfully difficult with blue films, the continuity, and putting the close-ups in the right place. We have some contacts—well, friends really, who do all the technical side. We made a few mistakes in the last one we did—filmed over several days so that the boys could come up with the goods, but then you found, if you had an eye for such things, that they’d somehow mysteriously changed their socks in the middle of a fuck or whatever.’ ‘I didn’t realise this was such an established business—I’m astonished.’ ‘This is our third,’ said Charles, with the personal satisfaction of the amateur. ‘Much the best. 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 …’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Then I stole across the landing and lay down fully clothed in Julien's room. For a long time I watched the candle burning, the flame tugged away by a harmless draught. When I blew it out and saw the thin-walled cup of wax at the tip cool into darkness I thought how for centuries the world had fallen asleep with that sweet singed smell in its nostrils. 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.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I felt in fact that I had somehow escaped from a run of bad luck. I had caught a mirror before it shattered or avoided seeing the new moon through glass. I could speak for some time in this prudential vein, in the hushed control I placed on my fright, denying the childish wound of being accused, however justly. But he was fumbling with the seat-belt, prodding and tugging at the simple catch, which at last came free. It was an old belt that didn't retract and he flung it with a clatter against the tin and plastic of the door. He jumped out of the car and stood for a moment gazing away, as if trying to choose the perfect phrase with which to go: I waited for one of his broody poetic claims, while the rain streaked down around him and over the inside of the open door. But he merely pulled the belt of the coat free and then shrugged the heavy garment off. He bundled it loosely, tumblingly, and without looking tossed it in at me like something common and contemptible. Then he turned back down the street, leaving the door standing out like a broken wing. I leant over and pulled it to and then sat and watched him quickly dwindle in the rain-bubbled side-mirror, with an involuntary catch of pleasure at his big handsome backside—he was terribly sexy to me for a moment. I stayed and calmed myself. I was going to the Museum, to warn Paul I was leaving town, but I couldn't turn up like this. I groped for a handkerchief, and of course it was Luc's, not altogether clean, with a trouser-pocket staleness, gummed up with snot which clung in the creases in hard translucent grains, like rice: I placed one on my tongue, half-expecting it to liquefy as in some miracle with a saint's salved fluids. The jacket was a lovely one, a somewhat conventional garment, with its Scotland-Piccadilly-Brussels pedigree, for a teenage runaway—but that was just Luc's ambiguity. It suited me more than his other things, and gave me that stamp of square-shouldered smartness I could never fully attain myself. I had seen his mother's hesitation as I lifted it down on its hanger, like something I couldn't afford.