Excitement

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 92 of 182 · 20 per page

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  When she saw that her plane would be half an hour late, she relaxed. She was one of four students from Syracuse waiting to board American Airlines Flight 6780 heading to Newark Airport. Like her, they’d finished their exams and were going home for a break before second semester began. Kathy was the only girl among them, making her wish her roommate, Jane, had been able to come. She kidded around with the boys while they waited, bought a pack of Juicy Fruit and a copy of Silver Screen to distract her during the flight. The weather was nasty, but who cared? Her cousin Phil would be meeting her at Newark, and he’d promised to bring his friend Steve Osner. Not that she and Steve had talked about officially dating or anything, but he liked her—she could tell. There was definitely an attraction between them. Not to mention that sweet Happy New Year kiss. She wasn’t going to worry about the difference in their ages. Everyone knew that wives outlived their husbands. The plane had already picked up passengers in Buffalo and Rochester when it finally landed in Syracuse. Kathy boarded and was seated next to an older man, who introduced himself as Robert Patterson. When he asked what she was studying she hid her movie magazine, not wanting him to think she was some dumb girl. He was very friendly. Told her he had a son and three daughters. Told her he was the former Secretary of War under President Truman. Gads, Kathy thought, he was someone important, someone famous. He wanted to know her plans for the future. Said it was never too early to have goals. She was embarrassed. She’d never really thought beyond graduating from the college of home economics, marrying someone with possibilities and having a couple of kids. “I’m going to work for a food magazine,” she said, trying to impress him. Working for a magazine sounded glamorous to her. She’d have to live in New York. She was pretty sure that’s where the magazines had their offices. Or she could commute. By the time they began their descent into Newark, she had it all worked out in her head. She’d marry Steve Osner, work for a magazine in New York until they had children and live in Elizabeth, in the same pretty neighborhood as Steve’s parents, where the streets were named after poets—Kipling, Browning, Byron, Shelley. When she’d mentioned to Steve that she loved the names of the streets around his house Steve had seemed surprised. “Really?” he’d asked. “English poets?” Oh, well, the required freshman English lit course would fix that. It had been a bumpy trip, and she was starting to feel queasy. “I don’t like it when I can’t see the ground,” she told Secretary Patterson. He told her to focus on something straight ahead. Don’t look out the window. She figured he knew, being a former Secretary of War and all.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We came to know French truck stops with Italian espresso machines serving thick excellent coffee. We came to know the pleasures of Alsatian beer and boxes of peaches bought from farmers by the side of the road. We knew we were in France when the headlights of the cars turned from white to mustard yellow and the bread became delicious. We came to know the ugliest part of France, that badland near the German border where the roads are broken-surfaced meandering two-lane caravans and the French refuse to repair them, saying that the Germans get to Paris fast enough anyway. We came to know an endless series of cheap hostelries with two-watt lightbulbs and fly-speckled bidets (into which we peed because we were reluctant to trek out to the filthy hall toilet whose light only went on when you broke your nails turning the door lock). We came to know the more posh sort of campsite with indoor toilets and a bar with a jukebox blaring the Beatles. But most of the time (this being August and every burgher in Europe being on a camping vacation with his 2.5 children), we found the better campsites filled and had to pitch our tent by the side of the road (and crap squatting with the weeds tickling our asses and the horseflies zooming hideously close to our assholes to alight upon the fresh turds). We came to know the Autostrada del Sole with its phantasmagoric Pavese auto-grills—Fellini visions of cellophane-wrapped candy, mountains of toys, barrels of silver-foil-wrapped panetone, gift-ribboned jam pots, and tricycles trailing streamers of lollipops. We came to know the Italian madmen who race their Fiat Cinquecenti ninety miles an hour, but always stop to cross themselves and drop a few lire in the collection box at a roadside Jesus. We came to know dozens of major and minor airports in Germany and France and Italy, because at that point in the day when the second round of beers wore off and my massive depression reared its ugly head once more (along with secondary symptoms of headache and hangover), I would panic and command Adrian to drive me to the nearest airport. He never said no. Oh he would become silent and act disappointed with me, but he never directly opposed any clearly stated wish of mine. To the nearest Flughafen or aeroporto we went, getting lost and asking directions a dozen times along the way. When we got there we inevitably found out that the next plane was not for two days, or that it was booked solid (Europa in August: tout le monde en vacances), or that it had left two minutes ago. And then there would be a bar at the airport and we would drink more beer and Adrian would kiss me and joke with me and grab my ass affectionately and talk about our shared adventure. So off we’d go again in good spirits for the time being. After all, I wasn’t entirely sure I had any other place to go.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I’ve always been religious deep down. I never wanted to hurt anyone, not even when I was drilling a tooth.” She kisses him. “Is it any wonder I love you?” “No funeral,” he reminds her for the tenth time. — NONE OF THEM KNOWS if Natalie will show up for his early birthday party, but at the last minute, she does. She brings fifteen-year-old Ruby with her, the youngest of her three children, each by a different father. She’s never seen the point of marriage. They stay in a two-bedroom suite at Caesars Palace, arranged by Christina. A car and driver are at Natalie’s disposal, delivering her and young Ruby to Miri’s house for Dr. O’s party. It’s a sunny afternoon, warm enough to set up the buffet on the deck. Eliza hits it off with Ruby Renso. “What exactly is our relationship?” Miri hears Ruby ask Eliza. Eliza answers, “Well...your grandfather is married to my grandmother. That must make us something-in-laws.” “Yes,” Ruby says. “Something-in-laws.” Before sunset Eliza and Ruby come to her. “Mom,” Eliza says with more enthusiasm than Miri has heard in ages, “Ruby’s invited me to Santa Fe for the summer.” “Actually,” Ruby says, “we live on a spread in Tesuque, outside of Santa Fe.” “Can I go?” Eliza begs. “Please...” Miri has to think fast. “Let me talk to Natalie about this and see what we can work out.” “Does that mean yes?” Ruby asks Eliza. Eliza says, “It means We’ll see.” “Great!” Ruby says. “At least it doesn’t mean no!” Miri laughs. So do Malcolm and Kenny. “She’s going to be okay, Mom,” Kenny says of Eliza. “I hope so,” Miri says. “At least we didn’t give you any trouble,” Malcolm says. “Right, Kenny? We were perfect children.” Ha! Miri remembers the pot plants in the closet, the acid trip to the mountains,

