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 This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Bobby and Norma let me off outside the school and drove away. They had been glum and prickly with each other on the way down. In a few months they’d be graduating, and their plans didn’t agree. I knew I was in trouble as soon as we started our lay-up drills. The shoes were heavy and squarish, chosen by Dwight to go with both my school clothes and my Scout uniform. They clomped loudly as I ran and the slick new soles slipped like skates on the profoundly varnished floor. I fell down twice before the game began. By tip-off the kids from the other school were already hooting at me. I didn’t want to play, but only five of us had shown up that night so I had no choice. My shoes clomped as I ran blindly up and down the court. Sometimes the ball came at me. I dribbled it once or twice and threw it at someone else in red. Jumped when I saw everyone else jumping. Ran back and forth. Fell down whenever I tried to stop too fast. In the din of voices I heard one in particular, a woman’s, shrieking high above the rest. It was like the crazy voice on laugh tracks. Once I picked it up I couldn’t stop listening for it. It distressed me and made me even clumsier. Every time I slipped or fell down she shrieked higher and louder, and then there came a time when she didn’t stop between falls but kept on shrieking in a breathless, broken voice that had no trace of laughter. I wasn’t the only one to notice. The gym grew quiet. Eventually hers was the only voice to be heard. She didn’t stop. Our coach called time-out, and we went to the sidelines to towel off and slake our thirst. People were turning in their seats to look up at her. She was standing in the top row of the bleachers, a woman I’d never seen before, a huge broad-shouldered woman wearing curlers and toreador pants. She had her hands over her face. Her shoulders jerked as muffled barking sounds escaped her. A short man with scarlet cheeks and downcast eyes was leading her by the elbow. They passed along their row and down the steps, then across the gym floor to the exit, the woman barking convulsively through her fingers. The game resumed, but with a difference. The crowd was quieter now, almost hushed. When the other team had the ball, a few scattered voices called polite encouragement; when they made a basket the applause was subdued. The room came into focus for me. I caught my breath, found my rhythm, and settled into the game. I still had trouble keeping my feet, but nobody laughed when I fell down. The crowd was on my side now, and the other team seemed to know it. They played with an air of deference, almost of apology.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I was getting annoyed with the booksellers who, sensing my foreignness, kept directing me to their piles of battered American paperbacks, and as G. continued not to appear I wondered if my sacrificed afternoon would go to waste. But then he did appear, standing beside me suddenly, and my annoyance dissolved at the sight of him. He stood out here, with his slightly formal clothes, his feathered hair, though in the States he would have been generic enough, an East Coast aspirant prep school kid, maybe not quite the real thing, especially if he smiled too broadly (as he was careful almost never to do) and revealed a lower set of teeth in un-American disarray. He was friendly enough in greeting me, but as always there was something reserved about him, as if he were deciding whether or not to pronounce a judgment he was on the point of making. He asked me where we should go only to dismiss all my proposals, saying he would take me to a favorite place of his own, and then he set off, walking not beside but in front of me, preventing conversation and as if he were ready to deny any association with me at all. I was hardly a newcomer, I had lived in Sofia for two years, but I had remained a kind of dilettante of the city, and soon—though the center is small and we hadn’t gone far from Slaveykov and Graf Ignatiev, the part of it I knew best—I had no idea where we were. My ignorance wasn’t for lack of trying: for months after I arrived, I came to the center every morning I could, walking the streets as the city woke up and returning to mark off my route on a map pinned to the wall. And yet those same streets, even a short time later, seemed almost entirely unfamiliar; I could never understand how they fit together, and only the stray detail (an old cornice carving, an oddly painted façade) reminded me I had passed that way before. Walking behind G., as always when I was with someone born in Sofia, I had a sense of the city opening itself up, the monolithic blank concrete of the Soviet-style apartment blocks giving way to unsuspected courtyards and cafés and paths through overgrown little parks. As we entered these spaces, which were quieter and less traveled than the boulevards, G. slowed his pace, allowing me to come up beside him, and we walked in a more companionable way, though still without speaking.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  At one point during the voyage, he noticed McNeish’s spirits sinking, and suddenly the man stopped rowing. Shackleton sensed the danger here—if he yelled at McNeish or ordered him to row, he would probably become even more rebellious, and with so few men crowded together for so many weeks with so little food, this could turn ugly. Improvising in the moment, he stopped the boat and ordered the boiling of hot milk for everyone. He said they were all getting tired, including himself, and they needed their spirits lifted. McNeish was spared the embarrassment of being singled out, and for the rest of journey, Shackleton repeated this ploy as often as necessary. A few miles from their destination, a sudden storm pushed them back. As they desperately looked for a new approach to the island, a small bird kept hovering over them, trying to land on their boat. Shackleton struggled to maintain his usual composure, but suddenly he lost it, standing and swinging wildly at