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.

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

  She hadn’t found herself involved in many negotiations, and she didn’t know that the basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole. So she got flummoxed and instantly folded. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” PENNY AND I flew to Sacramento. We were both excited to be on the road, far from parents and curfews, though I suspected Penny might be more excited about getting to use her high school graduation gift—a matching set of pink luggage. Whatever the reason, nothing could diminish her good mood. It was blazing hot that weekend, more than one hundred degrees, but Penny never once complained, not even about the metal seats in the bleachers, which turned to griddles. She didn’t get bored when I explained the nuances of track, the loneliness and craftsmanship of the runner. She was interested. She got it, all of it, right away, as she got everything. I brought her down to the infield grass, introduced her to the runners I knew, and to Bowerman, who complimented her with great courtliness, saying how pretty she was, asking in complete earnestness what she was doing with a bum like me. We stood with my former coach and watched the day’s last races. That night we stayed at a hotel on the edge of town, in a suite painted and decorated in an unsettling shade of brown. The color of burned toast, we agreed. Sunday morning we spent in the pool, hiding from the sun, sharing the shade beneath the diving board. At some point I raised the subject of our future. I was leaving the next day for a long and vital trip to Japan, to cement my relationship with Onitsuka, I hoped. When I returned, later that summer, we couldn’t keep “dating,” I told her. Portland State frowned on teacher-student relationships. We’d have to do something to formalize our relationship, to set it above reproach. Meaning, marriage. “Can you handle arranging a wedding by yourself while I’m gone?” I said. “Yes,” she said. There was very little discussion, or suspense, or emotion. There was no negotiation. It all felt like a foregone conclusion. We went inside the burned-toast suite and phoned Penny’s house. Dot answered, first ring. I gave her the news, and after a long, strangling pause she said: “You son of a bitch.” Click. Moments later she phoned back. She said she’d reacted impulsively because she’d been planning to spend the summer having fun with Penny, and she’d felt disappointed. Now she said it would be almost as much fun to spend the summer planning Penny’s wedding. We phoned my parents next. They sounded pleased, but my sister Jeanne had just gotten married and they were a bit weddinged out. We hung up, looked at each other, looked at the brown wallpaper, and the brown rug, and both sighed. So this is life. I kept saying to myself, over and over, I’m engaged, I’m engaged.

• 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 City of Night (1963)

