Excitement

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.

Page 13 of 182 · 20 per page

• From Educated (2018)

  But by the time I heard it, I no longer needed to hear it. The fever of self-doubt had broken long ago. That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it as much as I trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people’s. But that was years away. [image "Chapter 36 Four Long Arms Whirling" file=Image00038.jpg] It was a sunny September afternoon when I heaved my suitcase through Harvard Yard. The colonial architecture felt foreign but also crisp and unimposing compared to the Gothic pinnacles of Cambridge. Widener library was the largest I had ever seen, and for a few minutes I forgot the past year and stared up at it, wonderstruck. My room was in the graduate dorms near the law school. It was small and cavelike—dark, moist, frigid, with ashen walls and cold tiles the color of lead. I spent as little time in it as possible. The university seemed to offer a new beginning, and I intended to take it. I enrolled in every course I could squeeze into my schedule, from German idealism to the history of secularism to ethics and law. I joined a weekly study group to practice French, and another to learn knitting. The graduate school offered a free course on charcoal sketching. I had never drawn in my life but I signed up for that, too. I began to read—Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. I lost myself in the world they had lived in, the problems they had tried to solve. I became obsessed with their ideas about the family—with how a person ought to weigh their special obligations to kin against their obligations to society as a whole. Then I began to write, weaving the strands I’d found in Hume’s Principles of Morals with filaments from Mill’s The Subjection of Women . It was good work, I knew it even as I wrote it, and when I’d finished I set it aside. It was the first chapter of my PhD. I returned from my sketching class one Saturday morning to find an email from my mother. We’re coming to Harvard, she said. I read that line at least three times, certain she was joking. My father did not travel—I’d never known him to go anywhere except Arizona to visit his mother—so the idea that he would fly across the country to see a daughter he believed taken by the devil seemed ludicrous. Then I understood: he was coming to save me. Mother said they had already booked their flights and would be staying in my dorm room. “Do you want a hotel?” I asked. They didn’t. —A FEW DAYS LATER, I signed in to an old chat program I hadn’t used in years. There was a cheerful jingle and a name turned from gray to green. Charles is online, it said. I’m not sure who started the chat, or who suggested moving the conversation to the phone.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Where normal rules didn’t apply? After an hour of this baffling tutorial, I shook hands with the ex-GIs and said my good-byes. Feeling suddenly that I couldn’t wait, that I needed to strike quickly, while their words were fresh in my mind, I raced back to my hotel, threw everything into my little suitcase and backpack, and phoned Onitsuka to make an appointment. Later that afternoon I boarded a train south. JAPAN WAS RENOWNED for its impeccable order and extreme cleanliness. Japanese literature, philosophy, clothing, domestic life, all were marvelously pure and spare. Minimalist. Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing— the immortal Japanese poets wrote lines that seemed polished and polished until they gleamed like the blade of a samurai’s sword, or the stones of a mountain brook. Spotless. So why, I wondered, is this train to Kobe so filthy? The floors were strewn with newspapers and cigarette butts. The seats were covered with orange rinds and discarded newspapers. Worse, every car was packed. There was barely room to stand. I found a strap by a window and hung there for seven hours as the train rocked and inched past remote villages, past farms no bigger than the average Portland backyard. The trip was long, but neither my legs nor my patience gave out. I was too busy going over and over my tutorial with the ex-GIs. When I arrived I took a small room in a cheap ryokan. My appointment at Onitsuka was early the next morning, so I lay down immediately on the tatami mat. But I was too excited to sleep. I rolled around on the mat most of the night, and at dawn I rose wearily and stared at my gaunt, bleary reflection in the mirror. After shaving, I put on my green Brooks Brothers suit and gave myself a pep talk. You are capable. You are confident. You can do this. You can DO this. Then I went to the wrong place. I presented myself at the Onitsuka showroom, when in fact I was expected at the Onitsuka factory— across town. I hailed a taxi and raced there, frantic, arriving half an hour late. Unfazed, a group of four executives met me in the lobby. They bowed. I bowed. One stepped forward. He said his name was Ken Miyazaki, and he wished to give me a tour. The first shoe factory I’d ever seen. I found everything about it interesting. Even musical. Each time a shoe was molded, the metal last would fall to the floor with a silvery tinkle, a melodic CLING- clong . Every few seconds, CLING- clong, CLING -clong , a cobbler’s concerto. The executives seemed to enjoy it, too. They smiled at me and each other. We passed through the accounting department. Everyone in the room, men and women, leaped from their chairs, and in unison bowed, a gesture of kei , respect for the American tycoon.