the bird while swearing. Almost immediately he felt embarrassed and sat back down. For fifteen months he had kept all of his frustrations in check for the sake of the men and to maintain morale. He had set the tone. Now was not the time to go back on this. Minutes later, he made a joke at his own expense and vowed to himself never to repeat such a display, no matter the pressure. After a journey over some of the worst ocean conditions in the world, the tiny boat finally managed to land at South Georgia Island, and several months later, with the help of the whalers who worked there, all of the remaining men on Elephant Island were rescued. Considering the odds against them, the climate, the impossible terrain, the tiny boats, and their meager resources, it was one of the most remarkable survival stories in history. Slowly word spread of the role that Shackleton’s leadership had played in this. As the explorer Sir Edmund Hillary later summed it up: “For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift, efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” • • • Interpretation: When Shackleton found himself responsible for the lives of so many men in such desperate circumstances, he understood what would spell the difference between life or death: the men’s attitude. This is not something visible. It is rarely discussed or analyzed in books. There are no training manuals on the subject. And yet it was the most important factor of all. A slight dip in their spirit, some cracks in their unity, and it would become too difficult to make the right decisions under such duress. One attempt at getting free of the floe, taken out of the impatience and pressure from a few, would certainly lead to death. In essence, Shackleton was thrown back into the most elemental and primal condition of the human

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There were six of us left, we tightened our circle as another Bulgarian writer, the only woman in their cohort, took the bottle and spun it on the cobblestones. But before it could come to a stop a voice called out in Bulgarian and then a waitress from inside stepped in between us, wagging her finger and snatching the bottle up from the ground. Chakaite, one of the Bulgarians said, hold on, we’re almost finished, but the waitress said Ne, ne mozhe, it’s not permitted, we were being too loud, people lived above the restaurant, and the bottle, what if it broke, what a mess, and then she turned and walked back inside, the bottle cradled against her chest. We looked at one another, embarrassed, and then the Bulgarian woman shrugged and turned back to the table. Most of the others joined her, one or two went inside the restaurant, where the writers who taught the workshops were sitting, one Bulgarian and one American, we had had our first sessions earlier that day. I stepped away again, not wanting to join them, I pulled my phone out but put it back in my pocket unchecked. I can’t, R. had said, wiping his face, I don’t think I can, I don’t know what I feel, I have to figure out my life. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his computer open in front of him, he kept leaning toward the screen and back. But Skups, I said, using my name for him, our name for each other, that’s what we’ve been doing, we’re figuring out our lives, you are my life, I didn’t say, but I thought it, for two years he had been my life. Every couple of months I flew to Lisbon to spend a long weekend with him, a week, whenever I had a break I stayed in his tiny student’s room, we slept together in the narrow bed he was sitting on now. I’m trying, I said to him, I’m applying for jobs, but there were no jobs, or none I could get, it was too expensive to hire Americans, they said, especially with the crisis, if I had an EU passport it would be different. It’s impossible, R. said, you know it’s impossible, we have to accept it, I have to live my life. I had to live my life too, and I wanted a different life, not a life without R. but a life in a new place, I couldn’t keep living the same day again and again, the hours of teaching, I wanted a new life too.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Mexico, and throughout the American West. Some experts estimate there may be as many as one hundred thousand. Even this larger number amounts to less than 1 percent of the membership in the LDS Church worldwide, but all the same, leaders of the mainstream church are extremely discomfited by these legions of polygamous brethren. Mormon authorities treat the fundamentalists as they would a crazy uncle—they try to keep the “polygs” hidden in the attic, safely out of sight, but the fundamentalists always seem to be sneaking out to appear in public at inopportune moments to create unsavory scenes, embarrassing the entire LDS clan. The LDS Church happens to be exceedingly prickly about its short, uncommonly rich history—and no aspect of that history makes the church more defensive than “plural marriage.” The LDS leadership has worked very hard to persuade both the modern church membership and the American public that polygamy was a quaint, long-abandoned idiosyncrasy practiced by a mere handful of nineteenth-century Mormons. The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith—still the religion’s focal personage—married at least thirty- three women, and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation. Polygamy was, in fact, one of the most sacred credos of Joseph’s church—a tenet important enough to be canonized for the ages as Section 132 of The Doctrine and Covenants, one of Mormonism’s primary scriptural texts. * The revered prophet described plural marriage as part of “the most holy and important doctrine ever revealed to man on earth” and taught that a man needed at least three wives to attain the “fullness of exaltation” in the afterlife. He warned that God had explicitly commanded that “all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same . . . and if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.” Joseph was murdered in Illinois by a mob of Mormon haters in 1844. Brigham Young assumed leadership of the church and led the Saints to the barren wilds of the Great Basin, where in short order they established a remarkable empire and unabashedly embraced the covenant of “spiritual wifery.” This both titillated and