  But the queens have already come out anxiously like prisoners fleeing a jail. Through the crowds, I spot Miss Ange—self-conscious about her short, short hair, which undauntedly she has arranged in minuscule ringlets over her forehead. In a green-flowered hoop skirt and a wide yellow straw hat—her dress so wide that she shrieks in annoyance when someone threatens to crush it—which keeps her screaming over and over—today she is Scarlett O’Hara.... Desdemona and Drusilla Duncan, standing under the yellowish umbrella of a streetlight, For The Whole World To See, are in twin outfits of the fast, vampish 20s—their hair, too, in helpless ringlets—and they carry cigarette holders pointed carefully into the air in order to avoid poking some sympathetic someone.... Shimmying recklessly on the street, legs thrashing, looking like an alarm clock jangling insistently out of control, Whorina is a Woman of the Night—in a studded shiny red dress: a vision, at last, of her stifled impossible dreams from the graveyard hours when she knows, inside, that she was meant to be, every bit, a Woman.... And Sandy-Vee, in mesh stockings, bustle like a pinned rose—a chorus girl—has left her bar to display herself as A Celebrity. A handsome youngman in tuxedo and cummerbund escorts her Proudly.... Another queen, Cinderella, shakes a long metallic wand—gold streamers attached—at the tourists, as if to banish them from her sight forever. Now, during Mardi Gras, when the barcrowds flow from one place to another—a mob thirsty for the momentary liquid gayety of the carnival—from the blue-shifting, pink lights of the burlesque halls to the offbeat, side-street bars—there will be, too, in overwhelming abundance, the curious and the largely unaware, both men and women. For this one day, those two worlds will collide—the night-world and the touristworld—on the twisting, grinding, clamoring stage of Carnival, New Orleans. Even in the melee of queenfaces, painted eyes, bodies in drag—even then, she stood out from all the others at The Rocking Times: a queen perched on a stool like a startled white owl: a man with bleached, burned-out hair and a painted face dominated to the point of absolute impossibility by the largest, widest, darkest eyes I have ever seen, painted into two enormous tadpoles, slanting to the very edges of her temples. The frizzled quality of the bleached curled hair and the devouring wideness of the eyes gave her the appearance of a demented Cassandra whose futile, unattended knowledge makes her burn, inside, with a fire that consumes only herself, while others refuse to heed the prophecy shining from her face.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The waiters had been told it was my birthday, and fussed around me, offering wine. ‘How old is the young gentleman today?’ they asked Diana; and the way they asked it showed they thought me younger than I was. They might, I suppose, have taken Diana for my mother; for various reasons, the idea was not a nice one. Once, though, I had stopped at a shoe-black while Diana and her friends stood near to watch it, and the man - catching sight of Dickie and reading tommishness, as many regular people do, as a kind of family likeness - asked me if she, Dickie, were not my Auntie, taking me out for the day; and it had been worth being mistaken for a schoolboy, for the sake of her expression. She once or twice tried to compete with me, on the question of suits. The night of my birthday, for example, she wore a shirt with cuff-links and, above her skirt, a short gent’s cloak. At her throat, however, she had a jabot - I should never have worn anything so effeminate. She did not know it - she would have been horrified to know it! - but she looked like nothing so much as a weary old mary-anne - one of the kind you see sometimes holding court, with younger boys, on Piccadilly: they have rented so long they’re known as queens. Our supper was a very fine one, and when it was over Diana sent a waiter for a cab. 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.

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

  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. I’d read that “tycoon” came from taikun, Japanese for “warlord.” I didn’t know how to acknowledge their kei. To bow or not bow, that is always the question in Japan. I gave a weak smile and a half bow, and kept moving. The executives told me that they churned out fifteen thousand pairs of shoes each month. “Impressive,” I said, not knowing if that was a lot or a little. They led me into a conference room and pointed me to the chair at the head of a long round table. “Mr. Knight,” someone said, “here.” Seat of honor. More kei. They arranged themselves around the table and straightened their ties and gazed at me. The moment of truth had arrived.

• From City of Night (1963)

  In the afternoons, Sundays especially, a parade of hunters prowled that area—or they would sit or lie on the grass waiting for that day’s contact. Even in the brilliant white blaze of newyork sun, it was possible to make it, right there, in the tree-secluded areas. At night they sat along the benches, in the fringes of the park. Or they strolled with their leashed dogs along the walks.... The more courageous ones penetrated the park, around the lake, near a little hill: hoods, hobos, hustlers, homosexuals. Hunting. Young teenage gangs lurk threatening among the trees. Occasionally the cops come by, almost timidly, in pairs, flashing their lights; and the rustling of bushes precedes the quick scurrying of feet along the paths. Unexpectedly at night you may come upon scenes of crushed intimacy along the dark twisting lanes. In the eery mottled light of a distant lamp, a shadow lies on his stomach on the grasspatched ground, another straddles him: ignoring the danger of detection in the last moments of exiled excitement.... In Central Park—as a rainstorm approached (the dark clouds crashing in the black sky which seemed to be lowering, ripped occasionally by the lightning)—once, one night in that park, aware of an unbearable exploding excitement within me mixed with unexplainable sudden panic, I stood against a tree and in frantic succession—and without even coming—I let seven night figures go down on me. And when, finally, the rain came pouring, I walked in it, soaked, as if the water would wash away whatever had caused the desperate night-experience . THE PROFESSOR: The Flight of the Angels 1 THE MAN IN BED—STARING AT me appraisingly—was enormous. In one hand he held a pastel-blue cigarette—poised, daintily between two puffed fingers. He brings the cigarette studiedly to his mouth and blows out a shapeless cloud of uninhaled smoke. He looks crazily like a pink-faced genie emerging from the smoke. The other hand held a tape-measure, which is partly wrapped about his sagging fat neck.... Hes somewhere in his 60s. His head is shaved completely. Huge dark eyes bulge behind thick glasses, like the crazy eyes painted on the glasses children wear on Halloween. Beside me, in this well-furnished apartment, stands a young malenurse, who has brought me here from Times Square. He is perhaps 28, coldly blond, with a very pale face—a premature Oldness, a bitter knowingness. He acts like a haughty movie butler who feels superior to the guests. Even on the street when he approached me, he had looked at me with unconcealed contempt; lighting a cigarette as we walked here, not offering me one. Scattered about the floor are manuscripts, books, magazines. The room is cluttered with statues, unhung paintings, vases with withered flowers. There was a large ugly German beer mug on a mantle. Now the malenurse is looking at the old man—waiting, I knew, for some sign of approbation or displeasure from him.

