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 Untrue (2018)

  Ready for It?The popularity of Davis’s workshops, and of both Awkward Black Girl and Insecure, are just a few examples that suggest a considerable share of us are ready to be challenged and delighted and surprised about sex, double standards, relationships, and what it means for an African American woman to be in charge of her libido. Even when that means letting her libido be in charge of her. Might our culture also be ready for women to write and produce and present women who aren’t stereotypes, and aren’t constrained by constraint? Like Roxane Gay, whose short story collection Difficult Women gives us female protagonists who are unapologetically “untrue,” sexual, and complicated, and not infrequently angry about being shunted aside for it; like Shonda Rhimes, who had the audacity and storytelling genius to present us with characters and storylines we couldn’t have imagined being permitted to see on TV only a few decades ago—Rae, Philyaw, Miller-Young, and Davis are paving the way forward. Meanwhile, the rage at Issa the character, the persistent shadow cast by controlling images, suggests that when it comes to who gets to represent the future of sex and gender, of men and women and beyond, who gets to talk about it, who gets to write and direct and produce the story of what black women want and how it will be, the stakes are very real, and very high. Chapter Eight Loving the Woman Who’s UntrueI had deliberately chosen a nondescript restaurant, one nobody I knew ever went to, for my meet-up with a married man. He had texted, “Let’s go somewhere private.” I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring—I hadn’t since that day of the workshop on consensual non-monogamy. The man I was meeting was attractive—dark-haired and fit—and always attentive. He was smart and handsome and he made me laugh and sometimes I wondered what it would be like to be with someone like him. Or to be with him. Catching sight of him across the room, I smiled, knowing that in seconds I would be able to embrace him. If this sounds like a setup for a story about an affair, it isn’t. It’s far more salacious and interesting than that, because the man I was meeting had a story to tell.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The powerful lights, with their silvery reflecting umbrellas, were switched off, and as the curtains were closed I had a quick recall of school play rehearsals in vacated classrooms, gestures made with imaginary props, embarrassed boys swallowing syllables, the sense of a final achievement lugubriously remote. Nonetheless I looked around admiringly and just as I still naughtily mount the pulpit when I visit a church, clutched Phil to me histrionically in front of one of the heavy unrolled backdrops of eggshell cartridge-paper. The lens of the crouching camera eyed us enigmatically, daring us to move. Phil grinned, and only saw too late what I was playing at. ‘Actually, over here is where I would want to shoot you, William.’ Behind the sheet of paper, at the rear of the studio, was a setting of another kind, a painted canvas flat showing a balustrade, a curtain tumbling down above, and a hazy impression of parkland beyond. It was similar in kind to the scene in the mysterious early photograph of Charles with a woman—though such backdrops must have been common in photographers’ studios all over the world before the war. ‘I picked it up from a demolition site out at Whitechapel,’ said Staines, coming up behind me to look at it, and resting a ringed hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s not all I picked up there, either, if you must know.’ I smirked. ‘No, I’m going to use it for my kind of Edwardian pics. So touching. You did say you’d do one of them didn’t you—you’ve got just the looks for it. Nothing naughty, nothing naughty at all. ’ ‘I should be pleased to,’ I decided. ‘But first I want to look out some pickies of old Charles and others. It’s all in the most frightful mess. Really I need someone—well, someone like you really—to come and sort out the archivi. It’s been a help selling lots of stuff, but still.’ Together we tugged out the wide shallow drawers in which hundreds and hundreds of photographs were laid up. Crazed, silky sheets of tissuepaper interleaved the older prints and, pulled back, revealed anonymous society faces of the Forties—I supposed—sulking, or smiling complacently. Some I wanted to look at more closely, but Staines dismissed them and hurried on; or if he told me about them they were people I had never heard of.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Kaupp’s workshop was happening that gray spring day and drawing not a few therapists who thought it important to attend because non-monogamy of all stripes—consensual/disclosed and non-consensual/undisclosed, male, female, and transgendered, straight and gay—is happening. From some angles, interest in it seems to have reached a critical mass or tipping point. On thinky/newsy platforms like Psychology Today, CNN, Salon, Slate, and NPR, smart writers and experts are giving us provocative pieces like “Maybe Monogamy Isn’t the Only Way to Love,” “Rethinking Monogamy Today,” “A Cultural Moment for Polyamory,” and “Black Folks Do: A Real Look at Consensual Non-Monogamy in the Black Community.” There are service-y pieces too—like “Is Consensual Non-Monogamy Right for You?” and “Dating Experts Explain Polyamory and Open Relationships”—presumably to help us figure it all out. Meanwhile, consensual non-monogamy is not just a plotline but practically a character on various shows: in season two of the wonderful Insecure, in which creator Issa Rae imbues her female characters with desires and sexual agency rarely seen