• From Educated (2018)

  It was too late to confide in Nick, to take him with me wherever I was going. So I said goodbye. [image "Chapter 27 If I Were a Woman" file=Image00029.jpg] I’d come to BYU to study music, so that one day I could direct a church choir. But that semester—the fall of my junior year—I didn’t enroll in a single music course. I couldn’t have explained why I dropped advanced music theory in favor of geography and comparative politics, or gave up sight-singing to take History of the Jews. But when I’d seen those courses in the catalog, and read their titles aloud, I had felt something infinite, and I wanted a taste of that infinity. For four months I attended lectures on geography and history and politics. I learned about Margaret Thatcher and the Thirty-Eighth Parallel and the Cultural Revolution; I learned about parliamentary politics and electoral systems around the world. I learned about the Jewish diaspora and the strange history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . By the end of the semester the world felt big, and it was hard to imagine returning to the mountain, to a kitchen, or even to a piano in the room next to the kitchen. This caused a kind of crisis in me. My love of music, and my desire to study it, had been compatible with my idea of what a woman is. My love of history and politics and world affairs was not. And yet they called to me. A few days before finals, I sat for an hour with my friend Josh in an empty classroom. He was reviewing his applications for law school. I was choosing my courses for the next semester. “If you were a woman,” I asked, “would you still study law?” Josh didn’t look up. “If I were a woman,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to study it.” “But you’ve talked about nothing except law school for as long as I’ve known you,” I said. “It’s your dream, isn’t it?” “It is,” he admitted. “But it wouldn’t be if I were a woman. Women are made differently. They don’t have this ambition. Their ambition is for children.” He smiled at me as if I knew what he was talking about. And I did. I smiled, and for a few seconds we were in agreement. Then: “But what if you were a woman, and somehow you felt exactly as you do now?” Josh’s eyes fixed on the wall for a moment. He was really thinking about it. Then he said, “I’d know something was wrong with me.” I’d been wondering whether something was wrong with me since the beginning of the semester, when I’d attended my first lecture on world affairs. I’d been wondering how I could be a woman and yet be drawn to unwomanly things. I knew someone must have the answer so I decided to ask one of my professors.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I spent the rest of the afternoon describing the shoes I wanted. Tennis, basketball, high top, low top, plus several more models of running shoes. The officials insisted they would have no trouble making any of these designs. Fine, I said, but before placing an order I’ll need to see samples. The factory officials assured me that they could blast out samples and ship them within days to Nissho’s offices in Tokyo. We bowed to each other. I went back to Tokyo and waited. Days and days of crisp fall weather. I walked around the city, drank Sapporo and sake, ate yakitori, and dreamed of shoes. I revisited the Meiji gardens, and sat beneath the ginkgos beside the torii gate. Portal to the sacred. On Sunday I got a notice at my hotel. The shoes had arrived. I went down to the offices of Nissho, but they were closed. They had trusted me enough to give me a pass, however, so I let myself in, and sat in a big room, amid rows and rows of empty desks, inspecting the samples. I held them to the light, turned them this way and that. I ran my fingers along the soles, along the check or wing or whatever our new side stripe would be called. They were not perfect. The logo on this shoe wasn’t quite straight, the midsole on that shoe was a bit too thin. There should be more lift on this other one. I made notes for the factory officials. But minor imperfections aside, they were very good. At last the only thing to do was think up names for the different models. I was panicked. I’d done such a poor job thinking up a name for my new brand— Dimension Six? Everyone at Blue Ribbon still mocked me. I’d only gone with Nike because I was out of time, and because I’d trusted Johnson’s savant-like nature. Now I was on my own, in an empty office building in downtown Tokyo. I’d have to trust myself. I held up the tennis shoe. I decided to call it… the Wimbledon. Well. That was easy. I held up another tennis shoe. I decided to call it… the Forest Hill. After all, that was the setting for the first U.S. Open. I held up a basketball shoe. I called it the Blazer, after my hometown NBA team. I held up another basketball shoe. I named it the Bruin, because the best college basketball team of all time was John Wooden’s Bruins. Not too creative, but. Now the running shoes. Cortez, of course. And Marathon. And Obori. And Boston and Finland. I was feeling it. I was in the zone. I started dancing around the room. I heard a secret music. I held up a running shoe. I named it the Wet-Flyte. Boom, I said. To this day I don’t know where that name came from.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  It was a knockoff, dirt cheap, with a simple logo, and we manufactured it in Saco, at Hayes’s ancient factory. We priced it low, just above cost. Now customs officials would have to use this “competitor” shoe as a new reference point in deciding our import duty. That was the jab. That was just to get their attention. Then we threw the left hook. We produced a TV commercial telling the story of a little company in Oregon, fighting the big bad government. It opened on a runner doing his lonely road work, as a deep voice extolled the ideals of patriotism, liberty, the American way. And fighting tyranny. It got people pretty fired up. Then we threw the haymaker. On February 29, 1980, we filed a $25 million antitrust suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that our competitors, and assorted rubber companies, through underhanded business practices, had conspired to take us out. We sat back, waited. We knew it wouldn’t take long, and indeed it didn’t. The bureau-kraken cracked up. He threatened to go nuclear, whatever that meant. It didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. His bosses, and his bosses’ bosses, didn’t want this fight anymore. Our competitors, and their accomplices in the government, realized that they’d underestimated our will. Immediately they initiated settlement talks. DAY IN, DAY out, our lawyers would phone. From some government office, some blue-chip law firm, some conference room on the East Coast, meeting with the other side, they’d tell me the latest settlement offer being floated, and I’d reject it out of hand. One day the lawyers said we could settle the whole thing, with no fuss, no courtroom drama, for the tidy sum of $20 million. Not a chance, I said. Another day they phoned and said we could settle for $15 million. Don’t make me laugh, I said. As the number crept lower, I had several heated conversations with Hayes, and Strasser, and my father. They wanted me to settle, be done with this. “What’s your ideal number?” they’d ask. Zero, I’d say. I didn’t want to pay one penny. Even one penny would be unfair. But Jaqua, and Cousin Houser, and Chuck, who were all consulting on the case, sat me down one day and explained that the government needed something to save face. They couldn’t walk away from this fight with nothing. As negotiations ground to a halt, I met one-on-one with Chuck. He reminded me that until this fight was behind us, we couldn’t think about going public, and if we didn’t go public we continued to risk losing everything. I became petulant. I moaned about fairness. I talked about holding out. I said maybe I didn’t want to go public—ever. Yet again I expressed my fear that going public would change Nike, ruin it, by turning over control to others.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Now he looks at Skipper in the same way. “Would you like to take a swim?” he asks Skipper. And Skipper, in his early 20s then, goes swimming in the director’s pool, and the water embraces him as if he, too, were meant for all this luxury. When he comes out of the water, laughing — the director places his hand on Skipper’s shoulder and says: “I have a feeling youre my new Discovery.”) “He asked me to move in with him,” Skipper was saying now, spewing out for the fatman with the cigar the steps by which his life had led him to squint his eyes now at Harry’s bar. “How long?” the fatman shoots at him. “I moved in the next day,” Skipper said evasively. “He said I’d be real big in the flix—I heard him—he told everyone I was his Biggest Discovery.” (“Youre a Very Beautiful Boy,” the director tells Skipper. “And in this town thats All that matters”) “He took me around—showed me off,” Skipper said. He smiles, the phantom smile of the youngman who believes hes seeing materialize fully the world hes been searching. “Man—I was really Someone!” (Skipper learns how to make drinks—like the youngman who would be there when I would meet the director later. He learns, at dinner, to cue the director’s best stories: “Remember when you were filming Angels in Paradise?” he may say, and the director: “Oh, yes — it was very amusing. The star was —...”) “And what did you have to do in return?” the fatman said. “Or did you just live there?” he asked derisively. Skipper’s eyes rise slowly from the surface of the table—he erases the circles of water in one sweeping move of his palm—and focuses his eyes evenly on the fatman. “I—” he started, and then instinctively he wiped his lips as if in physical disgust at the remembered contact “Nothing!” he almost shouted. (Skipper learns, for the first time, to reciprocate in bed — to close his eyes in order to stem the revulsion — to concentrate on the doors swinging open before him, leading to that glittering world .... Those first weeks he and the director will be alone. The groups of other youngmen are no longer invited. And in the afternoons, when hes not at the studio, Skipper will dive into the water of the pool, which, warming him, will reassure him....) “How long did you stay there?” the fatman persisted. “A month—more—maybe two—” Skipper says at last “Why didnt you stay longer?” Again Skipper dodges the question. “Well—see—this director—says I got the looks—the personality—but Ive got to study—lots—to get ahead in the flix—and—see—well—I was in one of his movies—” (The director says to Skipper: “Youve got what really matters — Looks. But youll need training. Talent is important, too—there are many very beautiful boys in this town....