• 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)

  In the warm palmtreed Los Angeles nights, restlessly they will feel the secret excitement. In Harry’s, Wally’s. Along the Main-Street-blocks-long arcade. In Pershing Square. Along winking Hollywood Boulevard. At Hooper’s in the stale greasy light.... On Market Street in dewy San Francisco, from Seventh Street to the magazine store at Powell, as they stand perhaps in the drizzle, fugitive spirits will respond to that now-faint message soon to become drummingly insistent.... In Chicago, along Clark Street. In the Square—as they huddle indolently in the frozen night for a car to stop and someone to ask if you want a Ride—that call will whisper to the outcasts like wind from the deserted concrete lake. Along Division Street. In the bars.... Sweeping through the other nightcities, the beckoning becomes louder. And the summoning words are these: Mardi Gras! By early January, say (depending on when Lent will begin that year, and therefore Mardi Gras), lean young faces will dot the white-winter highways, fingers will point in the direction of Away, New Orleans. In the Greyhound buses headed South, youngmen with maybe guitars and patched bags if any will eye the young girls reading True Confessions .... Quilted jalopies will tackle the highways of many-masked America. The exodus has begun. Slightly later, the second wave of fugitives will have felt the stirring of this call to brief Freedom. New Orleans is now the Pied Piper playing a multikeyed tune to varikeyed ears. In those same darkcities equally restless queens, wringing from their exiled lives each drop of rebellion, will feel the strange excitement (“My dear, the Most Fabulous Drags in the world go there,” you will hear them say, “and the simply butchest numbers—and all kinds of rich daddies so tired of their frigid wives theyll pay High for making it with a Queen!”) And with much more care and planning than that of the initial wave of masculine vagrants, the queens (prematurely sentenced to a purgatory of half-male, half-female) will begin their fe-male plans, selecting their women’s clothes Lovingly. The golden image of at last being Women—for that one glorious day!—of not possibly hassling getting busted (as they were in New York, Los Angeles, Points In Between)—is a fulfilled daydream in which The Newsreel Cameras—The Eyes and Ears of The World—will focus on them. Hips siren curved, wrists lily-delicately broken, they will stare in defiant demureness from theater screens and home screens all over the country; and those painted malefaces will challenge—and, Maybe, for an instant, be acknowledged by—the despising, arrogant, apathetic world that produced them and exiled them. Amid the swishing of taffeta and rayon drag, the queens will now join the Pageant. Still later, the third and more comfortable wave of this exodus (the tired richmen, the tired richwomen, the not-so-rich but tired men and the not-so-rich but equally tired women—and the other Young men and women—equally curious but not as defiant as the vagrants of the first and second waves) will feel the call of Shrove Tuesday.