on the little or big screen, Molly gets involved with a man in an open marriage (at one point he must leave abruptly during a sexy moment in the bathtub because his wife has locked herself out of their house). On House of Cards, all lugubrious lighting and power plays, the First Lady has lovers with her husband’s full knowledge and consent. If our Google habits are any indication, these shows and articles on the topic have stoked our curiosity. Sex researcher and Kinsey Institute fellow Amy Moors discovered that from 2009 to 2016 there was a dramatic uptick in searches for the terms “polyamory” and “open relationship.” Sheff calls all this CNM’s “third wave.” To state the obvious, non-monogamy is exercising a pull on us because monogamy isn’t working for everyone. Sure, in 2008, four-fifths of Americans polled in the General Social Survey (GSS)—a comprehensive sociological interview instrument that tracks social attitudes, concerns, and changes—said infidelity is “always wrong.” And 91 percent of more than 1,500 adults responding to a 2013 Gallup poll rated it “immoral.” But research that relies on the GSS and other representative samples also suggests that over our lifetimes, anywhere between 20 and 37.5 percent of us will cheat. The real percentage may well be higher, experts tell us, because we underreport our cheating. One source suggests that 60 percent of men and 50 percent of women in the US “reported sexual intercourse with someone who was not their spouse while married.” Asking about infidelity over a lifetime—“Have you ever cheated on your spouse or long-term partner?”—is likely to yield higher numbers than questions about the previous year or decade, experts note.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Several weeks later I found myself at another Skirt Club party, this one in L.A. The theme was “BDSM,” and the venue was a loft downtown tricked out like a dungeon. Walking down the long, dark hallway lined with candles, I quickly realized I wasn’t in Kansas, or Manhattan, anymore. The main room was jammed with women, many of them in their twenties, a number of them already naked. In the middle of the room was a large cage. A suspension machine hung from the ceiling. The bar was so crowded I couldn’t get near it. “These girls in L.A. drink a lot more, and they waste no time getting down to it,” LeJeune told me with a wink when I found her. No one seemed to need icebreakers or getting-to-know-you chitchat—they were already making out and grinding on sofas. Others were dancing and groping under a black chandelier. A woman in nothing but a black thong and black electrical tape over her nipples stood in the cage, beckoning me over. To reach her I had to walk past a tall blonde with Brigitte Bardot hair and a black leather miniskirt who was in a lip-lock with an equally statuesque brunette in black lace panties and a black lace bra. But I also walked by women talking about work, women exchanging business cards, women who appeared to be networking. They did so brandishing riding crops and handcuffs and cat-o’-nine-tails. I was relieved when it was time for the performance and I could sit down next to a welcoming male-to-female transsexual with enviable breasts and two women who had traveled to the party from Vancouver.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As we elbowed our way out and started along the platform I spotted my other suitor again, savouring the last seconds he might ever see me, and looking almost nauseous as the train pulled away past us and bore him off. ‘Do you live round here, then?’ I said to the boy, across another funny kind of distance. ‘Not exactly, no,’ he said, with something complacent about him that brought back to me my original impression that he wasn’t very nice. I smiled interrogatively. ‘I thought I might come and check out your place, actually,’ he explained. After some efficient sex, we had a glass of Pimm’s and sat on the window-seat in the evening sun. The air was streaming with seeds, to which Colin was sensitive, and after sneezing and screwing up his eyes for a few minutes, he announced that he had to go. I was not sorry; my mind was already running on to the prospect of opening the bag and getting a feel of what lay ahead. When I closed the door of the flat behind Colin, there the bag was, where I had propped it on a chair before making a grab at him. Retrieving it now, I saw how disrespectful I had been to cast it so hastily aside for the sake of that good but rather professional and chilly trick. I took the bag into the dining-room, tugged open its straps and pulled the contents on to the table. I closed the window to prevent papers from blowing round; since Arthur’s disappearance I had been a fiend for light and fresh air. The main part of the archive was a set of quarto notebooks, bound in brown boards, rubbed and worn at the edges—most of them with a clear ink inscription on the front cover; ‘Oxford, 1920’ and ‘1924: Khartoum’ were the first two I picked up. They were written in a fast, elegant and not especially legible hand, in black ink, and there were odd items tucked between the pages—postcards, letters, drawings, even hotel bills and visiting cards. There was also a fat five-year diary, of the kind which can be locked, with other letters and documents, and a large buff envelope bulky with photographs. I drew up a chair at once to look at these, as I believed they would be, although enigmatic, the keys or charms to open the whole case to me. There were snapshots, group photographs and studio portraits, all mixed up together. A mounted picture of a set of cocky young men was captioned ‘University Shooting VIII, 1921’ in the amateur Gothic script still favoured at Oxford for matriculation and team photos.