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And yet, she was turning its pages in fascination. A lady dipped her head to read the title from the spine, then cried: ‘But the book’s in Latin! Dickie, whatever is the point of a filthy story, if the damn thing’s written in Latin?’ Dickie now looked a little prim. ‘It is only the title that is Latin,’ she answered; ‘and, besides, it is not a filthy book, it is a very brave one. It has been written by a man, in an attempt to explain our sort so that the ordinary world will understand us.’ A lady dressed as Sappho took the cigar from her mouth, and studied Dickie in a kind of disbelief. She said: ‘This book is to be passed among the public; and your story is in it? The story of your life, as a lover of women? But Dick, have you gone mad! This man sounds like a pornographer of the most mischievous variety!’ ‘She has taken a nom-de-guerre, of course,’ said Evelyn. ‘Even so. Dickie, the folly of it!’ ‘You misunderstand,’ said Dickie. ‘This is a new thing entirely. This book will assist us. It will advertise us.’ A kind of collective shudder ran right around the drawing-room. The Sappho with the cigar shook her head. ‘I have never heard of such a thing,’ she said. ‘Well,’ answered Dickie impressively, ‘you will hear more of it, believe me.’ ‘Let us hear more of it now!’ cried Maria; and someone else called: ‘Yes, Diana, read it to us, do!’ And so more candles were brought, and placed at Diana’s shoulder. The ladies settled themselves into comfortable poses, and the reading began. I cannot remember the words of it now. I know that, as Dickie had promised, they were not at all filthy; indeed, they were rather dry. And yet, her story was lent a kind of lewdness, too, by the very dullness of the prose in which it was told. All the time Diana read, the ladies called out ribald comments. When Dickie’s history was complete, they read another, which was rather lewder. Then they read a very saucy one from the gentlemen’s section. At last the air was thicker and warmer than ever; even I, in my sulkiness, began to feel myself stirred by the doctor’s prim descriptions. The book was passed from lady to lady, while Diana lit herself another cigarette. Then one lady said, ‘You must ask Bo about that: she was seven years amongst the Hindoos’; and Diana called, ‘What? What must she ask?’ ‘We are reading the story,’ cried the woman in reply, ‘of a lady with a clitoris as big as a little boy’s prick! She claims she caught the malady from an Indian maid.

