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 An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  One day, during my freshman year, I was walking through the botanical gardens at UCLA, and, gazing down into the small brook that flows through the gardens, I suddenly and powerfully was reminded of a scene from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Something, I think, about the Lady of the Lake. Compelled with an immediate and inflaming sense of urgency, I ran off to the bookstore to track down a copy of it, which I did. By the time I left the student union I was weighed down with at least twenty other books, some of which were related to Tennyson’s poem, but others of which were only very tangentially connected, if at all, to the Arthurian legend: Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King were added, as were The Golden Bough, The Celtic Realm, The Letters of Héloïse and Abelard, books by Jung, books by Robert Graves, books about Tristan and Isolde, anthologies of creation myths, and collections of Scottish fairy tales. They all seemed very related to one another at the time. Not only did they seem related, but they seemed together to contain some essential key to the grandiosely tizzied view of the universe that my mind was beginning to spin. The Arthurian tragedy explained everything there was to know about human nature—its passions, betrayals, violence, grace, and aspirations—and my mind wove and wove, propelled by the certainty of absolute truth. Naturally, given the universality of my insights, these purchases seemed absolutely essential at the time. Indeed, they had a certain rapturous logic to them. But in the world of more prosaic realities, I could ill afford the kind of impulsive buying that this represented. I was working twenty to thirty hours a week in order to pay my way through college, and there was no margin at all for the expenses I ran up during these times of high enthusiasms. Unfortunately, the pink overdraft notices from my bank always seemed to arrive when I was in the throes of the depressions that inevitably followed my weeks of exaltation. Much as it had during my senior year in high school, my classwork during these galvanized periods seemed very straightforward, and I found examinations, laboratory work, and papers almost absurdly easy during the weeks that the high-flying times would last. I also would become immersed in a variety of political and social causes that included everything from campus antiwar activities to slightly more idiosyncratic zealotries, such as protesting cosmetic firms that killed turtles in order to manufacture and sell beauty products. At one point I picketed a local department store with a homemade placard that showed two very badly drawn sea turtles scrunching their way across the sand, with bits of starlight overhead—a crushing reminder, I thought, of their remarkable navigational abilities—and the words YOUR SKIN HAS COST THEM THEIRS printed in large red letters beneath the picture.

• From The Girls (2016)

  night’s dinner, but I turned off the faucet, watching Suzanne with my whole body. “And Russell said, Let’s just talk for a minute. Just let me tell you what I’m about.” Suzanne spit a shell back into the bag. “We had some tea with the guy, in his weird log cabin house. For an hour or something. Russell gave him the whole vision, laid it all out. And the guy was real interested in what we were doing out here. Showed Russell his old army pictures. Then he said we could just have the truck.” I wiped my hands on my shorts, her giddiness making me so shy I had to turn away. I finished the dishes to the sound of her snapping open peanut after peanut from her perch on the counter, amassing an unruly pile of damp shells until the bag was gone and she went looking for someone else to tell her story to. — The girls would hang out near the creek because it was cooler, the breeze carrying a chill, though the flies were bad. The rocks capped with algae, the sleepy shade. Russell had come back from town in the new truck, bearing candy bars, comic books whose pages grew limp from our hands. Helen ate her candy immediately and looked around at the rest of us with a seethe of jealousy. Though she’d also come from a wealthy family, we weren’t close. I found her dull except around Russell, when her brattiness took on a directed aim. Preening under his touch like a cat, she acted younger, even than me, stunted in a way that would later seem pathological. “Jesus. Stop staring at me,” Suzanne said, hunching her candy away from Helen. “You already ate yours.” Her shape on the bank next to me, her toes curling into the dirt. Jerking when a mosquito swarmed by her ear. “Just a bite,” Helen whined. “Just the corner.” Roos glanced up from the chambray mess of cloth in her lap. She was mending a work shirt for Guy, her tiny stitches made with absent precision. “You can have some of mine,” Donna said, “if you be quiet.” She picked her way to Helen, her chocolate bar craggy with peanuts.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  Picking up a book in the red bedroom and the cane chair uncomfortable; tired of sitting on my ass all day long, tired of red wallpaper, tired of seeing so many people jabbering away about nothing. The red bedroom and the trunk always open; her gowns lying about in a delirium of disorder. The red bedroom with my galoshes and canes, the notebooks I never touched, the manuscripts lying cold and dead. Paris! Meaning the Café Select, the Dôme, the Flea Market, the American Express. Paris! Meaning Borowski’s canes, Borowski’s hats, Borowski’s gouaches , Borowski’s prehistoric fish—and prehistoric jokes. In that Paris of ‘28 only one night stands out in my memory—the night before sailing for America. A rare night, with Borowski slightly pickled and a little disgusted with me because I’m dancing with every slut in the place. But we’re leaving in the morning! That’s what I tell every cunt I grab hold of —leaving in the morning! That’s what I’m telling the blonde with agate-colored eyes. And while I’m telling her she takes my hand and squeezes it between her legs. In the lavatory I stand before the bowl with a tremendous erection; it seems light and heavy