• From Untrue (2018)

  What if women of all ages are uncoupling sex from monogamy simply because of who and what we are? The recent work of several female sex researchers suggests it may be so. Over the last decade, a triumvirate of academic experts—Meredith Chivers, biopsychologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario; Marta Meana, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and Alicia Walker, a sociologist and expert on female infidelity at Missouri State University in Springfield—have all peeled back what science writer Natalie Angier has characterized as “the multiple sheaths of compromise and constraint” that cloak and contort female sexuality so thoroughly as to make women strangers to ourselves and our own libidos. What these experts have unveiled shakes up many of our most deeply ingrained and dearly held assumptions about who women are, what motivates us, and what we want. Our sexual selves are being rethought, reexamined, and perhaps finally revealed. TrailblazersSex researchers are a friendly tribe. At least the ones who attended the 2017 annual SSTAR (Society for Sex Therapy and Research) meeting in Montréal are. It was unseasonably cold and relentlessly gray when I arrived in Quebec’s largest city in late April—the conference’s theme was “Healing Relationships and Fostering Sexual Well-Being”—but I found the sexologists, sex researchers, sex therapists, and sex educators there warm and welcoming to a person as I bumped from presentation to presentation. These included “Dialectical Behavioral Group Therapy for Out-of-Control Internet Porn Users,” “Impact of Persistent Genital Arousal Symptoms on Women’s Psychosocial, Sexual, and Relationship Functioning,” and sessions on “Kink Awareness.” No one rejected my requests for interviews or even put me off, an occupational hazard for writers dealing with experts. Instead they offered copies of their books, their contact information, and advice about journal articles I might find helpful. Questions posed to speakers by their colleagues were collegial, even when they were challenging. I began to suspect that being open, curious, and matter-of-fact about sex—a subject many of us consider shameful and private and, like those newly discovered creatures who inhabit the deepest parts of the ocean, perfectly suited and inherently appropriate to its indigenous darkness—correlates with a sunny disposition and bright interpersonal style. The hotel’s bar was convivial at 5 p.m., when the sexperts repaired there to unwind, the kind of detail that tells an observer a lot.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The story of Druckerman’s interviewee Elaine is typical of affairs of the era and of her milieu. Married and in her mid-twenties, she met a man she felt an instant attraction to, Irwin, at a party at her uncle’s house. Not long after, they had sex in Irwin’s car (“I went down on him, in the car! I said to myself, If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it the whole way!”). Irwin told Elaine that he would never leave his wife, but Elaine had an agenda of her own, and after a meet-up or two in the city, she implemented a scheme: “I got more friendly with his wife, so that the four of us were together constantly.… There were times when Irwin and I were in New York and we’d fall asleep in a hotel, and we’d both be late coming home, and the four of us [all] had [a date] that night, and [my] husband and [his] wife never put it together.” Elaine would go shopping with Irwin’s wife and then see him at night and say, “Ugh, what your wife bought!” Elaine—strategic, unrepentant, calculating, perhaps even devious to our eyes and ears at this half-century-plus distance—was no outlier. She and her peers engineered trysts with precise intent. There were plenty of chances to abandon these plans and think twice about the meet-ups they plotted, as Sarah had. They didn’t. Instead, they proceeded brazenly, telling their girlfriends all and even introducing their married beaus to their mothers. Nor were they embarrassed about what they’d done when they were young (or, in Sarah’s case, ashamed and remorseful about what they hadn’t done). Au contraire, perhaps because they had exercised such agency and taken such risks, they considered their affairs the best, most exciting times of their lives. “We didn’t have guilt then. Everybody knew. It was exciting. It was thrilling!” they told Druckerman. Nancy described what happened when she went into the city to meet her paramour, a married real estate developer. “I’m talking about going to meet him in New York one day and having detectives follow me and…chase me!”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I kept him at it for about an hour, never stopping as, under the DJ’s gurgling patter, the rhythms of one track, clean and fierce, cut across and then went under the rhythms of the next. It was a sport, where exhaustion was only a spur to more effort, the blood-opiates sang through the system, lap succeeded lap. On the floor there was competition, more athletic than sexual, and I would find myself challenged, magnetised by strangers, drawn into faster and faster action, though no words were said, we affected not even to look at each other. And some of the kids there could dance. Sometimes a ring would suddenly form around one or two of them, and we hung on each other’s shoulders to see them—their brief, fizzy routines of backward handsprings, jack-knife jumps and other crazy things. Boy after boy would follow, explode in action, stumble back into obscurity; and then the ring would dissolve, the crowd would repossess the floor. At last Phil rocked to a stop and gestured for drink. I gasped ‘Lager’ in his ear. Both of us were parched—and all wet outside, so that his hair, when I roughed it and sent him off, stood up, and the bristly back of his neck glistened as if it had been dressed. I lurched off the dance floor and into Stan. Stan was a colossal Guyanan bodybuilder, not only gigantically muscular but six feet six inches tall. ‘Love the arse on your chum,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching him.’ ‘Heaven, isn’t it?’ ‘Yeah. Where d’you find that then?’ ‘I took him under my wing at the Corry.’ He craned to see where Phil had got to in the further spotlit half-dark. ‘Still go there then?’ ‘Daily. You should come back. We all miss seeing you.’ Stan smiled sweetly and said, ‘I bet you fucking do.’ His mouth, like the rest of him, was vast, so that when he laughed it seemed his whole head would open up like a canteen of cutlery. I had met him at the Corry during my first Oxford vac and fooled about with him rather unsatisfactorily in an alley off the Tottenham Court Road. I remember how struck I was by the contrast of his rocky physique and the beautiful, almost smothering softness of his lips. A term later he had left, for some north London gym more suited to his championship needs. But I would run into him from time to time in clubs and bars, and though we had nothing much in common I seemed to charm him somehow, so that despite his superhuman body he was slightly in awe of me. I rested a hand on the side of his neck, whose shaft, thicker than his head, was buttressed by the gathered, sloping muscles of his shoulders.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  My fieldwork in Suriname in 1982 launched me on a path of exploration that I have continued to follow down to the present day (though with diminished capacity in recent decades due to major hearing loss). In the intervening decades, I have conducted ornithological research in twelve neotropical countries and have had the good fortune to observe nearly forty species of manakins in the wild. (I am still working eagerly to see the rest.) For some of those species, I spent hours, days, or even months of observation getting to know their habits, observing their daily rhythms, describing their courtship songs and dances, and mapping out their social relationships. This helped me to build a rich database of natural history knowledge about manakin behavioral complexity and aesthetic diversity. But my ever-expanding knowledge of manakin diversity also taught me to ask bigger, more fundamental questions about the evolutionary workings of the natural world. Early on, I had thought of manakins as colorful birds with delightfully bizarre display and social behaviors. Later, I conceptualized the manakins as a great example of how the complex mechanisms of mate choice affect behavioral evolution among species. Most recently, I have come to think of manakins as one of the world’s premier examples of aesthetic radiation. And as we’ll see in a later discussion of manakins (see chapter 7), the female manakins haven’t only transformed male display repertoires; they’ve changed the very nature of male social relations. It’s an astonishing story of the transformative power of female mate choice.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I looked at Walter and only then realized that his eyes were moist. He was shaking his head from side to side in disbelief. I put my hand on his shoulder before announcing to the court that Myers could be excused. We had no further questions. Myers stood up to leave the courtroom. As the deputies led him to a side door, he looked apologetically at Walter before being escorted out. I’m not sure Walter saw him. People in the courtroom started whispering again. I heard one of Walter’s relatives, in a muted tone, say, “Thank you, Jesus!” The next challenge was to rebut the testimony of Bill Hooks and Joe Hightower, who had claimed to see Walter’s modified “low-rider” truck pulling out from the cleaners about the time Ronda Morrison was murdered. I called Clay Kast to the stand. The white mechanic testified that McMillian’s truck was not a low-rider in November 1986 when Ronda Morrison was murdered. Kast had records and clearly remembered modifying Walter’s truck in May 1987, over six months after the day when Hooks and Hightower claimed they’d seen a low-rider truck at the cleaners. We finished the day with Woodrow Ikner, a Monroeville police officer who testified that he was the first on the scene and that the body of Ronda Morrison was not where Myers had testified it was. Ikner said it was clear from his observation of the murder scene that Morrison had been shot in the back after a struggle that had started in the bathroom and ended in the rear of the cleaners, where the body was found. Ikner’s description of the scene contradicted the assertion that Myers had made at trial about seeing Morrison near the front counter. More significantly, Ikner testified that he’d been asked by Pearson, the trial prosecutor, to testify that Morrison’s body had been dragged through the store from the front counter to the spot where it was found. Ikner was indignant on the stand as he recalled the conversation. He knew that such testimony would be false and had told the prosecutors that he refused to lie. He was soon after discharged from the police department. Evidentiary hearings, like jury trials, can be exhausting. I had done the direct examination of all of the witnesses and was surprised when I realized that it was already 5:00 P.M. The hearing was going well. I was excited and energized to be able, finally, to lay out all of the evidence proving Walter’s innocence.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  ais in a late antique cemetery he excavated at Antinoe. Elsewhere in the same graveyard was found the body of a male mummy, buried with an iron belt, along with a potsherd that identifi ed him as Serapion. Th e museum of Gayet’s patron, Émile Étienne Guimet, was eager to accommodate imaginative connections with the Th ais and Serapion of legend. In short or- der the exhumed mummies of Th ais and Serapion were displayed together in a glass case at the museum. In the sweltering summer heat of 1902, in a last burst of fame for the penitent prostitutes, Th ais was the sensation of Paris. Th e identifi cation of the mummy as the Th ais of literary legend might have faded like any other instance of archaeological exuberance, had not an eminent scholar of Syriac Christianity, l’Abbé François Nau, intervened at R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  this juncture with a discovery that seemed not only to support the identifi - cation but to clinch it by the addition of a relationship between Th ais and Serapion. Th is was more than Gayet had dreamed of. In the pop u lar version of the Th ais legend, best known through the Latin translation in the Vitae Patrum and adapted by Anatole France, Th ais is led to repentance by a monk named Paphnutius. But Nau discovered an unedited Greek version of the life of Th ais, preserved