• From City of Night (1963)

  CITY OF NIGHT FROM ST CHARLES AVENUE, THE PARADE of Rex passed in front of the Mayor, who drank champagne, standing on a platform attended by a Negro in white gloves, while the King of the parade smashed his own wine glass into the street and the people screamed with joy, and someone sang, “If I ever cease to love....” The floats passed opening and closing giant mechanical eyes Insanely and the girls with chilled rosy legs twirled their nervous batons and the Air Force marched by in Military Style, playing a march and feeling much a part of Something—The Parade, in Military Style: winding through the staggering crowds threatening to storm the police-cleared street. Somewhere in the distance a shot sounded with a sharp, unreal crack! —and someone gasped: “They was fightin ovuh some beads, an he shot him”—because as the parade passes, men in masks mounted on floats throw beads to the crowds—necklaces and bracelets and one-inch elephants and miniature parasols and whistles, and the people jump up to get them as if swatting flies; and since this is Mardi Gras Day—the day before Ash Wednesday—if you havent caught a bracelet or a necklace, youre as frantic as if life had deprived you of even that mere trinket. From that room with Jeremy, I had emerged mythless to face the world of the masked pageant. Quickly reinforced by liquor—gulped drink after drink at a bar only moments after walking out of that room—and the previously dormant pills tugging at my senses with renewed fury as I watch the parade in the harsh sun (floats passing vividly beyond their bare physical reality)—I feel myself at last on the very threshold of drunkenness, beyond which, I already know, waits a pit of terror. And the bright sun directly in my eyes erupted violently, the liquor jolted me anew, the pills were like claws ripping mercilessly inside me. I shut my eyes momentarily. And when I opened them: Suddenly! The clown on the float became an angel before my exploding eyes, and it raised sun-luminous wings as if to catapult to Heaven... leaving me sadly alone. Down here. Alone. I began to follow it, reeling through the crowds blocking my path; and the angel leaned from the float toward me. And he threw me a silver star! And I jumped to catch it but someone else did too, and the cheap necklace the clown-angel had thrown spilled on the street, all pink and blue pieces of glass, my silver star. And already the disdainful angel, only vaguely visible to my shattered eyes, has been replaced by clowns on other passing floats. An angel....

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I’m an assistant at a sanitary inspector’s. You may not pull such a face; it was quite a triumph, I tell you, my getting the position at all. They think women too delicate for that sort of work.’ ‘I think I would rather be delicate,’ I said, ‘than do it.’ ‘Oh, but it’s marvellous work! It’s only now and then I have to peer into sewers, as I did today. Mostly I measure, and talk to workers, and see if they are too hot or too cold, have enough air to breathe, enough lavatories. I have a government order, and do you know what that means? It means I can demand to see an office or a workshop, and if it’s not right, I can demand that it be put right. I can have buildings closed, buildings improved ...’ She waved her hands. ‘Foremen hate me. Greedy masters from Bow to Richmond absolutely loathe the sight of me. I wouldn’t swap my work for anything!’ I smiled at the enthusiasm in her voice; she might be a sanitary inspector, but she was also, I could tell, something of an actress. Now she took another mouthful of tea. ‘So,’ she said, when she had swallowed it, ‘how long have you been a friend of Florrie’s?’ ‘Well, friend isn’t quite the word for it, really...’ ‘You don’t know her terribly well?’ ‘Not at all.’ ‘That’s a shame,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘She’s not been herself, these past few months. Not been herself at all...’ She would have gone on, I think, if there had not, at that moment, come the sound of the front door opening, and then of feet upon the parlour floor. ‘Oh hell !’ I said. I put my cup down, gazed wildly about me for a second, then ran past the girl to the pantry door. I didn’t stop to think; I didn’t say a word to her or even look at her. I simply hopped inside the little cupboard, and pulled the door shut behind me. Then I put my ear to it, and listened. ‘Is there someone out there?’ It was Florence’s voice. I heard her stepping, cautiously, into the kitchen. Then she must have seen her friend. ‘Annie, oh, it’s you! Thank goodness. For a moment I thought - what’s the matter?’ ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘Why do you look so queer? What’s going on? What has happened to the step at the front of the house? And what’s this mess on the stove?’ ‘Florrie -’ ‘What?’ ‘I think I might as well tell you; indeed, I really think I’m quite obliged to tell you...’ ‘What? You’re frightening me.’ ‘There’s a girl in your pantry.’ There was a silence then, during which I swiftly surveyed my options. They were, I found, very few; so I decided on the noblest. I took hold of the handle of the pantry door, and slowly pushed it open.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I cannot say what it was that made the crowds like Kitty and me together, more than they had liked Kitty Butler on her own. It may just have been, as Walter had foreseen, that we were novel: for though in later years we were rather freely imitated, there was certainly no other act like ours in the London halls in 1889. It may also have been - again, as Walter had predicted - that the sight of a pair of girls in gentlemen’s suits was somehow more charming, more thrilling, more indefinably saucy, than that of a single girl in trousers and topper and spats. We did, I know, go handsomely together -Kitty with her nut-brown crop, me with my head blonde and smooth and gleaming; she raised a little on her one-inch slippers, me in my flat effeminate shoes, my cleverly tailored suits that masked the slender angularity of my frame with girlish curves. Whatever it was that made the change, however, it worked, and worked extraordinarily. We became not just rather popular, as Kitty had been, but really famous. Our wages rose; we worked three halls a night - four, sometimes - and now, when our brougham was caught in traffic, our driver would yell, ‘I’ve got Kitty Butler and Nan King in here, due at the Royal, Holborn, in fifteen minutes! Clear a way there, can’t you ? - and the other drivers would shift a little to let us through, and smile and raise their hats to the windows as we passed! Now there were flowers for me, as well as for Kitty; now I received invitations to dinner, for requests and autographs, and letters... It took me weeks to understand that it was really happening, and to me; weeks to let myself believe in it, and to trust the crowd that liked me. But when at last I learned to love my new life, I loved it fiercely. The pleasures of success, I suppose, are rather easy to understand; it was my new capacity for pleasure - for pleasure in performance, display and disguise, in the wearing of handsome suits, the singing of ribald songs - that shocked and thrilled me most. I had been content till now to stand in the wings, looking on while Kitty dallied, in the lime-light, with the vast, rumbustious crowd. Now, suddenly, it was I who wooed it, me at whom it gazed in envy and delight. I could not help it: I had fallen in love with Kitty; now, becoming Kitty, I fell in love a little with myself. I admired my hair, so neat and so sleek.