• 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)

  You live all your lives in houses like this, where even the dam’ dog is a dancing one. Four months ago I was an oyster-girl in Whitstable!’ ‘Four months before Bessie Bellwood made her debut,’ Walter replied, ‘she was a rabbit-skinner in the New Cut!’ He put his hand upon my arm. ‘Nan,’ he said kindly, ‘I am not pressing you, but let us see if this thing will work, at least. Will you just go and take a suit of Kitty’s, and try it on properly? And Kitty, you go and get fitted up, too. And then we’ll see what the two of you look like, side by side.’ I turned to Kitty. She gave a shrug. ‘Why not?’ she said. It seems strange to think that, in all my weeks of handling so many lovely costumes, I had never thought to try one on myself; but I had not. The piece of sport with the jacket and the boater had been a novel one, born of the gaiety of that marvellous morning; until then Kitty’s suits had seemed too handsome, too special - above all, too peculiarly hers, too fundamental to her own particular magic and swank - for me to fool with. I had cared for them and kept them neat; but I had never so much as held one up in front of me, before the glass. Now I found myself half-naked in our chilly bedroom, with Kitty beside me with a costume in her hand, and our roles quite reversed. I had removed my dress and petticoats, and buttoned a shirt over my stays. Kitty had found a morning-suit of black and grey for me to wear, and had a similar costume ready for herself. She looked me over. ‘You must take your drawers off,’ she said quietly - the door was shut fast, but Walter was audibly pacing the little parlour beyond it - ‘or else they’ll bunch, beneath the trousers.’ I blushed, then slid the drawers down my thighs and kicked them off, so that I stood clad only in the shirt and a pair of stockings, gartered at the knee. I had once, as a girl, worn a suit of my brother’s to a masquerade at a party. That, however, had been many years before; it was quite different, now, to pull Kitty’s handsome trousers up my naked hips, and button them over that delicate place that Kitty herself had so recently set smarting. I took a step, and blushed still harder. I felt as though I had never had legs before - or, rather, that I had never known, quite, what it really felt like to have two legs, joined at the top.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I took a breath, and leaned into the dark interior of the coach. ‘Madam,’ I hissed, ‘I ain’t a boy at all. I’m -’ I hesitated. The end of the cigarette disappeared: she had thrown it out of the window. I heard her give one impatient sigh - and all at once I understood. ‘You little fool,’ she said. ‘Get in.’ Well, what should I have done? I had been weary, but I was not weary now. I had been disappointed, my expectations for the evening dashed; but with this one, unlooked-for invitation the glamour of the night seemed all restored. True, it was very late, and I was alone, and this woman was clearly a stranger of some determination, and with odd and secret tastes ... But her voice and manner were, as I have said, compelling ones. And she was rich. And my purse was empty. I hesitated for a moment; then she held out her hand and, where the lamplight fell upon her rings, I saw how large the stones were. It was that - only that, just then - which decided me. I took her hand, and climbed into the carriage. We sat together in the gloom. The brougham lurched forward with a muted creak, and started on its smooth, quiet, expensive way. Through the heavy lace of its windows the streets seemed changed, quite insubstantial. This, I realised, was how the rich saw the city all the time. I glanced at the woman at my side. She wore a dress or cloak of some sombre, heavy material, indistinguishable from the dark upholstery of the carriage’s interior; her face and gloved hands, illuminated by the regular gleam of passing street-lamps, their surface fantastically marbled by the shadow of the drapes, seemed to float, pale as water-lilies, in a pool of gloom. She was, as far as I could tell, handsome, and quite young - perhaps ten years older than myself. For a full half-minute neither of us spoke; then she tilted back her head, and looked me over. She said, ‘You are, perhaps, on your way home from a costume ball?’ Her voice had a new, slightly arrogant drawl to it. ‘A ball?’ I answered. To my own surprise I sounded reedy, rather trembly. ‘I thought - the uniform ...’ She gestured towards my suit. It, too, seemed to have lost some of its bravado, seemed to be bleeding its crimson into the shadows of the coach. I felt I was letting her down. I said, with an effort at music-hall sauce, ‘Oh, the uniform is my disguise for the streets, not a party. I find that a girl in skirts, on her own in the city, gets looked at, rather, in a way not always nice.’ She nodded. ‘I see.