in a handful of Eu ro pe an manuscripts, that presents a monk called Serapion the Sindonite as the instrument of her salvation. Nau’s discovery of a Greek version of the life— noteworthy enough apart from Gayet and his mummies— came at a fortuitous moment, and it was quickly published . . . in the Annales du Musée Guimet. Nau made a signifi cant discovery that was coincidentally useful to others, though he entertained sensational identifi cations that deserved more than a half mea-sure of scholarly skepticism. Nau’s willingness to identify Th ais the mummy with the Th ais of hagiography has obscured, in the glare of misspent erudition, what is a real opportunity to witness the transformation of an early monastic legend into refi ned literature. He treats the story of Serapion in the Sayings of the Fathers as the prime source for the Life or Repentance of Th ais— without any reckoning of just how little is shared between the primitive and literary versions of the story. Th e primitive legend and the literary version of the Life of Th ais in fact

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I waited greedily, and yelped as his hand came down, and again and again, tenderising my ass with wild, hard slaps. Then he crossed the room in front of me and yanked down from a shelf a catering-size drum of corn oil. It fell cold on my skin as he splashed it from a height then slicked my cheeks and slot, driving a strong unhesitating finger in. I heard the graphic rustle of his clothes, his trousers dropping to the floor with the weight of the keys in his pocket. He fucked me with a thrilling leisured vehemence, giving each long stroke, when it was in to the balls, a final questing shunt that had me gurgling with pleasure and grunting with pain, my cock chafing beneath me against the table’s furred and splintered edge. It was quickly finished, and he slurped out of me, and slapped me again. ‘Hmm,’ he said noncommittally; then, ‘Fuck off out of here, man.’ 7 At my prep school the prefects (for some errant Wykehamical reason) were called Librarians. The appellation seemed to imply that in the care of books lay the roots of leadership—though, by and large, there was nothing bookish about the Librarians themselves. They were chosen on grounds of aptitude for particular tasks, and were known officially by the name of their responsibility. So there were the Chapel Librarian, the Hall Librarian, the Garden Librarian and even, more charmingly, the Running and the Cricket Librarians. My aptitude, from the tropically early onslaught of puberty forwards, had been so narrowly, though abundantly, for playing with myself and others, that it was only in my last term, as a shooting, tumid thirteen-year-old, that I achieved official status, and was appointed Swimming-Pool Librarian. My parents were evidently relieved that I was not entirely lost (urged absurdly to read Trollope I had stuck fast on Rider Haggard) and my father, in a letter to me, made one of his rare witticisms: ‘Delighted to hear that you’re to be Swimming-Pool Librarian. You must tell me what sort of books they have in the Swimming-Pool Library.’ I was an ideal appointment, not only a good swimmer but one who took a keen interest in the pool. A quarter of a mile from the school buildings, down a chestnut-lined drive, the small open-air bath and its whitewashed, skylit changing-room saw all my earliest excesses. On high summer nights when it was light enough at midnight to read outside, three or four of us would slip away from the dorms and go with an exaggerated refinement of stealth to the pool.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I have omitted to mention the smell, which as soon as the ship docked & the wind it made was stilled, rose to the nostrils from the land. ‘Ah, the East!’ Harrap had said connoisseurially. It is not a smell one could anticipate, or even much care for in itself, but I relished its authenticity at once—a dusty dryness, & a sweetness, a foetor, as it might be near some perpetual meat-market, a smell utterly unhygienic and inevitable. The other streets here might have borne exploring, but I was thirsty & went to sit in the shade of the tea-terrace. The tea, served impractically in a glass, was refreshing, somehow muddy & more sustaining than tea I am used to. All the while there was Sinai, very hazily apparent in the distance, & near to the spectacle of the ship being refuelled, which is done by an endless chain of Egyptians, some in blue or white djellabas, others naked but for a knotted nappy around the loins, lean, by & large, & sinewy. All the while they pass on baskets of coal, their foreman leading them in monotonous chanting, a call raised, a general echoing response, the words, indistinguishable to my Oxford Arabic, intensifying the impression of changeless pharaonic labour. Meanwhile on the quay, & even for a while from the bows of the ship until an official stopped them, three or four youths, virtually naked & entrancingly wild & fearless, were diving for coins. As I sat & watched them, my pleasure & fascination evident perhaps in my gaze, a handsome young man with the immemorial flat, broad features of the Egyptian, a blue djellaba & a circular embroidered hat that made him look like an exotic afterthought of Tiepolo, sidled among the tables towards me, half-concealing behind him a battered valise. I had been thoroughly trained to expect him & his inevitable offers of fake antiquities, but as I was still alone—the others not yet having arrived at the rendezvous—& in my mood of exultant curiosity & celebration, I let him approach. The major-domo, I noticed, kept an eye out for my reaction, & when I did not object, looked at the youth in a way which suggested some sinister understanding between them, as if, the protocol of deference having been observed, I was now a legitimate victim of their antique trade. ‘You see Lesseps statue, m’sieu,’ he said, standing over me solicitously. ‘No, no,’ I replied tolerantly. ‘Is very good, m’sieu. You like. You like, I take you. Only 50 piastres. Is most instructive.’ ‘No thank you,’ I said firmly, but with an amused look, I suppose, which may have encouraged him—if encouragement were needed—to carry on. He hoisted his case up then on to the table, although I raised a hand to promise him it was no use. ‘Here is postcard picture of statue of Lesseps, m’sieu.