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Using fine bristles so our brush strokes wouldn’t show, we painted the bench, the pedestal, the fluted columns that rose from the pedestal to the keyboard. We painted the carved scrollwork. We painted the elaborate inlaid picture above the keyboard, a picture of a girl with braided yellow hair leaning out of her gabled window to listen to a redbird on a branch. We painted the lustrous cabinet. We even painted the foot pedals. Finally, because the antique yellow of the ivory looked wrong to Dwight against the new white, we very carefully painted the keys, all except the black ones, of course. I was standing on the road with two other boys, my news bag still heavy with papers, when I saw him coming toward us with his little dog Pepper. The three of us started making cracks about him. His name was Arthur Gayle and he was the uncoolest boy in the sixth grade, maybe even the whole camp. Arthur was a sissy. His mother was said to have turned him into a sissy by dressing him in girls’ clothes when he was little. He walked like a girl, ran like a girl, and threw like a girl. Arthur was my father’s name, so that seemed okay to me, but the name Gayle implicated him further in sissyhood. He was clever. He had an arch, subtle voice that he used to good effect as an instrument of his cleverness. I’d come away smarting from all my exchanges with him. Arthur was testy with me. He seemed to want something. At times I caught him looking at me expectantly, as if I were holding out on him. And I was. All my life I have recognized almost at a glance those who were meant to be my friends, and they have recognized me. Arthur was one of these. I liked him. I liked his acid wit and the wild stories he told and his apparent indifference to what other people thought of him. But I had withheld my friendship, because I was afraid of what it would cost me. As Arthur came toward us he set his face in a careless smirk. He must have known we were talking about him. Instead of walking past, he turned to me and said, “Didn’t your momma teach you to wash your hands after you go pee?” My hands weren’t all that yellow anymore, in fact they were nearly back to normal. I’d finished shucking the nuts weeks before. It was springtime. The earth was spongy with melted snow, and on the warmest days, if you listened for it, you could hear a faint steady sibilance of evaporation, almost like a light rain. The trees were hazy with new growth. Bears had begun to appear on the glistening granite faces of the mountainsides above us, taking the sun and soaking up heat from the rock; at lunchtime people came out onto their steps and watched them with upturned, benevolent faces.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Oh yes, I said, very much, so many wonderful things, as if I were trying to make amends for the thoughts I had just had. It felt wrong to leave so quickly, having stayed so long, and I asked if she had a card, saying we would love to see the studio they kept in Sofia. She didn’t, she said, but she took a sheet of paper from a drawer, on which she wrote in beautiful Cyrillic an address we promised to visit. She kept smiling as she handed this to me, but I could see she didn’t believe what I had said; her gaze had gone a little unfocused, she was already staring past us at the empty street. Outside, I wanted to tell R. why I had needed to leave so suddenly, but as I began to speak what I had felt seemed ridiculous, out of scale, and I let it drop. It was already late afternoon, and we angled our way back to the busier part of town. We didn’t have any plans for the evening, and as we walked I kept an eye on the walls of the buildings beside the road, which were crowded with posters for concerts and exhibitions and plays, a surprising number for such a small town, I thought, posters mounted over other posters, bulging like plaster from the walls. Most of them were for small venues, clubs and cafés, but there was a series of performances held within the walls of the ruined fortress, too; the stage of ages, they called it, symphony and opera and ballet. We had been saving Tsarevets for the evening anyway; it would be brutal in the day, exposed to the sun and with almost no shade to be found. I saw that there was a concert that night, members of the Sofia Opera and Ballet performing Lakmé , the opera by Delibes. I had never seen it live, I told R., but it was the first opera I owned on CD, two discs I had played again and again. It was like a door opening onto my adolescence, I felt, a chance to share it with him, and suddenly it seemed important that we go, Please, I said, can we go, please, surprising us both with my insistence. He had never been to an opera before, but he was willing; it would be a new experience, he said, he was eager for new experiences. We had a late lunch at a restaurant near the hotel. It was almost empty, there were only a few solitary men nursing beers, though the air was still heavy with smoke from the afternoon rush. The large windows along the back wall offered the same view as our room, and R. and I sat at a table next to one of them, looking out at the hills and their crowded houses.