• From Educated (2018)

  “Where were you?” I explained as best I could, that my parents didn’t believe in public education, that they’d kept us home. When I’d finished, he laced his fingers as if he were contemplating a difficult problem. “I think you should stretch yourself. See what happens.” “Stretch myself how?” He leaned forward suddenly, as if he’d just had an idea. “Have you heard of Cambridge?” I hadn’t. “It’s a university in England,” he said. “One of the best in the world. I organize a study abroad program there for students. It’s highly competitive and extremely demanding. You might not be accepted, but if you are, it may give you some idea of your abilities.” I walked to my apartment wondering what to make of the conversation. I’d wanted moral advice, someone to reconcile my calling as a wife and mother with the call I heard of something else. But he’d put that aside. He’d seemed to say, “First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.” I applied to the program. — EMILY WAS PREGNANT. THE pregnancy was not going well. She’d nearly miscarried in the first trimester, and now that she was approaching twenty weeks, she was beginning to have contractions. Mother, who was the midwife, had given her Saint-John’s-wort and other remedies. The contractions lessened but continued. When I arrived at Buck’s Peak for Christmas, I expected to find Emily on bed rest. She wasn’t. She was standing at the kitchen counter straining herbs, along with half a dozen other women. She rarely spoke and smiled even more rarely, just moved about the house carrying vats of cramp bark and motherwort. She was quiet to the point of invisibility, and after a few minutes, I forgot she was there. It had been six months since the explosion, and while Dad was back on his feet, it was clear he would never be the man he was. He could scarcely walk across a room without gasping for air, so damaged were his lungs. The skin on his lower face had regrown, but it was thin and waxy, as if

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  As I have said, I had thought her plan not much of a treat; but even I could not help being excited as our hansom joined the line of rocking carriages at the door of the Royal Opera, and we - Diana, Maria, Dickie and I - entered the crush of gentlemen and ladies in the lobby. I had never been here before; had never, in a year of fitful chaperoning, been part of such a rich and handsome crowd - the gents, like me, all in cloaks and silk hats and carrying glasses; the ladies in diamonds, and wearing gloves so high and slender they might all have just left off dipping their arms, to the armpit, in tubs of milk. We stood jostling in the lobby for a moment or two, Diana exchanging nods with certain ladies that she recognised, Maria holding Satin at her bosom, out of the crush of heels and trains and sweeping cloaks. Dickie said she would fetch us a tray of drinks, and went off to do so. Diana said, ‘Take our coats, Neville, will you?’ nodding to a counter where two men stood, in uniform, receiving cloaks. She turned to let me draw the coat from her, Maria did the same, and I picked my way across the lobby with them, then paused to unfasten my own cloak - thinking all the time, only, what a handsome gathering it was, and how well I looked in it! and making sure that the coats I carried weren’t falling over my wrist and obscuring the watch. The counter had a queue at it, and as I waited I looked idly at the men whose job it was to collect the cloaks from the gents, and give them tickets. One of them was slim, with a sallow face - he might have been Italian. The other man was a black man. When I reached the desk at last and he tilted his face to the garments I gave him, I saw that he was Billy-Boy, my old smoking-partner from the Brit. At first, I only stared; I think, actually, that I was considering how I might best make my escape before he saw me. But then, when he tugged at the coats and I failed to release them, he raised his eyes - and I knew that he didn’t recognise me at all, only wondered why I hesitated; and the thought made me terribly sorry. I said, ‘Bill’, and he looked harder. Then he said: ‘Sir?’ I swallowed. I said again, ‘Bill. Don’t you remember me?’ Then I leaned and lowered my voice. ‘It’s Nan,’ I said, ‘Nan King.’ His face changed. He said, ‘My God!’