• From Untrue (2018)

  A week or so after that awkward get-together and continued texting, late one evening Michelle’s doorbell rang. When she opened it, Delia stood in front of her. Her wife was away and she just had to see Michelle, she said. She walked in and pushed Michelle up against the wall, pressing into her, and they kissed, a long, hot kiss. “There was a line there, and I crossed it,” Michelle says in retrospect. “That is very, very me.” She told Delia to leave, and she did, but Michelle couldn’t stop thinking about her—that kiss, the way it felt to have Delia’s body pressed up against hers—and soon they were seeing each other. It was secretive and exciting, but it didn’t feel right to Michelle. “She’d sometimes come over while she was out on a run. Once we met in a park. Other times I’d wait for her in a parking garage and we’d go to a hotel. It was all very covert; it was terrible,” Michelle recalls, shaking her head. “From the get-go I told her, ‘Look, we can’t do this unless you leave your wife.’ I was clear about that. I said, ‘You have to at least be on your way out.’ And she said, ‘I’m doing it.’ And to her credit she tried.” A few months after Delia and Michelle’s first kiss, Delia and her wife separated, and she moved into her own place. She and Michelle spent a few weeks together, though no sleepovers “because of the kids.” They were weeks Michelle still describes as “incredibly sexy but also deep. We had and still have a very real connection and an incredible attraction to each other.” They were getting into a groove, talking about how to integrate their lives and what to tell their children when all hell broke loose. Delia’s wife discovered a love letter Michelle had written to Delia and put the timeline together. She realized Delia had cheated on her with Michelle, and she was devastated and very angry. She came to Delia’s job and created a scene that was humiliating to Delia. And then Delia decided to go back to her wife. “She told me she felt so guilty and that she didn’t deserve to be happy when her partner was so miserable. She’s just utterly codependent on this woman she’s desperately unhappy with, but it wasn’t my place to get into that with her.”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  My sister Paulina was grave, silent, and sullen; she was married young to an old man. The standard of honesty was rigorous, but we were harsh to slaves. There was no curiosity about anything whatsoever; one was careful to think on all subjects what becomes a citizen of Rome. Of these many virtues, if virtues they be, I shall have been the squanderer. Officially a Roman emperor is said to be born in Rome, but it was in Italica that I was born; it was upon that dry but fertile country that I later superposed so many regions of the world. The official fiction has some merit: it proves that decisions of the mind and of the will do prevail over circumstance. The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools. The schools of Spain had suffered from the effects of provincial leisure. Terentius Scaurus' school, in Rome, gave mediocre instruction in the philosophers and the poets but afforded rather good preparation for the vicissitudes of human existence: teachers exercised a tyranny over pupils which it would shame me to impose upon men; enclosed within the narrow limits of his own learning, each one despised his colleagues, who, in turn, had equally narrow knowledge of something else. These pedants made themselves hoarse in mere verbal disputes. The quarrels over precedence, the intrigues and calumnies, gave me acquaintance with what I was to encounter thereafter in every society in which I have lived, and to such experiences was added the brutality of all childhood. And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal to you a masterpiece, or to unveil for you a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, after all; it was Socrates. The methods of grammarians and rhetoricians are perhaps less absurd than I thought them to be during the years when I was subjected to them. Grammar, with its mixture of logical rule and arbitrary usage, proposes to a young mind a foretaste of what will be offered to him later on by law and ethics, those sciences of human conduct, and by all the systems wherein man has codified his instinctive experience. As for the rhetorical exercises in which we were successively Xerxes and Themistocles, Octavius and Mark Antony, they intoxicated me; I felt like Proteus.