at the same time, like a piece of lead with wings on it. And while I’m standing there like that two cunts sail in—Americans. I greet them cordially, prick in hand. They give me a wink and pass on. In the vestibule, as I’m buttoning my fly, I notice one of them waiting for her friend to come out of the can. The music is still playing and maybe Mona’ll be coming to fetch me, or Borowski with his gold-knobbed cane, but I’m in her arms now and she has hold of me and I don’t care who comes or what happens. We wriggle into the cabinet and there I stand her up, slap up against the wall, and I try to get it into her but it won’t work and so we sit down on the seat and try it that way but it won’t work either. No matter how we try it it won’t work. And all the while she’s got hold of my prick, she’s clutching it like a lifesaver, but it’s no use, we’re too hot, too eager. The music is still playing and so we waltz out of the cabinet into the vestibule again and as we’re dancing there in the shithouse I come all over her beautiful gown and she’s sore as hell about it. I stumble back to the table and there’s Borowski with his ruddy face and Mona with her disapproving eye. And Borowski says “Let’s all go to Brussels tomorrow,” and we agree, and when we get back to the hotel I vomit all over the place, in the bed, in the washbowl, over the suits and gowns and the galoshes and canes and the notebooks I never touched and the manuscripts cold and dead. A few months later.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  It was spring before I managed to escape from the penitentiary, and then only by a stroke of fortune. A telegram from Carl informed me one day that there was a vacancy “upstairs”; he said he would send me the fare back if I decided to accept. I telegraphed back at once and as soon as the dough arrived I beat it to the station. Not a word to M. le Proviseur or anyone. French leave, as they say. I went immediately to the hotel at 1 bis , where Carl was staying. He came to the door stark naked. It was his night off and there was a cunt in the bed as usual. “Don’t mind her,” he says, “she’s asleep. If you need a lay you can take her on. She’s not bad.” He pulls the covers back to show me what she looks like. However, I wasn’t thinking about a lay right away. I was too excited. I was like a man who has just escaped from jail. I just wanted to see and hear things. Coming from the station it was like a long dream. I felt as though I had been away for years. It was not until I had sat down and taken a good look at the room that I realized I was back again in Paris. It was Carl’s room and no mistake about it. Like a squirrel cage and shithouse combined. There was hardly room on the table for the portable machine he used. It was always like that, whether he had a cunt with him or not. Always a dictionary lying open on a gilt-edged volume of Faust , always a tobacco pouch, a beret, a bottle of vin rouge , letters, manuscripts, old newspapers, water colors, teapot, dirty socks, toothpicks, Kruschen Salts, condoms, etc. In the bidet were orange peels and the remnants of a ham sandwich. “There’s some food in the closet” he said. “Help yourself! I was just going to give myself an injection.” I found the sandwich he was talking about and a piece of cheese that he had nibbled at beside it. While he sat on the edge of the bed, dosing himself with his argyrol, I put away the sandwich and cheese with the aid of a little wine. “I liked that letter you sent me about Goethe,” he said, wiping his prick with a dirty pair of drawers. “I’ll show you the answer to it in a minute—I’m putting it in my book. The trouble with you is that you’re not a German. You have to be German to understand Goethe. Shit, I’m not going to explain it to you now. I’ve put it all in the book. … By the way, I’ve got a new cunt now—not this one—this one’s a half-wit. At least, I had her until a few days ago. I’m not sure whether she’ll come back or not.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The meeting where Watson was peering and twitching and yawning was focused specifically on the genetic basis of manic-depressive illness, with the intent of bringing together clinical psychiatrists, geneticists, and molecular biologists, all of whom are in one way or another actively engaged in the search for the genes responsible for manic-depressive illness, to share information about their research methods, findings, and the pedigrees of the affected families whose genetic material is being analyzed. Pedigree after pedigree was being projected onto the screen, some with relatively few ill family members, others containing large numbers of squares and circles that had been completely blackened in, indicating men or women who suffered from manic-depressive illness. Half-blackened circles and squares depicted depressive illness, and an s, cross, or slash flagged those individuals who had committed suicide. Each of these black or half-black symbols represented a life with periods of terrible suffering, yet, ironically, the more of these darkened squares and circles in a particular family, the “better” (that is, the more genetically informative and useful) the pedigree was considered to be. It seemed very likely, when I looked around the room, that among these scientists, and somewhere within these pedigrees, the location of the gene or genes responsible for manic-depressive illness was going to be found. It was a very exciting thought, because once the genes are located, early and far more accurate diagnosis is likely to follow; so, too, is more specific, safer, less problematic, and more effective treatment.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  All that is here related moves with imaginary feet along the parallels of dead orbs; all that is seen with the empty sockets bursts like flowering grass. Out of nothingness arises the sign of infinity; beneath the ever-rising spirals slowly sinks the gaping hole. The land and the water make numbers joined, a poem written with flesh and stronger than steel or granite. Through endless night the earth whirls toward a creation unknown. … Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany—“Fay ce que vouldras!… fay ce que vouldras!” Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy! Things, certain things about my old idols bring the tears to my eyes: the interruptions, the disorder, the violence, above all, the hatred they aroused. When I think of their deformities, of the monstrous styles they chose, of the flatulence and tediousness of their works, of all the chaos and confusion they wallowed in, of the obstacles they heaped up about them, I feel an exaltation. They were all mired in their own dung. All men who over-elaborated. So true is it that I am almost tempted to say: “Show me a man who over-elaborates and I will show you a great man!” What is called their “over-elaboration” is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted… I miss the cloying qualities. When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears. I see in the beautifully bloated pages that follow the interruptions the erasure of petty intrusions, of the dirty footprints, as it were, of cowards, liars, thieves, vandals, calumniators.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  By the time you get to New York this’ll be nothing more than a bad dream.” This got him so excited that his feet were moving convulsively, as if he were trying to run inside the cab. At the bank his hand was trembling so that he could hardly sign his name. That was one thing I couldn’t do for him—sign his name. But I think, had it been necessary, I could have sat him on the toilet and wiped his ass. I was determined to ship him off, even if I had to fold him up and put him in a valise. It was lunch hour when we got to the British Consulate, and the place was closed. That meant waiting until two o’clock. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, by way of killing time, than to eat. Fillmore, of course, wasn’t hungry. He was for eating a sandwich. “Fuck that!” I said. “You’re going to blow me to a good lunch. It’s the last square meal you’re going to have over here—maybe for a long while.” I steered him to a cosy little restaurant and ordered a good spread. I ordered the best wine on the menu, regardless of price or taste. I had all his money in my pocket—oodles of it, it seemed to me. Certainly never before had I had so much in my fist at one time. It was a treat to break a thousand franc note. I held it up to the light first to look at the beautiful watermark. Beautiful money! One of the few things the French make on a grand scale. Artistically done, too, as if they cherished a deep affection even for the symbol. The meal over, we went to a café. I ordered Chartreuse with the coffee. Why not? And I broke another bill—a five-hundred franc note this time. It was a clean, new, crisp bill. A pleasure to handle such money. The waiter handed me back a lot of dirty old bills that had been patched up with strips of gummed paper; I had a stack of five and ten franc notes and a bagful of chicken feed. Chinese money, with holes in it. I didn’t know in which pocket to stuff the money any more. My trousers were bursting with coins and bills. It made me slightly uncomfortable also, hauling all that dough out in public. I was afraid we might be taken for a couple of crooks. When we got to the American Express there wasn’t a devil of a lot of time left. The British, in their usual fumbling farting way, had kept us on pins and needles. Here everybody was sliding around on castors. They were so speedy that everything had to be done twice. After all the checks were signed and clipped in a neat little holder, it was discovered that he had signed in the wrong place. Nothing to do but start all over again.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  There is a wonderful kind of excitement in modern neuroscience, a romantic, moon-walk sense of exploring and setting out for new frontiers. The science is elegant, the scientists dismayingly young, and the pace of discovery absolutely staggering. Like the molecular biologists, the brain-scanners are generally well aware of the extraordinary frontiers they are crossing, and it would take a mind that is on empty, or a heart made of stone, to be unmoved by their collective ventures and enthusiasms. I was, in spite of myself, caught up by the science, wondering whether these hyperintensities were the cause or the effect of illness, whether they became more pronounced over time, where in the brain they localized, whether they were related to the problems in spatial orientation and facial recognition that I and many other manic-depressives experience, and whether children who were at risk for manic-depressive illness, because one or both of their parents had the disease, would show these brain abnormalities even before they became ill. The clinical side of my mind began to mull about the visual advantages of these and other imaging findings in convincing some of my more literary and skeptical patients that (a) there is a brain, (b) their moods are related to their brains, and (c) there may be specific brain-damaging effects of going off their medications. These speculations kept me distracted for a while, as changing gears from the personal side of having manic-depressive illness to the professional role of studying and treating it often does. But, invariably, the personal interest and concerns returned. When I got back to Johns Hopkins, where I was now teaching, I buttonholed neurology colleagues and grilled my associates who were doing the MRI studies. I scurried off to the library to read up on what was known; it is, after all, one thing to believe intellectually that this disease is in your brain; it is quite another thing to actually see it. Even the titles of some of the articles were a bit ungluing: “Basal Ganglia Volumes and White Matter Hyperintensities in Patients with Bipolar Disorder,” “Structural Brain Abnormalities in Bipolar Affective Disorder: Ventricular Enlargement and Focal Signal Hyperintensities,” “Subcortical Abnormalities Detected in Bipolar Affective Disorders, Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging”; on and on they went. I sat down to read. One study found that “Of the 32 scans of the patients with bipolar disorder, 11 (34.4%) showed hyperintensities, while only one scan (3.2%) from the normal comparison group contained such abnormalities.”