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  You know those poems you put up in the classroom, he began, and I nodded, of course I did: five student poems from the two classes of twelfth-graders I taught, which I hung up in a little display on the back wall. For a week before the students handed them in there had been an extraordinary wind in Sofia, fierce and incessant, a wind from Africa, people said, which played havoc through the city and left all of us feeling anxious or exalted. It was constant, unignorable, and in each of the poems I posted it appeared, in one as a snake, in another as horses galloping on sand, in a third as the sea they galloped by, the pages hanging on the wall together like panes of a compound eye. Four of the poems you put up were by me and my closest friends, he said, three of us are in one class and the fourth is in the other; we hadn’t talked about it at all, it was funny that we wrote about the same thing. Did you know we were so close, he asked, but I didn’t know; I was embarrassed to realize, in fact, that in the weeks since the assignment I had forgotten exactly whose work I had chosen, and as G. spoke that afternoon I would puzzle out only slowly who the other students in his story were. Or maybe it wasn’t funny, he went on, I guess there’s nothing so funny about it, but it was odd, anyway, how we were all drawn to the same thing. They had been friends since they came to the College, he said then, they met as eighth-graders, three boys and one girl, and almost from the first day they were inseparable. As he spoke of these friends, I felt that despite my missteps he had decided I was worthy of his confidence, of a deeper confidence than he had already shown; or maybe it wasn’t judgment but need that drove him to speak to me as he did, not for some virtue of my own but merely for the function I could serve.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We were boring in comparison to them, I thought as the bottle came to a stop and, to a chorus of cheers, the boxer stepped forward and shook the hand of one of the Americans. There was something a little sheepish about the pair of them, maybe the erotic overtones of the game caused them to lean away from each other as they shook hands, each staying decidedly in his own sphere. N., who ran the website, took the bottle next. He was a bigger man, not quite fat, not quite handsome, the friendliest and funniest in the group; he had made us laugh to tears over dinner and he made us laugh now, when he took his American partner by the shoulders and hugged him close, he was so happy, they would be brothers forever, a toast, he said, taking him to the table and its bottle of rakia. There were six of us left, we tightened our circle as another Bulgarian writer, the only woman in their cohort, took the bottle and spun it on the cobblestones. But before it could come to a stop a voice called out in Bulgarian and then a waitress from inside stepped in between us, wagging her finger and snatching the bottle up from the ground. Chakaite , one of the Bulgarians said, hold on, we’re almost finished, but the waitress said Ne, ne mozhe , it’s not permitted, we were being too loud, people lived above the restaurant, and the bottle, what if it broke, what a mess, and then she turned and walked back inside, the bottle cradled against her chest. We looked at one another, embarrassed, and then the Bulgarian woman shrugged and turned back to the table. Most of the others joined her, one or two went inside the restaurant, where the writers who taught the workshops were sitting, one Bulgarian and one American, we had had our first sessions earlier that day. I stepped away again, not wanting to join them, I pulled my phone out but put it back in my pocket unchecked. I can’t, R. had said, wiping his face, I don’t think I can, I don’t know what I feel, I have to figure out my life. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his computer open in front of him, he kept leaning toward the screen and back.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We were boring in comparison to them, I thought as the bottle came to a stop and, to a chorus of cheers, the boxer stepped forward and shook the hand of one of the Americans. There was something a little sheepish about the pair of them, maybe the erotic overtones of the game caused them to lean away from each other as they shook hands, each staying decidedly in his own sphere. N., who ran the website, took the bottle next. He was a bigger man, not quite fat, not quite handsome, the friendliest and funniest in the group; he had made us laugh to tears over dinner and he made us laugh now, when he took his American partner by the shoulders and hugged him close, he was so happy, they would be brothers forever, a toast, he said, taking him to the table and its bottle of rakia. There were six of us left, we tightened our circle as another Bulgarian writer, the only woman in their cohort, took the bottle and spun it on the cobblestones. But before it could come to a stop a voice called out in Bulgarian and then a waitress from inside stepped in between us, wagging her finger and snatching the bottle up from the ground. Chakaite , one of the Bulgarians said, hold on, we’re almost finished, but the waitress said Ne, ne mozhe , it’s not permitted, we were being too loud, people lived above the restaurant, and the bottle, what if it broke, what a mess, and then she turned and walked back inside, the bottle cradled against her chest. We looked at one another, embarrassed, and then the Bulgarian woman shrugged and turned back to the table. Most of the others joined her, one or two went inside the restaurant, where the writers who taught the workshops were sitting, one Bulgarian and one American, we had had our first sessions earlier that day. I stepped away again, not wanting to join them, I pulled my phone out but put it back in my pocket unchecked. I can’t, R. had said, wiping his face, I don’t think I can, I don’t know what I feel, I have to figure out my life. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his computer open in front of him, he kept leaning toward the screen and back.