• From City of Night (1963)

  Truly, you will admit, Darling Dolly Dane is cute in the dimlight and smokeshadows, with softlooking creamskin and dancing eyes and a loose sweater tonight and slacks—acting like a flirt teenage girl out to get laid. “And Buddy—” Miss Destiny finishes with the introductions. Buddy is a blond very young boy, I would say 19—at whom, as Miss Destiny and I sit at the already-crowded table, Darling Dolly Dane is glaring. Miss Destiny tells me confidentially, to explain the cool looks between Darling Dolly and Buddy, that Buddy had been living with Darling Dolly Dane until last night when she found he hocked some of her drag clothes and she locked him out and he had to sleep in his brokendown Mercury, which may not even be his.... Now a score at the bar is ostentatiously turning us on to free drinks—and cokes for Darling Dolly, who is making such a thing about her Not Drinking. On a small balcony over the head, the rock-n-roll spades are going, perched like a nest of restless blackbirds. A queen, obviously drunk, has climbed on it and has started to do an imitation strip, and Ada, who runs the bar and is a real woman—a mean, tough blonde like a movie madam—climbs after her dragging her roughly off the balcony just as the queen is unsnapping her imaginary brassiere, saying: “Ssssssssssssufferrrrrrrrrrrr....” At the table, everyone is talking, eyes constantly searching the bar. The beat of the music somehow matches the movements, the stares, the muted desperation all around; the smothered moans of the spade now blaring words from the balcony is like a composite moan, a wail emanating in unison from everyone crushed into this dirty bar.... Darling Dolly is breathlessly explaining the Severe Jolt she got when she got home and found her best drag clothes gone: “My lovely lace negligee—my studded shoes!” Buddy shakes his head and says to the table: “I needed the bread.” Darling Dolly stabs him with a look. Chuck says hes heard of a malehouse in Hollywood where he can make hundreds of dollars a day: “But I don know where it is so I cain apply.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But you can see one, and there’s no need to strike out into the forest to do so. There’s live feed of goshawk nests, now, on the internet. One click, and you’re given an up-close and personal view of the family life of this most secretive of hawks. There, in a four-inch box in low-resolution glitter, is a square of English woodland. The hissing you hear from your computer speakers is a digitised amalgam of leaves, wind and chaffinch song. You see the nest itself, a bulky concatenation of sticks pushed hard up against conifer bark and lined with sprays of green leaves. On the webcam the male goshawk appears on the nest. It’s so sudden, and he’s so brightly shiny white and silver-grey, that it’s like watching a jumping salmon. There’s something about the combination of his rapidity and the lag of the compressed image that plays tricks with your perception: you carry an impression of the bird as you watch it, and the living bird’s movements palimpsest over the impression the bird has made until he fairly glows with substance. Goshawk substance. And he bows his head and calls. Chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew. Black mouth, soft smoke in the cold April morning. And then the female arrives. She’s huge. She lands on the edge of the nest and it shakes. Her gnarly feet make the male’s look tiny. She is like an ocean liner. A Cunard goshawk. And on each leg, as she turns, you can see the leather anklets she wears. This bird was bred in captivity somewhere, in an aviary just like the one in Northern Ireland that bred mine. She was flown by a nameless falconer, was lost, and now here she is, settling on four pale eggs, being watched on computer screens as the very type of the wild. Time passed on the Scottish quay and brightness moved in from the sea. Then a man was walking towards us, holding two enormous cardboard boxes like a couple of oversized suitcases. Strangely alien suitcases that didn’t seem to obey the laws of physics, because as he walked they moved unpredictably, in concert neither with his steps nor with gravity. Whatever is in them is moving, I thought with a little thump of my heart. He set the boxes down, ran his hand through his hair. ‘I’m meeting another falconer here in a bit. He’s having the younger bird. Yours is the older. Bigger too,’ he said. ‘So.’ He ran his hand through his hair again, exposing a long talon scratch across his wrist, angry at its edges and scurfed with dried blood. ‘We’ll check the ring numbers against the Article 10s,’ he explained, pulling a sheaf of yellow paper from the rucksack and unfolding two of the official forms that accompany captive- bred rare birds throughout their lives. ‘Don’t want you going home with the wrong bird.’ We noted the numbers.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The last photograph I saw only once. I never want to see it again. But I can never stop seeing it. Blurred, taken from a low angle, far too low; an empty London street. Sodium lights, dusk, a wall tipped sideways from the vertical and running into the distance; a vanishing point of sallow, stormy sky. 12 Outlaws ‘Come on, Mabel!’ I’m kneeling on the carpet and holding out a dead day-old cockerel chick. My freezer is packed with their sad, fluffy corpses, by- products of industrial egg production. Mabel loves them. She stares longingly at the one in my glove. I hold it just out of reach and whistle. ‘You can do it!’ I say. ‘Jump!’ But she is doing everything she can to avoid jumping. It is comical. She leans. She leans further. She stretches her neck as far as it will go and opens her beak hopefully. The food is just there. She can’t reach it. She over-balances, scrambles upright. A change in tactics is required. She makes a cobra-strike grab for the meat with one great, grasping foot. Her reach is astonishing; her legs are almost as long as she is. One feathered shin flashes out, tawny as a lion’s, and her talons very nearly catch on the glove. But not quite. Now she is cross. She paces up and down. She stamps and grips her perch. Her black-feathered moustaches harden into frown-lines down her jaw, and I can feel her bristling. She snakes her head from side to side, reckoning distances. Something is changing in her. I sense it with a shiver. It is as if the room is darkening, contracting to a point. Then something happens. My hand is hit, hard, with a blow so unexpectedly powerful the shock is carried down my spine to the tips of my toes. Hitting someone’s hand with a baseball bat would have a similar effect. She is on the glove, mantling her great, barred wings over it, gripping it fiercely and tearing at the meat. Disarticulated pieces of chicken disappear fast down her throat. I am delighted. She has crossed a great psychological gulf, one far wider than the ten inches of air between her perch and the glove she’s landed upon. Not that she’s landed on it: she’s killed it. There is no mercy in that ratcheting, numbing grip. Mabel can keep up this pressure with no effort whatsoever. It is an effort for her to let go. I choose my moment. When her head is up swallowing a mouthful of chick, I tug its remains through my palm and spirit it away. She looks down, then behind her, then at the floor. Where did it go? I persuade her to step back onto her perch. Then I hold the chick out once more, and further away. Instantly I feel that terrible blow. It is a killing blow, but there is something about the force of it that reminds me that I am alive.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. Soft grass underfoot. One hand out to steady myself, we picked our way around to the final corner . And then I slowly extended my gloved fist out from the screen of brush. The hawk left the fist with the recoil of a .303 rifle. I stepped out to watch. Saw a chain of events so fast they snapped into a comic strip: frame, frame, frame . Frame one: goshawk spluttering from the fist in bars and pinions and talons. Frame two: goshawk low to the ground, grass streaking along under her. Chocolate wings, beating strongly, hump-backed. Frame three: rabbits running. Frame four: the pheasant, too, crouching and running into the wood’s safe margin. But it wasn’t safe. Split-second, ink-starred decisions in the hawk’s tactical computer . She slewed round sling-shot style, heel-bow, soaking up g-force like a sponge. Closed her wings and was gone. Sucked into the black hole of the wood, beneath a low-hanging larch branch. Everything disappeared. No rabbits, no pheasant, no hawk. Just a black hole in the wood’s edge. It had gone very quiet. There was the distant coc-coc-coc of a scared pheasant. I ran into the wood and shivered. We’d been hawking in the soft, woolly haze of a sunny autumn evening. Soft grass, meadow brown butterflies; a comfortable, easy light. Walking into the wood, the temperature dropped by five degrees, and the light by several stops. It was dark. And cold. Outside, a late summer evening in England. In here, Norway. I half-expected to feel grains of snow pattering through the needles. I stood, slightly unnerved. Looked about. Nothing. No hawk. What should I do now? I stood very still and listened. Strained to hear through the dark. Listened so hard the air became particulate: sound no longer sound, but compression waves through trillions of molecules of air. But there was no sound at all. Dead, muffled silence between larch trunks. And then, some way off to my left – a long way off – I heard a scuffle and breaking sticks and the unmistakable sound of hawk bells. I broke through brush, blindly. I thought I’d heard a squeal in the sound; maybe she had caught a rabbit. Silence again, except for my breathing hard and smashing through the branches of a fallen tree, blind and brute, to get to the spot. I saw her before I heard her. She came running out from a tangle of thornbushes capping a huge warren. Came at a run, barrel-chested, and flung herself up to my fist. Everything apart from her yellow-tinted cere and feet was black and white. Blackthorn, black needles, the hawk’s white chest, black teardrop feathers, black talons. Black nose.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When I discovered there was still such a thing as falconry things became less amorphously religious. I told my long-suffering parents that I was going to be a falconer when I grew up and set about learning as much as I could about this miraculous art. Dad and I hunted for falconry books on family days out, and one by one the great works came home with us, second-hand trophies in paper bags from bookshops long since gone: Falconry by Gilbert Blaine; Falconry by Freeman and Salvin; Falcons and Falconry by Frank Illingworth; the gloriously titled Harting’s Hints on Hawks. All the boys’ books. I read them over and over, committed great swathes of nineteenth-century prose to memory. Being in the company of these authors was like being dropped into an exclusive public school, for they were almost entirely written a long time ago by bluff, aristocratic sportsmen who dressed in tweed, shot Big Game in Africa, and had Strong Opinions. What I was doing wasn’t just educating myself in the nuts and bolts of hawk-training: I was unconsciously soaking up the assumptions of an imperial elite. I lived in a world where English peregrines always outflew foreign hawks, whose landscapes were grouse moors and manor houses, where women didn’t exist. These men were kindred spirits. I felt I was one of them, one of the elect.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It is raining quite hard now, and the hawk’s flat head is beaded with tiny gems of water that glow in the light from the sodium lamps. She balances on the balls of her feet, as she does when she’s calm. Her pupils are wide and catlike in the dark. What the hell, I think. She’s jumped to the fist inside the house. I wonder if she’ll do it out here. Right next to us is a wooden barrier enclosing a young lime sapling. I plonk her down on the top of the post, and she jumps, blam, just like that, leash-length from the post to my fist for food. With the wind blowing the wrong way, with rain in her eyes, with joggers thundering past us, she jumps three times, and then rouses, sending raindrops in a spray of metallic orange around us both. Brilliant. 