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  My mind was beginning to have to scramble a bit to keep up with itself, as ideas were coming so fast that they intersected one another at every conceivable angle. There was a neuronal pileup on the highways of my brain, and the more I tried to slow down my thinking the more I became aware that I couldn’t. My enthusiasms were going into overdrive as well, although there often was some underlying thread of logic in what I was doing. One day, for example, I got into a frenzy of photocopying: I made thirty to forty copies of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an article about religion and psychosis from the American Journal of Psychiatry, and another article, “Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences,” written by a prominent psychologist who had elucidated all of the reasons why teaching rounds, when poorly conducted, are such a horrendous waste of time. All three of these articles seemed to me, quite suddenly, to have profound meaning and relevance for the clinical staff on the ward. So I passed them out to everyone I could. What is interesting to me now is not that I did such a typically manic thing; rather, it’s that there was some prescience and sense in those early days of incipient madness. The ward rounds were a complete waste of time, although the ward chief was less than appreciative of my pointing it out to everyone (and even less appreciative of my circulating the article to the entire staff). The Millay poem, “Renascence,” was one I had read as a young girl, and, as my mood became more and more ecstatic, and my mind started racing ever and ever faster, I somehow remembered it with utter clarity and straightaway looked it up. Although I was just beginning my journey into madness, the poem described the entire cycle I was about to go through: it started with normal perceptions of the world (“All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood”) and then continued through ecstatic and visionary states to unremitting despair and, finally, reemergence into the normal world, but with heightened awareness. Millay was nineteen years old when she wrote the poem, and, although I did not know it at the time, she later survived several breakdowns and hospitalizations. Somehow, in the strange state I was in, I knew that the poem had meaning for me; I understood it totally. I gave it to the residents and interns as a metaphorical description of the psychotic process and the important possibilities in a subsequent renewal. The residents, unaware of the internal flurry that propelled the readings, seemed to respond well to the articles and, almost to the person, expressed pleasure in the break from their regular medical reading.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions. Beside the perfection of Turgenev I put the perfection of Dostoevski. (Is there anything more perfect than The Eternal Husband?) Here, then, in one and the same medium, we have two kinds of perfection. But in Van Gogh’s letters there is a perfection beyond either of these. It is the triumph of the individual over art. There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives. Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they are putting into it. The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted. Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude . Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more… The telephone interrupts this thought which I should never have been able to complete. Someone is coming to rent the apartment. … It looks as though it were finished, my life at the Villa Borghese. Well, I’ll take up these pages and move on. Things will happen elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice—they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It’s in the blood now—misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch—until there’s no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death. So fast and furiously am I compelled to live now that there is scarcely time to record even these fragmentary notes. After the telephone call, a gentleman and his wife arrived. I went upstairs to lie down during the transaction. Lay there wondering what my next move would be. Surely not to go back to the fairy’s bed and toss about all night flicking bread crumbs with my toes. That puking little bastard! If there’s anything worse than being a fairy it’s being a miser.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  To me it looked easy, simple as rolling off a log. The whole thing was working itself out rapidly in my mind. I knew just what each step would be. Clear as a bell, I was. “Whose money is that in the bank?” I asked. “Is it her father’s or is it yours?” “It’s mine!” he exclaimed. “My mother sent it to me. I don’t want any of her goddamned money.” “That’s swell!” I said. “Listen, suppose we hop a cab and go back there. Draw out every cent. Then we’ll go to the British Consulate and get a visa. You’re going to hop the train this afternoon for London. From London you’ll take the first boat to America. I’m saying that because then you won’t be worried about her trailing you. She’ll never suspect that you went via London. If she goes searching for you she’ll naturally go to Le Havre first, or Cherbourg. ... And here’s another thing—you’re not going back to get your things. You’re going to leave everything here. Let her keep them. With that French mind of hers she’ll never dream that you scooted off without bag or baggage. It’s incredible. A Frenchman would never dream of doing a thing like that ... unless he was as cracked as you are.” “You’re right!” he exclaimed. “I never thought of that. Besides, you might send them to me later on—if she’ll surrender them! But that doesn’t matter now. Jesus, though, I haven’t even got a hat!” “What do you need a hat for? When you get to London you can buy everything you need. All you need now is to hurry. We’ve got to find out when the train leaves.” “Listen,” he said, reaching for his wallet, “I’m going to leave everything to you. Here, take this and do whatever’s necessary. I’m too weak. ... I’m dizzy.” I took the wallet and emptied it of the bills he had just drawn from the bank. A cab was standing at the curb. We hopped in. There was a train leaving the Gare du Nord at four o’clock, or thereabouts. I was figuring it out—the bank, the Consulate, the American Express, the station. Fine! Just about make it. “Now buck up!” I said, “and keep your shirt on! Shit, in a few hours you’ll be crossing the Channel. Tonight you’ll be walking around in London and you’ll get a good bellyful of English. Tomorrow you’ll be on the open sea—and then, by Jesus, you’re a free man and you needn’t give a fuck what happens. By the time you get to New York this’ll be nothing more than a bad dream.” This got him so excited that his feet were moving convulsively, as if he were trying to run inside the cab. At the bank his hand was trembling so that he could hardly sign his name. That was one thing I couldn’t do for him—sign his name.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  His voice is raucous, scraping, booming, a heavy blunt weapon that wedges its way through flesh and bone and cartilage. Boris calls me down to be introduced. He is rubbing his hands, like a pawnbroker. They are talking about a story Mr. Wren wrote, a story about a spavined horse. “But I thought Mr. Wren was a painter?” “To be sure,” says Boris, with a twinkle in his eye, “but in the wintertime he writes. And he writes well... remarkably well.” I try to induce Mr. Wren to talk, to say something, anything, to talk about the spavined horse, if necessary. But Mr. Wren is almost inarticulate. When he essays to speak of those dreary months with the pen he becomes unintelligible. Months and months he spends before setting a word to paper. (And there are only three months of winter!) What does he cogitate all those months and months of winter? So help me God, I can’t see this guy as a writer. Yet Mrs. Wren says that when he sits down to it the stuff just pours out. The talk drifts. It is difficult to follow Mr. Wren’s mind because he says nothing. He thinks as he goes along—so Mrs. Wren puts it. Mrs. Wren puts everything about Mr. Wren in the loveliest light. “He thinks as he goes along”— very charming, charming indeed, as Borowski would say, but really very painful, particularly when the thinker is nothing but a spavined horse. Boris hands me money to buy liquor. Going for the liquor I am already intoxicated. I know just how I’ll begin when I get back to the house. Walking down the street it commences, the grand speech inside me that’s gurgling like Mrs. Wren’s loose laugh. Seems to me she had a slight edge on already. Listens beautifully when she’s tight. Coming out of the wine shop I hear the urinal gurgling. Everything is loose and splashy. I want Mrs. Wren to listen. ... Boris is rubbing his hands again. Mr. Wren is still stuttering and spluttering. I have a bottle between my legs and I’m shoving the corkscrew in. Mrs. Wren has her mouth parted expectantly. The wine is splashing between my legs, the sun is splashing through the bay window, and inside my veins there is a bubble and splash of a thousand crazy things that commence to gush out of me now pell- mell. I’m telling them everything that comes to mind, everything that was bottled up inside me and which Mrs.

• From The Girls (2016)

  docile as dosed lab chimps. Those of us at the ranch functioned on a whole other level, fighting against the miserable squall, and so what if you had to mess with the straight people to achieve larger goals, larger worlds? If you checked yourself out of that old contract, Russell told us, refused all the bullshit scare tactics of civics class and prayer books and the principal’s office, you’d see there was no such thing as right and wrong. His permissive equations reduced these concepts to hollow relics, like medals from a regime no longer in power. — I asked Teddy for a drink. Lemonade, I figured, soda, anything but what he brought me, his hand shaking nervously when he passed me the glass. “Do you want a napkin?” he said. “Nah.” The intensity of his attention seemed exposing, and I laughed a little. I was just starting to learn how to be looked at. I took a deep drink. The glass was full of vodka, cloudy with the barest slip of orange juice. I coughed. “Your parents let you drink?” I asked, wiping at my mouth. “I do what I want,” he said, proud and uncertain at the same time. His eyes gleamed; I watched him decide what to say next. It was strange to watch someone else calibrate and worry over their actions instead of being the one who was worrying. Was this what Peter had felt around me? A limited patience, a sense of power that felt heady and slightly distressing. Teddy’s freckled face, ruddy and eager—he was only two years younger than me, but the distance seemed definitive. I took a large swallow from the glass, and Teddy cleared his throat. “I have some dope if you want it,” he said. — Teddy led me to his room, expectant as I glanced around at his boyish novelties. They seemed arranged for viewing, though it was all junk: a captain’s clock whose hands were dead, a long-forgotten ant farm, warped and molding. The glassy stipple of a partial arrowhead, a jar of pennies, green and scuzzy as sunken treasure. Usually I’d make some crack to Teddy. Ask him where he got the arrowhead or tell him about the