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Wouldn’t it be prideful fo’ me to try and figure out His reasons?” The group members were silent. Apparently embarrassed, they all—even Dorothy—looked away, out the window. This is, I kept trying to tell myself, good therapy: Magnolia has faced some of her demons and now seems poised on the brink of some important therapeutic work. Yet I felt I had desecrated her. Perhaps the other members felt that way too. Yet they said nothing. A heavy silence descended. I caught each member’s gaze and silently urged each to speak. Perhaps I had read into Magnolia too much earth mother. Perhaps it was only I who had lost an icon. I struggled to put my sense of desecration into words that would be useful to the group. Nothing came. My mind was silent. Giving up, I glumly resigned myself to a tired, scuffed comment I had uttered countless times before in countless group meetings: “Magnolia has said a great deal. What feelings do her words stir up in each of you?” I hated saying that, hated its ordinariness, its technical banality. Ashamed of myself, I slumped into my chair. I knew precisely how the group members would respond and grimly awaited their formulaic comments: “I feel I really know you now, Magnolia.” “I feel a lot closer to you now.” “I see you as a real person now.” Even one of the residents, venturing out of his role as silent observer, chipped in: “Me too, Magnolia. I see you as a full person, someone I can relate to. I experience you in three dimensions now.” Our time was up. I had to summarize the session somehow and delivered the obvious, mandatory interpretation: “You know, Magnolia, this has been a tough meeting but a rich one. What I’m aware of is that we started with the issue of your not being able to complain, perhaps not feeling you had the right to complain. Your work today has been uncomfortable, but it’s the beginning of real progress. The point is that you have a lot of pain inside, and if you can learn to complain about it and deal with it directly as you’ve done today, you won’t have to express it in indirect ways—for example, through problems with your house, or your legs, perhaps even the feelings about insects on your skin.” Magnolia didn’t answer. She just looked straight at me, her eyes still brimming with tears. “Do you understand what I mean, Magnolia?” “Ah understan’, Doctah. Ah understan’ real good.” She wiped her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. “Ah’m sorry to be bawlin’ so much. Ah didn’t tell you before, maybe Ah should’ve, but tomorrah’s the day mah momma died. One yeah ago tomorrah.” “I know what that feels like, Magnolia, I lost my mother last month.” I surprised myself. Ordinarily I wouldn’t speak so personally to a patient I barely knew. I think I was trying to give her something.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Joni is quite forthcoming in disclosing her sexual past: the best experiences she’s had, the worst, and what made them so. She gives me a raft of information about the atmosphere she grew up in, her early stirrings, the age she started to masturbate, and the age when she understood what masturbation was. But when I ask her, “What does sex mean to you? What are the feelings that accompany your desire? What do you seek in sex? What do you want to feel? To express? Where do you hold back?” she looks at me, perplexed. “I have no idea,” she admits. “No one’s ever asked me that before.” All of us invest our erotic encounters with a complex set of needs and expectations. We seek love, pleasure, and validation. Some of us find in sex the perfect venue for rebellion and escape. Others reach for transcendence and ecstasy, even spiritual communion. What I got from Joni was a history of her experience. What I was looking for was a sense of the longings and conflicts she brought to these experiences. “Can I ask you about your fantasies?” I ask. Joni pales. “Oh, God. That’s so personal. What I do, or what I have done, doesn’t seem nearly as embarrassing as what goes on in my mind.” “But that’s exactly where I want us to go. I have a sense that if we talk about your fantasies we may be able to get to the heart of what stands between you and Ray.” Over time, and with much coaxing, Joni divulges a fantastic collection of intemperate, luscious, and infinitely detailed erotic tableaux, which she’s been constructing since early adolescence. Cowboys, pirates, kings, and concubines parade in endless configurations of carefully wielded power and highly refined surrender. Over the years the plots have changed, but the essence has not. The latest installment takes place on her “husband’s” ranch, where she is ritualistically presented to his hired hands as a sexual offering. The night they arrive, she is told to dress for dinner, where she’ll be meeting his staff. Her husband (who is, in her characterization, emphatically not Ray) chooses her clothing, an elegant, highly revealing dress and other exquisitely fitting adornments—chandelier earrings, a diamond pendant dangling between her breasts, stiletto heels. He pays attention to every detail of her appearance. After the meal, he asks her to undress for them, so they can appreciate her beauty. She complies; even though she is embarrassed and even humiliated, all this is oddly thrilling. She is completely at their mercy, and makes no attempt to escape. The men are given their own challenge—to anticipate her every desire, and to bring her to heights of sexual ecstasy she has never before known. “You want to know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid that I’m a masochist, just like my mother,” she tells me. “How are you a masochist in this story?” I inquire.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  The competition was held outside, and it started to rain while we sat declaiming in The Great Circle. We wore Indian costumes made from burlap sacks that had once held onions. When the burlap got wet it started to stink. We were not the only ones to notice. Miss Houlihan wouldn’t let us quit. She walked around behind the circle, whispering, “Reach down, reach down.” In the end we were disqualified for keeping time on a tom-tom. Horseface Greeley taught shop. At the introductory class for each group of freshmen it was his custom to drop a fifty-pound block of iron on his foot. He did this as an attention-getter and to show off his Tuff-Top shoes, which had reinforced steel uppers. He thought we should all wear Tuff-Tops. We couldn’t buy them in the stores but we could order them through him. When I was in my second year at Concrete an impetuous freshman tried to catch the block of iron as it fell toward Horseface’s foot, and