• From Untrue (2018)

  As for “weaker” libidos—guess again. For most female primates, a single copulation with one male is just the warm-up. When they are sexually receptive and sometimes even when not, they may seek out copulation after copulation with numerous males, one after the other, often in rapid sequence. Female chimps in one group averaged 3.6 daily copulations while in estrus, and never with just one male; an Indian female rhesus was observed soliciting four different males in less than two hours. A female chacma baboon would be unimpressed by her rhesus cousin’s appetite; chacmas have been observed to mate with three males in three minutes. Unconstrained, woolly spider monkey and Barbary macaque females will copulate with just about every male they encounter. While these behaviors may seem undiscriminating, they are anything but: what really gets our non-human primate female cousins going is a fellow who hasn’t been around long, or even better, a total stranger. Female chimps leave their natal groups to have sex with “stranger” males and then return home. Female patas monkeys “roam the savannah looking for males other than their harem leader.” Squirrel monkey females look for action outside their troop all the time. As mentioned previously, Kim Wallen and his colleagues at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center know it’s important to introduce new males into their macaque population; otherwise the females lose interest in sex entirely. Even supposedly “monogamous” gibbon females hook up with new males when their mates are out of sight. Small summarizes that a thirst for novelty is the single most observable trait among all the sexual behaviors, preferences, and drivers of female primates. In fact, female primates couldn’t be further from reluctant breeders or seekers of “intimacy” with a single “best” mate, or dead set on doing it with “the alpha.” Indeed, Small suggests that it is difficult for us humans to wrap our minds around “just how little importance nonhuman female primates attach to knowing a male before they mate with him.” Au contraire, our primate sisters are sexual adventuresses, driven by the thrill of the unknown and unfamiliar. And not a few of them like to get busy with other females. Linda Wolfe discovered that roughly 75 percent of the two troops of female macaques she studied regularly mounted or were mounted by other females. Female langurs also have sexual encounters with other female langurs; in three thousand hours of observation of a troop in India, researchers found that there were no females who didn’t. Could a penchant for sexual variety—homosexual as well as heterosexual acts—be an extension of the female primate’s craving for novelty? Could the sex of one’s partner be less important to a female primate than the excitement of the new and the unexpected, and the pleasures they confer? And what’s the relationship between the social and the sexual for female primates of the human and non-human varieties?

• From Untrue (2018)

  Until the body shots. The lights went even lower, the music got even louder. One woman after another lay on her back on a white leather sofa, giggling as her legs were sprinkled with salt. A lime was stuffed into her mouth. Shot glasses of tequila rested near her face, and the game was on. “Victims” were licked, literally from head to toe (well, toe to head). Then the disinhibited partygoers headed for the large hot tub on the terrace, an impromptu make-out session in a cozy den, and the bedrooms. By 11 p.m., a group of eight naked women were on a bed upstairs, having sex in every imaginable configuration. They were grinding and giving and receiving oral sex. One woman used a dildo on another woman, who writhed and groaned on her back in the middle of the bed. Like stockings, inhibitions were shed. “I’ve been married for almost twenty years, and I just had sex with another married woman. This party helped me find myself,” a remarkably fit and entirely naked woman enthusiastically told me as we watched the goings-on from what I deemed a safe distance. As she pulled her thong and spike-heeled boots back on and a woman on the bed behind her climaxed noisily, I did not doubt her. An attractive woman in a bustier and thong, her heels long cast aside, reached out and asked me if I wanted to join her on the bed. I demurred and headed downstairs. Fascinating and hot as I found my first Skirt Club party, I couldn’t cross the line. At the door, the beautiful young blonde woman who had been tied up approached me. She said she was sorry I was leaving and that she hoped we could see each other again soon. I offered my phone so she could give me her contact information and then I headed out. In the lobby, I could still hear laughter and pumping music. The bonobo bacchanal would continue for hours.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was as full as it sensibly could be now, and there were some interesting punky-looking boys with public-school voices as well as real leather queens and a sprinkling of those dotty types with monocles and panama hats who seem to exist for ever in some fantastic Bloomsbury of their own. I was excited by a heavily built man with thick slicked-back hair, and was showing an implausible degree of interest in the picture hanging just by his right shoulder, when the bell went again. We both turned, though he looked away at once while I, seeing Charles shuffle in, felt my mood lighten with friendliness and a flicker of guilt. I had been neglecting the old boy, and seeing him now in this noisy, confusing place recalled my responsibilities. I went to help him. ‘Ah … ah …’, he was saying, looking regretfully to left and right. ‘Charles! It’s William.’ He took my arm at once. ‘I know perfectly well who it is. What an orgy … Good heavens.’ He gave off, close to, the elderly smell of sweat and shaving-soap. ‘We almost didn’t come,’ he admitted, with what I took for humorous grandeur. ‘I’m very glad you did. I haven’t seen you for ages.’ He was prodding his other hand behind him, like someone searching for the armhole of a coat. ‘This is Norman,’ he explained, as another man, thus encouraged, came forward from his shadow. ‘The grocer’s boy.’ Norman reached round Charles to shake my hand. ‘I’m the grocer’s boy,’ he confirmed, very happy, it seemed, to be remembered by his juvenile role. As he was a man in his mid-fifties I found it hard to place him at first. ‘I used to work in the grocer’s in Skinner’s Lane,’ he said, smiling, nodding, ‘years and years ago, when Lord Nantwich first moved in.’ I cottoned on. ‘And then you joined the merchant navy and sailed all over the world.’ He smiled again, as at the successful recitation of an old tale. ‘I left the service some time ago now, though.’ Service, one could see, was something he was proud of, and his whole manner spoke of it. He was soberly dressed, in an ill-fitting grey suit and shiny casual shoes of a kind that had been fashionable in my earliest childhood (my father had worn something very similar on family holidays). The suit, which was broad in the shoulders and stood off the neck, was the sort of thing that students bought in second-hand shops, and on one or two of the modish boys in this room could have had a certain chic. Norman’s wearing of it was without irony and he reminded me, as the man in the lavatory had reminded Charles forty years before, of a College scout, habituated, stunted by service. His face shone. ‘Norman dropped in this afternoon,’ said Charles. ‘Quite amazing.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I called Clay Kast to the stand. The white mechanic testified that McMillian’s truck was not a low-rider in November 1986 when Ronda Morrison was murdered. Kast had records and clearly remembered modifying Walter’s truck in May 1987, over six months after the day when Hooks and Hightower claimed they’d seen a low-rider truck at the cleaners. We finished the day with Woodrow Ikner, a Monroeville police officer who testified that he was the first on the scene and that the body of Ronda Morrison was not where Myers had testified it was. Ikner said it was clear from his observation of the murder scene that Morrison had been shot in the back after a struggle that had started in the bathroom and ended in the rear of the cleaners, where the body was found. Ikner’s description of the scene contradicted the assertion that Myers had made at trial about seeing Morrison near the front counter. More significantly, Ikner testified that he’d been asked by Pearson, the trial prosecutor, to testify that Morrison’s body had been dragged through the store from the front counter to the spot where it was found. Ikner was indignant on the stand as he recalled the conversation. He knew that such testimony would be false and had told the prosecutors that he refused to lie. He was soon after discharged from the police department. Evidentiary hearings, like jury trials, can be exhausting. I had done the direct examination of all of the witnesses and was surprised when I realized that it was already 5:00 P.M. The hearing was going well. I was excited and energized to be able, finally, to lay out all of the evidence proving Walter’s innocence. I kept an eye on Judge Norton to make sure he was still engaged, and he seemed visibly affected by the proceedings. I believed the concerned look on his face revealed confusion about what he was going to do in light of this evidence, and I considered the judge’s newfound confusion and concern to be real progress. All of the witnesses we called during the first day were white, and none had any loyalties to Walter McMillian. It seemed that Judge Norton had not expected that. When Clay Kast acknowledged that the truck the state witnesses described as a “low-rider” wasn’t modified until close to seven months after the crime took place, the judge furiously scribbled notes, the worry lines on his face deepening. When Woodrow Ikner announced that he had been fired for trying to be honest about the evidence against McMillian, the judge seemed shaken. This was the first evidence we presented that suggested that people in law enforcement had been so focused on convicting Walter that they were prepared to ignore or even hide evidence that contradicted their case.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I got all the books I could on rockets and outer space and read them for hours in the library, completely fascinated by the drawings and the telescopes and the sky charts. I had an incredible rocket I got for Christmas that you had to pump compressed water into. I pulled back a plastic clip and it would send the thing blasting out across Castiglia’s lawn, then out onto Hamilton Avenue in a long arc of spurting water. Castiglia and I used to tape aluminum-foil rolls from Mom’s kitchen to the top of the plastic rocket then put ants and worms in the nosecone with a secret message wrapped in tissue paper. We had hundreds of rocket launchings that year. Though none of our payloads made it into orbit like the Sputniks, we had a lot of fun trying. In the spring of that year I remember the whole class went down to New York City and saw the movie Around the World in Eighty Days on a tremendous screen that made all of us feel like we were right there in the balloon flying around the world. After the movie we went to the Museum of Natural History, where Castiglia and I walked around staring up at the huge prehistoric dinosaurs billions of years old, and studied fossils inside the big glass cases and wondered what it would have been like if we had been alive back then. After the museum they took us to the Hayden Planetarium, where the whole sixth-grade class leaned back in special sky chairs, looking up into the dome where a projector that looked like a huge mechanical praying mantis kept us glued to the sky above our heads with meteor showers and comets and galaxies that appeared like tremendous snowstorms swirling in the pitch darkness of the incredible dome. They showed the whole beginning of the earth that afternoon, as we sat back in our chairs and dreamed of walking on the moon someday or going off to Mars wondering if there really was life there and rocketing off deeper and deeper into space through all the time barriers into places and dreams we could only begin to imagine. When we got on the school bus afterward and were all seated, Mr. Serby, our sixth-grade teacher, turned around and in a soft voice told us that someday men would walk upon the moon, and probably in our lifetime, he said, we would see it happen. We were still trying to catch up with the Russians when I heard on the radio that the United States was going to try and launch its first satellite, called Vanguard , into outer space. That night Mom and Dad and me and the rest of the kids watched the long pencil-like rocket on the television screen as it began to lift off after the countdown. It lifted off slowly at first.