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  When we sallied out we had to pass through the red-light district where there were more grandmothers with shawls about their necks sitting on the doorsteps fanning themselves and nodding pleasantly to the passers-by. All such good-looking, kindly souls, as if they were keeping guard over a nursery. Little groups of sailors came swinging along and pushed their way noisily inside the gaudy joints. Sex everywhere: it was slopping over, a neap tide that swept the props from under the city. We piddled along at the edge of the basin where everything was jumbled and tangled; you had the impression that all these ships, these trawlers and yachts and schooners and barges, had been blown ashore by a violent storm. In the space of forty-eight hours so many things had happened that it seemed as if we had been in Le Havre a month or more. We were planning to leave early Monday morning, as Fillmore had to be back on the job. We spent Sunday drinking and carousing, clap or no clap. That afternoon Collins confided to us that he was thinking of returning to his ranch in Idaho; he hadn’t been home for eight years and he wanted to have a look at the mountains again before making another voyage East. We were sitting in a whorehouse at the time, waiting for a girl to appear; he had promised to slip her some cocaine. He was fed up with Le Havre, he told us. Too many vultures hanging around his neck. Besides, Jimmie’s wife had fallen in love with him and she was making things hot for him with her jealous fits. There was a scene almost every night. She had been on her good behavior since we arrived, but it wouldn’t last, he promised us. She was particularly jealous of a Russian girl who came to the bar now and then when she got tight. A troublemaker. On top of it all he was desperately in love with this boy whom he had told us about the first day. “A boy can break your heart,” he said. “He’s so damned beautiful! And so cruel!” We had to laugh at this. It sounded preposterous. But Collins was in earnest. Around midnight Sunday Fillmore and I retired; we had been given a room upstairs over the bar. It was sultry as the devil, not a breath of air stirring. Through the open windows we could hear them shouting downstairs and the gramophone going continually. All of a sudden a storm broke—a regular cloudburst. And between the thunderclaps and the squalls that lashed the window-panes there came to our ears the sound of another storm raging downstairs at the bar. It sounded frightfully close and sinister; the women were shrieking at the tops of their lungs, bottles were crashing, tables were upset and there was that familiar, nauseating thud that the human body makes when it crashes to the floor.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  By the time you get to New York this’ll be nothing more than a bad dream.” This got him so excited that his feet were moving convulsively, as if he were trying to run inside the cab. At the bank his hand was trembling so that he could hardly sign his name. That was one thing I couldn’t do for him—sign his name. But I think, had it been necessary, I could have sat him on the toilet and wiped his ass. I was determined to ship him off, even if I had to fold him up and put him in a valise. It was lunch hour when we got to the British Consulate, and the place was closed. That meant waiting until two o’clock. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, by way of killing time, than to eat. Fillmore, of course, wasn’t hungry. He was for eating a sandwich. “Fuck that!” I said. “You’re going to blow me to a good lunch. It’s the last square meal you’re going to have over here—maybe for a long while.” I steered him to a cosy little restaurant and ordered a good spread. I ordered the best wine on the menu, regardless of price or taste. I had all his money in my pocket—oodles of it, it seemed to me. Certainly never before had I had so much in my fist at one time. It was a treat to break a thousand franc note. I held it up to the light first to look at the beautiful watermark. Beautiful money! One of the few things the French make on a grand scale. Artistically done, too, as if they cherished a deep affection even for the symbol. The meal over, we went to a café. I ordered Chartreuse with the coffee. Why not? And I broke another bill—a five-hundred franc note this time. It was a clean, new, crisp bill. A pleasure to handle such money. The waiter handed me back a lot of dirty old bills that had been patched up with strips of gummed paper; I had a stack of five and ten franc notes and a bagful of chicken feed. Chinese money, with holes in it. I didn’t know in which pocket to stuff the money any more. My trousers were bursting with coins and bills. It made me slightly uncomfortable also, hauling all that dough out in public. I was afraid we might be taken for a couple of crooks. When we got to the American Express there wasn’t a devil of a lot of time left. The British, in their usual fumbling farting way, had kept us on pins and needles. Here everybody was sliding around on castors. They were so speedy that everything had to be done twice. After all the checks were signed and clipped in a neat little holder, it was discovered that he had signed in the wrong place. Nothing to do but start all over again.