got his fingers crushed. I BROUGHT HOME good grades at first. They were a fraud—I copied other kids’ homework on the bus down from Chinook and studied for tests in the hallways as I walked from class to class. After the first marking period I didn’t bother to do that much. I stopped studying altogether. Then I was given C’s instead of A’s, yet no one at home ever knew that my grades had fallen. The report cards were made out, incredibly enough, in pencil, and I owned some pencils myself. All I had to do was go to class, and sometimes even that seemed too much. I had fallen in with some notorious older boys from Concrete who took me on as a curiosity when they discovered that I’d never been drunk and still had my cherry. I was grateful for their interest. I wanted distinction, and the respectable forms of it seemed to be eluding me. If I couldn’t have it as a citizen I would have it as an outlaw. We smoked cigarettes every morning in a shallow gully behind the school, and we often stayed there when the bell rang for class, then cut downhill through a field of ferns—ferns so tall we seemed to be swimming through them—to the side road where Chuck Bolger kept his car. Chuck’s father owned a big auto parts store near Van Horn and was also the minister of a Pentecostal church. Chuck himself talked dark religion when he was drinking. He was haunted and wild, but his manner was gentle; even, at least with me, brotherly. For that reason I felt easier with him than with the others. I believed that there were at least some things he would not do. I did not have that feeling about the rest. One of them had already spent time in jail, first for stealing a chain saw and then for kidnapping a cat. He was big and stupid and peculiar.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  She collapsed onto Mr. Fox. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her firmly by the shoulders as he repeatedly thrust himself into her. She clung to him, trembling as he released himself into her. And Mrs. Wolfe forgot everything for a while, simply luxuriating in the soft afterglow of their lovemaking. But at last she perceived that Mr. Fox had fallen asleep, with her still rested atop and astride him. She silently extricated herself from his embrace, careful not to wake him. Then she quickly dressed and left the Foxes’ bedroom. Mrs. Fox was there to meet her in the dim hallway, and their eyes met and examined the other for a brief moment in silence. Mrs. Wolfe blushed as she wondered what Mrs. Fox must think after having this firsthand knowledge of her husband. But Mrs. Fox was experiencing the same embarrassment as she wondered the same thing! And both realized that they were better suited to their own husbands after all. Perhaps the reader now expects me to reiterate the sage adage that the grass isn’t greener on the other side, and that people ought to be content with what they have. But I’m not sure that would be the appropriate conclusion to draw from this particular tale, for Mrs. Fox and Mrs. Wolfe continue their occasional excursions into the other’s bedrooms to this very day. And while it is quite true that the grass was not actually greener on the other side for either one, it turns out that it was still fairly green, after all. And there really are so many shades of green anyway, aren’t there? Snow White in the WoodsOnce upon a time there lived a king and queen who had everything they wanted—except a child. On cold winter evenings they would sit contentedly near the cozy hearth, the queen with her needlepoint and the king watching her, while both discussed the day’s events. But every now and then, the queen would halt all activity to stare out the window at the falling snow, and there she would gaze, having completely forgotten her unfinished sentence or her needle suspended in midair. Her husband knew well what it was that arrested her attention on these occasions; she was envisioning their child. On one such evening, the queen accidentally pricked her finger with her sewing needle. A bright red drop of blood appeared and, as the queen stared at it, she sighed deeply and murmured, “If only I could have a daughter with lips as red as this blood, skin as white as the snow outside and hair as black as the coal that burns in the fire!” Within a year the queen’s wish came to pass, and the happy couple were blessed with a daughter who had lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow and hair as black as coal. They called her Snow White.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  But these improvements also smuggled in some unintended consequences. Without denigrating those historically significant achievements, I do believe that the emphasis on egalitarian and respectful sex—purged of any expressions of power, aggression, and transgression—is antithetical to erotic desire for men and women alike. The Bounded Space of Eroticism Elizabeth and Vito have worked hard to have an equitable marriage, but sex takes them to another place. The power differential that would be unacceptable in her emotional relationship with Vito is precisely what excites Elizabeth erotically. At first, when she discloses her sexual predilection, she is embarrassed. It doesn’t fit her image of herself as a liberated, powerful woman. “I’ve struggled to accept what turns me on. For a long time I was disturbed by my fantasies. Submission just isn’t me. It took me years to reconcile what arouses me with my political beliefs. Somewhere in the midst of marriage, kids, and career, I realized that it was time to stop hiding, to stop pretending, and most of all to stop apologizing for who I was and what I hungered for in the world. Getting older helps. I don’t feel as if I have to justify myself. Maybe that’s the meaning of sexual liberation.” A lot of women find their desire for sexual submission hard to accept. But stepping out of ourselves is exactly what eroticism allows us to do. In eros, we trample on cultural restrictions; the prohibitions we so vigorously uphold in the light are often the ones we enjoy transgressing in the dark. It’s an alternative space where we can safely experience our taboos. The erotic imagination has the force to override reason, convention, and social barriers. The more I point to the tensions in these epiphanies of pleasure, the more relieved Elizabeth seems. I continue, “Of course nothing is scarier than a true loss of control in ‘reality.’ But the point of fantasy is that it allows you to transcend the moral and psychological constraints of your everyday life.” In the liberating expression of sexuality we give in to our unruly impulses and the disavowed, lurid parts of ourselves. Mordechai Gafni, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, explains that fantasies are like mirrors. We hold them in front of us in order to see what is behind. We spot images of ourselves that are otherwise inaccessible. If commitment requires a trade-off of freedom for security, then eroticism is the gateway back to freedom. In the broad expansiveness of our imagination we uncover the freedom that allows us to tolerate the confines of reality.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  At the most basic level, our reluctance stems from simple embarrassment. Most of us were taught at a very young age to keep our thoughts to ourselves and our hands off our bodies. Some of us were handed down a stricter message that turned our innocent curiosity into lasting shame. Schooled in silence, the inheritors of an incontrovertible distrust of sex, it is no wonder we’re filled with discomfort at the prospect of conveying our innermost thoughts. By opening ourselves to another, we risk being laughed at and judged. My patient Zoya summed it up well: “The way I grew up, there was no liking sex, let alone talking about it. People who have sex because they like it are all sluts and perverts who go blind and grow hair on their palms. You bet I kept my mouth shut.” If we’re not talking, no one else is, either. Many of us experience our sexual fantasies in isolation (despite the public ubiquitousness of sex). Since we don’t know what others are thinking and doing, we have nothing to compare ourselves with, no way to gauge whether or not we’re normal. We’re afraid of being different and therefore deviant. This would be less of an issue if our erotic imagination were better behaved, more in line with our public persona. In our internal erotic geography, we all have places that are dear to us. Chances are that at least some of them are places we must sneak into, eluding the watchdog of our conscience. The man who relishes making tender love to his wife has no need for concealment—ditto the woman who fantasizes about a dozen roses from her lover strewn over her bed. Nothing about their romantic aspirations is cause for discomfort or guilt. We should all be so lucky. An imagination peopled with little ladies and gentlemen, so considerate and polite, would easily slip by our internal board of ethics. But the erotic mind is rarely so docile.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Though there were many empty seats, she plunked herself down next to one of the neighborhood toughs, a boy a year older than I. “That seat’s saved, lady,” he growled. “Yeah, yeah! Saved!” my mother replied contemptuously as she made herself comfortable. “He’s saving seats, the big shot!” she announced to everyone within earshot. I tried to vanish into the maroon velvet seat cushion. Later, in the darkened theater, I summoned courage, turned my head slowly. There he was, now sitting a few rows back next to his friend. No mistake, they were glaring and pointing at me. One of them shook his fist, mouthed, “Later!” Momma ruined the Sylvan Theater for me. It was now enemy territory. Off limits, at least in daylight. If I wanted to keep up with the Saturday serial —Buck Rogers, Batman, The Green Hornet, The Phantom—I had to arrive after the show started, take my seat in the darkness, at the very rear of the theater, as close to an escape door as possible, and depart just before the lights went on again. In my neighborhood nothing took precedence over avoiding the major calamity of being beaten up. To be punched—not hard to imagine: a bop on the chin, and that’s it. Or slugged, slapped, kicked, cut—same thing. But beaten up—ohmygod. Where does it end? What’s left of you? You’re out of the game, forever pinned with the “got beat up” label. And waving to Momma? Why would I wave now when, year after year, I lived with her on terms of unbroken enmity? She was vain, controlling, intrusive, suspicious, spiteful, highly opinionated, and abysmally ignorant (but intelligent—even I could see that). Never, not once, do I remember sharing a warm moment with her. Never once did I take pride in her or think, I’m so glad she’s my momma. She had a poisonous tongue and a spiteful word about everyone—except my father and sister. I loved my Aunt Hannah, my father’s sister: her sweetness, her unceasing warmth, her grilled hot dogs wrapped in crisp bologna slices, her incomparable strudel (its recipe forever lost to me, as her son will not send it to me—but that’s another story). Most of all I loved Hannah on Sundays. On that day her delicatessen near the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard was closed, and she put free games on the pinball machine and let me play for hours. She never objected to my putting small wads of paper under the front legs of the machine to slow the pinballs’ descent so I could run up higher scores.