13 Alice, falling The light is laid evenly on the grass, the cows are back in the fields after milking, and the far sky towards Buckingham builds towards dusk in dinted pewter clouds. Gos is perched twenty yards away on the railings of the well, and White is pleased with himself. He has solved the great and simple mystery of falconry: he knows now that the hawk will fly to him if it is hungry. It will misbehave if it is not. And now he has fashioned a creance from a long length of tarred twine – doubled in two to make it stronger, because it has a tendency to snap – and he has tied it to Gos’s swivel. And now he is here, and the hawk is over there, and he is whistling the tune of the hymn that calls the hawk to him. The Lord is My Shepherd. I shall not want. He . . . He rubs his eyes. They have begun to ache. He has been whistling the tune for ten minutes now, the old Scottish melody to Psalm 23, and it is hard to keep to the right notes when your lips are dry and the mosquitoes are starting to bite. The Lord is My Shepherd; I shall not want. He does want. He wants very much. He waves the glove again. The jointed rabbit leg waggles. Come on, Gos! Come on! He casts the hymn’s sad notes once more into the evening air. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Is the hawk looking at him? Surely he is. Why does he not come? He must be patient. The hawk will come.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Of course, there was nothing except my work-stained moleskins; and these - while they might have caused something of a sensation at the Cavendish Club - I thought must be rather too bold for an East End audience, so I cast them regretfully aside in favour of a skirt, and a gentleman’s shirt and collar, and a tie. The shirt and collar I cleaned and starched myself, and rinsed in washing-blue to make them shine; the neck-tie was of silk - a very fine silk, with only a slight imperfection to the weave, which Ralph had brought me from his workshop, and which I had had made up at a Jewish tailor’s. The silk was of blue, and showed off my eyes. I didn’t change, of course, until after we had cleared the supper things; and when I did - banishing poor Ralph and Cyril to the kitchen while I washed and dressed before the parlour fire - it was with a kind of anxious thrill, an almost queasy gaiety. For all that it was skirts and stays and petticoats that I pulled on, I felt as I thought a young man must feel, when dressing for his sweetheart; and all the time I buttoned my costume, and fumbled blindly with my collar-stud and necktie, there came a creaking of the boards above my head, and a swishing of material, until at last I could hardly believe that it was not my sweetheart up there, dressing for me. When she pushed at the parlour door and stepped into the room at last, I stood blinking at her for a moment, quite at a loss. She had changed out of her work-dress into a shirt-waist, and a waistcoat, and a skirt. The skirt was of some heavy winter stuff, but damson-coloured, and very warm upon the eye. The waistcoat was a lighter shade, the shirt-waist almost red; at her throat was pinned a brooch: a few chips of garnet, in a golden surround. It was the first time in a year that I had seen her out of her sober suits of black and brown, and she seemed quite transformed. The reds and damsons brought out the blush of her lip, the gold shine of her curling hair, the whiteness of her throat and hands, the pinkness and the pale half-moons at her thumb-nails. ‘You look,’ I said awkwardly, ‘very handsome.’ She flushed. ‘I have grown too stout,’ she said, ‘for all my newer clothes...’ Then she gazed at my own gear. ‘You look very smart. How well that neck-tie becomes you - doesn’t it? Except, you have tied it crooked. Here.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was scented with burning roses, and with the spice from the wine, Smelling it, with Zena warm against my shoulder, I began suddenly to feel drunker than I had all night. Perhaps it was only that my head was reeling, from the force. of Diana’s blow. I swallowed. Zena put a handkerchief to her nose, and grew a little stiller. There came, from the floors below, the sound of running feet, a furious thundering upon the piano, and a scream of laughter. ‘Just listen to them!’ I said, growing bitter again. ‘Partying like anything! They have forgotten all about us, sitting miserable up here ...’ ‘Oh, I hope they have!’ ‘Of course they have. We might be doing anything, it wouldn’ t matter to them! Why, we might be having a party of our own!’ She blew her nose, then giggled. My head gave a sort of tilt. I said: ‘Zena! Why shouldn’t we have a party, just the two of us! How many bottles of champagne are there left, in the kitchen?’ ‘There are loads of ’em.’ ‘Well, then. Just you run down and fetch us one.’ She bit her lip. ‘I don’t know ...’ ‘Go on, you shan’t be seen. They are all in the drawing-room, and you can go by the back stairs. And if anyone does see you, and asks, you can say you are fetching it for me. Which is true.’ ‘Well...’ ‘Go on! Take your candle!’ I rose, then took hold of her hands and pulled her to her feet; and she - infected at last by my new recklessness - gave another giggle, put her fingers to her lips, then tip-toed from the room. While she was gone I lit a lamp, but kept it turned very low. She had left her cap upon the bed: I picked it up and set it on my own head, and when she returned five minutes later and saw me wearing it she laughed out loud. She carried a dewy bottle and a glass. ‘Did you see any ladies?’ I asked her. ‘I saw a couple, but they never saw me. They were at the scullery door and - oh! they was kissing the guts out of each other!’ I imagined her standing in the shadows, watching them. I went to her and took the bottle, then peeled away the lead wrapper from its neck. ‘You’ve shaken it up,’ I said. ‘It’ll go off with a real bang!’ She put her hands over her ears, and shut her eyes. I felt the cork squirm in the glass for a second; then it leapt from my fingers, and I gave a yell: ‘Quick! Quick! Bring a glass!’