• From The Girls (2016)

  borrowed car, a Trans Am, possibly Mitch’s. Suzanne turned up the radio, KFRC, K. O. Bayley on the big 610. Both Suzanne and Donna seemed energized, and so was I. Happy to be back among them. Suzanne pulled into a glass-fronted Safeway that was familiar to me, the cant of its green roof. Where my mother shopped occasionally. “Grubby grub time,” Donna announced, making herself laugh. Donna hoisted herself over the lip of the dumpster, avid as an animal, knotting her skirt around her hips so she could dig deep. She got off on it, happy to muck around in the trash, the wet squelch. On the way back to the ranch, Suzanne made an announcement. “Time for a little trip,” she said, loudly recruiting Donna into the plan. I liked knowing she was thinking of me, trying to placate me. I noticed a new desperation around her after Mitch. I was more conscious of her attentions, of how to keep her eyes on me. “Where?” I asked. “You’ll see,” Suzanne said, catching Donna’s gaze. “It’s like our medicine, like a little cure for what ails you.” “Ooh,” Donna said, leaning forward. She seemed to have understood immediately what Suzanne was talking about. “Yes, yes, yes.” “We need a house,” Suzanne said. “That’s the first thing. An empty house.” She flashed a look at me. “Your mom’s gone, right?” I didn’t know what they were going to do. But I recognized a tinge of alarm, even then, and had the sense to spare my own home. I shifted in the seat. “She’s there all day.” Suzanne made a disappointed hum. But I was already thinking of another house that might be empty. And I offered it up to them, easily. I gave Suzanne directions, watching the roads grow more and more familiar. When Suzanne stopped the car and Donna got out and smeared mud on the first two numbers of the license plate, I only worried a little. I gathered an unfamiliar braveness, a sense of pushing past limitations, and tried to give myself up to the uncertainty. I was locked into my body in a way that was unfamiliar. It was the knowledge, perhaps, that I would do whatever Suzanne wanted me to do. That was a strange thought—that there was just this banal sense of being moved along the bright river of whatever was going to happen. That it could be as easy as this.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I kept talking about the ranch, about Russell. The way I tossed free Mitch’s name, like Donna had that day on the bus, with studied, careful deployment. The closer we got, the more worked up I became. Like horses that bolt with barn sickness, forgetting their rider. “It sounds nice,” Tom said. I could tell my stories had charged him, a dreamy excitement in his features. Mesmerized by bedtime tales of other worlds. “You could hang out for a while,” I said. “If you wanted.” Tom brightened at the offer, gratitude making him shy. “Only if I’m not intruding,” he said, a blush clotting his cheeks. — I imagined Suzanne and the others would be happy with me for bringing this new person. Expanding the ranks, all the old tricks. A pie-faced admirer to raise his voice with ours and contribute to the food pool. But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapors of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl. The car crossed the bridge, passing through the shit-stench veil of the landfill. I could see the span of another distant highway, sided by water, and the marshy flats before the sudden drop into the valley, the ranch hidden in its hills. — By that time, the ranch I’d known was a place that no longer existed. The end had already arrived: each interaction its own elegy. But there was too much hopeful momentum in me to notice. The leap in me when Tom’s car had first turned down the ranch drive: it had been two weeks, not long at all, but the return was overwhelming. And only when I saw everything still there, still alive and strange and half-dreamy as ever, did I understand I’d worried it might be gone. The things I loved, the miraculous house—like the one in Gone with the Wind, I’d realized, coming upon it again. The silty rectangle of pool, half-full, with its teem of algae and exposed concrete: it could all pass back into my possession.