• 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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She thinks about it for a second, looks up at the tree. Then she looks down at me. ‘That’s . . . fine,’ she says. ‘I only wanted to see if you were all right.’ She slams the window. The window slams hard, and the hawk moves. She flies from tree to tree, taking me away from the lawn towards the edge of the wood. The trees here are taller: now my hawk is the size of a thumbnail. Light shines dully from her spangled front. And out of nowhere, her half-size copy, a miniature doppelgänger, appears. The female sparrowhawk stoops at her, turns, and stoops again. It’s like Peter Pan being mobbed by his own shadow. My hawk flies to the next tree. By now I’ve no discernible thoughts. I know she won’t come down. I must just follow her, stumbling through bushes in a quixotic delirium. Snowberries, I think, as the white nubs brush against my hawking waistcoat. Didn’t Victorian gamekeepers plant them as cover for pheasants? Oh. Oh no. As soon as the thought is made, I see her twist out of the treetop, swerve to avoid a branch, and then stoop at a fifty-degree angle, wings almost entirely closed. It’s exciting enough to make me hold my breath, but I haven’t time: I’m already running. I duck under an electric fence, and my heart sinks. She’s stooped into a city of pheasants. They are everywhere. We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be here. I can hear her bell ringing. Where is she? Over the muddy ditch, and I’m in the wood. It is silent with leaves and fear. Then I hear pheasants running. I see one, two, three crouching in mortal terror. And then a blue-rumped cock pheasant burning copper against the leaves kicked up behind him, running hell for leather along the ground thirty feet away. Mabel comes up behind him like a gust of wind carrying the angel of death. I can’t stop this. Nothing can. She’s moving faster than seems plausible, powering down on a glide-slope that ends abruptly: she binds to the pheasant with both feet just as he sticks his head into a pile of brushwood. And then all hell breaks loose. Leaves fly, feathers fly, pheasant wings batter, and I’m running.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The shirt protrudes in a satanic tail behind him. Hes becoming sadly disheveled. The whole costume sags. Prespiration runs down his flushed face. Hes huffing. Ritualistically, like a servant who adores his job, whose purpose in life is subservience, he begins to remove my clothes (not as another person might, for the sake of the nakedness emphasizing the sexuality of the act: no, not at all like that: with him, it seems to be the actual act of obeisance that is exciting him). He had led me carefully away from the mirrors. When Im stripped, he doesnt touch my body, hardly even glances at me. First a pair of skintight black denim pants; a tapered shirt, russet-colored, which he leaves open halfway down my stomach. I wonder what this costume will ultimately be. It seems he is improvising for over-all effect: to create a fantasy which, like the furniture, will merely suggest something rather than be anything specific.... A pair of black boots which come to the knees; when he slips the boots onto my feet, his head bends brushing the slick leather with his cheek.... Black leather gloves. A hat which arches slightly on the sides. He added a thick large-buckled belt about my waist. Rushing to the leather box in the closet, he removed a long coiled whip, which he planted firmly in my hand. And he announced apocalyptically: “A plantation overseer!” Automatically I turn to face the panel of mirrors; but Neil blocks my view quickly. “Not yet!” After a few moments, he steps aside dramatically. “I present you to you—to You as You have always wanted to be,” he said solemnly. Clearly, this is me as he wants to see me. But I feel excited by the reflection of myself. Possibly noticing this, Neil stands before me again, once more blacking my reflection, as though my own fascination threatens to shut him out of the fantasy. “It’s just a hint,” he said in that awed tone. “Nothing extraordinary. Another time, I’ll Really Show You!” I notice his voice is changing strangely. What is he trying to convey by those vaguely recognizable accents? With a jolt of awareness which almost took my breath I realize that he is now speaking in the slightly slurred Southern sounds of a field hand! My first impulse was to laugh; my next, to remove the clothes and leave this fantastic man. But Neil is already saying: “Now we’re ready. Now we can really begin The Initiation.” Like a well-trained acolyte, he bowed. His actions revolt and fascinate me. I am overwhelmed by the ritualistic attention, excited by the image of myself in the mirror.