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Never again will I doubt the power of unconscious empathy. Perhaps it was this type of experience that prompted Freud to take seriously the idea of telepathic communication. “Where are your thoughts going, Myrna?” he finally said. “So much to say. Not sure where to start. Here’s a dream I had last night.” She held up a spiral tablet. “See, I wrote it down—that’s a first.” “You are taking our work more seriously.” “Gotta get my one-fifty’s worth. Oops!” She covered her mouth with her hands. “Didn’t mean that—sorry—please press delete key.” “Delete key pressed. You caught yourself—that’s great. Perhaps you were flustered by my paying you a compliment.” Myrna nodded but hurried on and read her dream from her notepad: I go to have my nose reconstructed. They remove the bandages. My nose is okay, but the skin has puckered or pulled up and my mouth is locked open and is a huge gaping hole taking half my face. My tonsils are visible—huge, swollen, inflamed. Crimson. Then a doctor with a nimbus comes by. I am suddenly able to close my mouth. He asks me questions, but I won’t answer. I don’t want to open my mouth and show him the big gaping hole. “Nimbus?” Ernest asked when she stopped . “You know, uh—radiance, holy light, halo.” “Oh, right. Yes, nimbus. So, Myrna, what are your thoughts about the dream?” “I think I know what you’ll say about it.” “Stay with your experience. Try to free-associate. What comes to you immediately as you think about the dream?” “The big hole in my face.” “What comes to mind as you think of it?” “Cavernous, abyssal, abysmal, inky black. More?” “Keep going.” “Gigantic, vast, stupendous, monstrous, Tartarean.” “Tartarean?” “You know, hell—or the abyss below Hades where the Titans were confined.” “Oh, right. Interesting word. Hmm—but back to the dream. You’re saying there’s something you don’t want doctors to see, and I guess I’m the doctor?” “Hard to quarrel with that. Don’t want you to see the big gaping hole, that emptiness.” “And if you open your mouth I’ll see it. So you guard yourself, guard your words. You still see the dream, Myrna? Still vivid?” She nodded. “Keep looking at it—what part of it draws your attention now?” “The tonsils—lot of energy there.” “Look at them. What do you see? What comes to mind?” “They’re hot, scalding.” “Keep going.” “Bursting, turgid, livid, distended, tumescent, turgescent—” “‘Tumescent, turgescent’? And that other one—‘Tartarean.’ These words, Myrna?” “I’ve been browsing in a thesaurus this week.” “Hmm, I’d like to hear more about that, but right now let’s stay with the dream. These tonsils; they’re visible if you open your mouth. Just like the emptiness. And they’re about to burst. What’ll come out?” “Pus, ugliness, something odious, hideous, loathsome, disgusting, execrable, abhorrent, rancid—” “More thesaurus browsing?”

• From Story of O (1954)

  This remark was occasioned by O, who, without stopping to think, had sat down somewhat hastily in her presence, and obliquely in front of her, on the arm of a big leather easy chair, and in so doing had lifted her skirt. The tall girl had glimpsed a flash of naked thigh above the rolled stocking, which covered the knee but stopped just above it. O had seen her smile, so strangely that she wondered what the girl had been thinking at the time, or perhaps what she had understood. She adjusted her stockings, one at a time, pulling them up to tighten them, for it was not as easy to keep them tight this way as it was when the stockings ended at mid-thigh and were fastened to a garter belt, and answered Jacqueline, as though to justify herself: “It’s practical.” “Practical for what?” Jacqueline wanted to know. “I dislike garter belts,” O replied. But Jacqueline was not listening to her and was looking at the iron ring.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  We talk about being swept away. “I couldn’t resist...I felt such a rush through my veins...It was bigger than both of us...I was completely taken over.” This infatuation with the big bang theory of sex suggests our impatience with seduction and playful eroticism, which take up too much time, require too much effort, and—most important—demand full consciousness of what we are doing. For many of us, premeditated sex is suspicious. It threatens our belief that sex is subject only to the machinations of magic and chemistry. The idea that sex must be spontaneous keeps us one step removed from having to will sex, to own our desire, and to express it with intent. As long as sex is something that just happens, you don’t have to claim it. It’s ironic that in such a willful society, willfully conjuring up sex seems obvious and crass. It embarrasses us, as if we’ve been caught doing something inappropriate. When my patients wax nostalgic about the early days of rapid ignition sex, I remind them that even in the beginning, spontaneity was a myth. Whatever used to happen “in the moment” was often the result of hours, if not days, of preparation. What outfit, what conversation, which restaurant, which music? All that planning—that highly detailed, imaginative production—was part of the buildup and part of the denouement. For this reason, I urge my patients not to be spontaneous about sex. Spontaneity is a fabulous idea, but in an ongoing relationship whatever is going to “just happen” already has. Now they have to make it happen. Committed sex is intentional sex. “I couldn’t resist” has to become “I don’t want to resist.” “We just fell into each other’s arms” has to become “Let me take you in my arms.” “We just click” has to become “Can we click tonight?” My aim is to help patients become comfortable with sexuality as a consciously acknowledged and enthusiastically welcomed part of their lives—something that demands full engagement. The idea of planning is a hurdle many couples need to cross. They associate planning with scheduling, scheduling with work, and work with obligation. Often, therapy is a process of dismantling these beliefs. Bringing Intentionality to Sex Dominick and Raoul complain about their lackluster sex life. In the early days of their romance, when Raoul still lived in Miami, distance precluded routine. Their weekends were much anticipated and never dull. But now, living together, they spend their downtime doing housework and running errands. I can’t help noticing the discrepancy between the attention they devote to these chores and the lack of attention they bring to their sex life—as if sex operates according to a different principle. “The laundry won’t just do itself, you know,” Dominick says defensively. “And sex will?” I ask. Dominick pretends not to understand what I mean by planned sex. “You want me to put it in my BlackBerry? Thursday night, ten o’clock?