• From The Girls (2016)

  here.” Even though she’d seen Mrs. Dutton stop me, she kept glancing at Tom like he was the reason I’d left. Poor Tom, who wandered the grassy yard with the hesitant shuffle of museumgoers. His nose pricking from the animal smells, the backed-up outhouse. Suzanne’s face was shuttered with the same distant confusion as Donna’s: they could no longer conceive of a world where you could be punished. I was suddenly guilty for the nights with Tamar, the whole afternoons when I didn’t even think of Suzanne. I tried to make my father’s apartment sound worse than it had been, as if I’d been watched at every moment, suffered through endless punishments. “Jesus,” Suzanne snorted. “Dragsville.” — The shadow of the ranch house stretched along the grass like a strange outdoor room, and we occupied this blessing of shade, a line of mosquitoes hovering in the thin afternoon light. The air crackled with a carnival sheen—the familiar bodies of the girls jostling against mine, knocking me back into myself. The quick metal flash through the trees— Guy was bumping a car through the back ranch, calls echoing and disappearing. The drowsy shape of the children, mucking around a network of shallow puddles: someone had forgotten to turn off the hose. Helen had a blanket around herself, pulled up to her chin like a woolly ruff, and Donna kept trying to snap it away and expose the homecoming queen body underneath, the hematoma on Helen’s thigh. I was aware of Tom, sitting awkwardly in the dirt, but mostly I thrilled to Suzanne’s familiar shape beside me. She was talking quickly, a glaze of sweat on her face. Her dress was filthy, but her eyes were shining. Tamar and my father weren’t even home yet, I realized, and how funny it was to already be at the ranch when they didn’t even know I was gone. Nico was riding a tricycle that was too small for him, the bike rusted and clanging as he pedaled hard. “Cute kid,” Tom said. Donna and Helen laughed. Tom wasn’t sure what he’d said that was funny, but he blinked like he was willing to learn. Suzanne plucked at a stalk of oat grass, sitting in an old winged chair pulled from the house. I was keeping an eye out for

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘Wanda, you must teach me to foxtrot,’ smiled Stephen. Jamie was blundering round the room with Barbara clasped to her untidy bosom; then she and Barbara started to sing the harmless, but foolish words of the foxtrot—if the servants were singing their old Breton hymns along in the kitchen, no one troubled to listen. Growing hilarious, Jamie sang louder, spinning with Barbara, gyrating wildly, until Barbara, between laughing and coughing, must implore her to stop, must beg for mercy. Wanda said: ‘You might have a lesson now, Stephen.’ Putting her hands on Stephen’s shoulders, she began to explain the more simple steps, which did not appear at all hard to Stephen. The music seemed to have got into her feet so that her feet must follow its rhythm. She discovered to her own very great amazement that she liked this less formal modern dancing, and after a while she was clasping Mary quite firmly, and they moved away together while Wanda stood calling out her instructions: ‘Take much longer steps! Keep your knees straight—straighter! Don’t get so much to the side—look, it’s this way—hold her this way; always stand square to your partner.’ The lesson went on for a good two hours, until even Mary seemed somewhat exhausted. She suddenly rang the bell for Pierre, who appeared with the tray of simple supper. Then Mary did an unusual thing—she poured herself out a whiskey and soda. ‘I’m tired,’ she explained rather fretfully in answer to Stephen’s look of surprise; and she frowned as she turned her back abruptly. But Wanda shied away from the brandy as a frightened horse will shy from fire; she drank two large glasses of lemonade—an extremist she was in all things, this Wanda. Quite soon she announced that she must go home to bed, because of her latest picture which required every ounce of strength she had in her; but before she went she said eagerly to Stephen: ‘Do let me show you the Sacré Cœur. You have seen it of course, but only as a tourist; that is not really seeing it at all, you must come there with me.’ ‘All right,’ agreed Stephen. When Jamie and Barbara had departed in their turn, Stephen took Mary into her arms: ‘Dearest . . . has it been a fairly nice Christmas after all?’ she inquired almost timidly. Mary kissed her: ‘Of course it’s been a nice Christmas.’ Then her youthful face suddenly changed in expression, the grey eyes growing hard, the mouth resentful: ‘Damn that woman for what she’s done to us, Stephen—the insolence of it! But I’ve learnt my lesson; we’ve got plenty of friends without Lady Massey and Agnes, friends to whom we’re not moral lepers.’ And she laughed, a queer, little joyless laugh. Stephen flinched, remembering Brockett’s warning.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She laughed bitterly: ‘Why should I be merciful to you? Isn’t it enough that I accept your challenge, that I offer you the freedom of my house, that I don’t turn you out and forbid you to come here? Come by all means, whenever you like. You may even repeat our conversation to Mary; I shall not do so, but don’t let that stop you if you think you may possibly gain some advantage.’ He shook his head: ‘No, I shan’t repeat it.’ ‘Oh, well, that must be as you think best. I propose to behave as though nothing had happened—and now I must get along with my work.’ He hesitated: ‘Won’t you shake hands?’ ‘Of course,’ she smiled; ‘aren’t you my very good friend? But you know, you really must leave me now, Martin.’ 3 After he had gone she lit a cigarette; the action was purely automatic. She felt strangely excited yet strangely numb—a most curious synthesis of sensations; then she suddenly felt deathly sick and giddy. Going up to her bedroom she bathed her face, sat down on the bed and tried to think, conscious that her mind was completely blank. She was thinking of nothing—not even of Mary. CHAPTER 53 1 W ith Martin’s return Stephen realized how very deeply she had missed him; how much she still needed the thing he now offered, how long indeed she had starved for just this—the friendship of a normal and sympathetic man whose mentality being very much her own, was not only welcome but reassuring. Yes, strange though it was, with this normal man she was far more at ease than with Jonathan Brockett, far more at one with all his ideas, and at times far less conscious of her own inversion; though it seemed that Martin had not only read, but had thought a great deal about the subject. He spoke very little of his studies, however, just accepting her now for the thing that she was, without question, and accepting most of her friends with a courtesy as innocent of patronage as of any suspicion of morbid interest. And thus it was that in these first days they appeared to have achieved a complete reunion.