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I recognised her at once, for all that I had seen so little of her before. I had just let myself out of the house, and lingered for a moment on the lowest step, yawning and rubbing my eyes. She was emerging into the sunlight from a passageway on the other side of Green Street, a little way down on my left, and she was dressed in a jacket and skirt the colour of mustard - it was this, struck by the sun and set glowing, that had caught my eye. Like me, she had paused: she had a sheet of paper in her hand, and seemed to be consulting it. The passageway led to the tenement flats, and I guessed she had been visiting the family that had held the party. I wondered idly which way she would go. If she moved towards King’s Cross again, I should miss her. At last she stowed the paper in a satchel that was slung, crosswise, over her chest, and turned - to her left, towards me. I kept to my step and, as I had before, I watched her; slowly she drew level with me until, once again, there was no more than the width of the road between us. I saw her eyes flick once towards mine, then away, and then, as she felt the persistence of my gaze, to mine again. I smiled; she slowed her step and, with a show of uncertainty, smiled back: but I could see that she had not the least idea who I might be. I couldn’t let the moment pass. While my eyes still held her questioning, amiable gaze, I lifted my hand to my head and raised my hat, and said in the same low tone that I had used on her before: ‘G’mornin’.’ As before, she started. Then she glanced up at the balcony above my head. And then she pinked. ‘Oh! It was you then - was it?’ I smiled again, and gave a little bow. My stays creaked; it felt all wrong, being gallant in a skirt, and I had a sudden fear that she might take me not for an impertinent voyeur, but for a fool. But when I raised my eyes to hers again her flush was fading, and her face showed neither contempt, nor discomfiture, but a kind of amusement. She tilted her head. A van passed between us, followed by a cart. In lifting my hat to her this time I had thought only, and vaguely, to correct the earlier misunderstanding; perhaps, to make her smile. But when the street was once again clear and she still stood there it seemed a kind of invitation.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  A new hawk! Full of excitement, White uncapped his pen and wrote Plan for a Passage Gos on the inside cover of his new copy of Bert’s Treatise. He mapped out detailed training plans, and they rang with new authority. ‘Watch her that night, keeping her constantly in motion,’ he wrote. ‘Have an assistant to take turns at this.’ But the new hawk was not to be. The day before it was due to arrive White was rushed to hospital with appendicitis – as if his body was rebelling against the prospect of another weary battle. The thought of the surgeon’s knife was a terror to him. ‘It made me feel cleaner in some obscure way,’ he wrote to John Moore after the operation. ‘I think I am brave and master of my soul after all.’ He had survived the crisis, and returned to his cottage. For a while he courted the night nurse, Stella, who had tended him at the hospital – but he thought her a wholly alien creature, and when he saw she might truly want him, he spurned her cruelly. The winter was long and dark. There was something mythical about its slow progression from snow to thaw, to snow again, to mud and misery and sickness, as if in living through it, he was passing through many ages. Hope returned with spring. He filled the house with orphans: squab pigeons and doves, a tawny owl called Archimedes and a pair of baby badgers. Then in April White drove to Croydon to pick up a new hawk. He called her Cully. She was in a dreadful state. On being trapped half her tail feathers had broken off, along with most of the primaries on her left wing. White frowned over diagrams in falconry books, cut buzzard feathers to size, and glued and sewed these replacements into the trimmed quills of her wings and tail. Imping, they called it: he knew it was one of the falconers’ Great Arts. But it was a bad job, the fixing, and all the bating in her eight weeks of training left her tail-less, part-winged, barely able to fly. But fly she did. The hawk flew free. Heart in mouth, he flew her free. Finally he would hunt with a hawk he had trained himself. His dazzling dreams of self-sufficiency, his dreams of innocent cruelty: both were within his reach. But it was getting late in the season, and he knew that Cully should be put down to moult. Hawks shed and replace all their feathers once every year, and during this time they are not flown, but loosed in a spacious enclosure and fed ad libitum. But he needed this one success. And one evening out on the Ridings, after days of fruitless stalking, he loosed his tattered hawk at a rabbit on Tofield’s Riding and after a hapless, ragged flight – at one point running after the rabbit, rather than flying – Cully grabbed it by the head.