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Title : The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us Author: Bergstein, Rachelle ASIN : B0CL5HCDDV [image "Cover: The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us, by Rachelle Bergstein." file=Image00005.jpg] Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. [image "The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us, by Rachelle Bergstein. One Signal Publishers. Atria. New York | London | Toronto | Sydney | New Delhi." file=Image00006.jpg] For my son Curtis and his friends, who make me excited about the future But here she had no children, no husband, and her mother was dead, no one was far weaker or far stronger than she, she carried her rage unknown, hidden, unknowable yet, she moved, slowly, under the arches, literally singing. —SHARON OLDS, FROM “VISITING MY MOTHER’S COLLEGE” The word police can fuck off. —MADONNA Timeline1938—Judith Sussman was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey1945—World War II ended1956—Graduated from Battin High School1959—Married John Blume1961—Graduated from New York University; gave birth to Randy Blume1963—Gave birth to Lawrence Blume; The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan1966—The National Organization for Women (NOW) formed1967—Diary of a Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman1968—Richard Nixon was elected1969—The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo1970—Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret ; Sexual Politics by Kate Millett; Women’s Strike for Equality1971—Freckle Juice and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t1972—It’s Not the End of the World and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing 1973—Deenie ; Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court; Fear of Flying by Erica Jong1974—Blubber ; Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal1975—Divorced John Blume; Forever ; the Vietnam War ended1976—Married Tom Kitchens in England1977—Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself ; It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein1978—Wifey1979—Divorced Tom Kitchens1980—Ronald Reagan was elected; Superfudge ; met George Cooper1981—Tiger Eyes1983—Smart Women1987—Married George Cooper; Just as Long as We’re Together PrefaceJudy Blume was my first. She wasn’t the first author I fell in love with, but when I was nine years old, she pulled me across another major milestone—she wrote a book that I wanted to hide from my parents. Just as Long as We’re Together , about three middle school–aged best friends and their musical-chair friendship dynamics, started with a sentence so intoxicating it might as well have come with a chaser: Stephanie is into hunks . Was I into hunks? I wasn’t sure. But I knew that I couldn’t put the book down. Stephanie’s parents were getting a divorce.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Then she turned her attention to arts and crafts. She bought yards and yards of colorful felt, fashioning it into splashy pendants to hang on children’s walls. Much to Judy’s delight, her local Bloomingdale’s agreed to stock them and they sold for $9 apiece. She made over $350 (around $3,200 in today’s dollars) before that enterprise got squashed by yet another malady, when her fingers started peeling because she developed an allergy to fabric glue. Another idea came to her soon after. Reading bedtime stories to her kids, she wondered if she could be a children’s book author and illustrator. She’d play around with words in her head—a little verse here, a mellifluous phrase there—and chuckle, imagining herself as the unlikely Dr. Seuss of suburban New Jersey. Her maiden name had been Sussman, she noted. Seuss, meet Suss. Was it a sign? Probably not, but Judy started jotting down her ideas anyway. They came alive in colored pencil with simple, homespun drawings. Okay, she conceded, maybe she’d need to work with an artist. But when she wrote, she felt the zap of something familiar from her girlhood: something electric and joyful. A distant, yet sacred, creative force welled up inside her. She wrote one story, called “You Mom, You?” about a mother patiently explaining to her two young kids that she had once been just a silly child herself. The tots—enthralled by their mother’s recollections, told in rhyme—are shocked by her playful history lesson. Judy was proud of her short manuscripts and bound them with brass fasteners. She started researching where she might submit them: small children’s book publishers and Parents magazine. One afternoon, she checked the mail and discovered a continuing education brochure from her alma mater, NYU. One class, offered on Monday nights, felt like it had been included just for her. It was called Writing for Children and Teenagers. Judy signed up and started riding the bus from Scotch Plains into the city every week. Even the commute down to the West Village was fulfilling. There was something about taking herself into Manhattan that seemed both delightfully grown-up and reminiscent of her unencumbered college years. Seeing the steel frame of the George Washington Bridge rise up from the road, the silvery skyline shooting out in the distance, it was like she was traveling to another world, one shimmering with artistic potential. In class, Judy was one of just seven students. The teacher was Lee Wyndham, a published children’s book author, syndicated reviewer, and Russian émigré who wore flamboyant hats with feathers. Wyndham took a traditional view of children’s literature—that all stories should have a good, clear-cut moral with no questions left unanswered in the end—but she also encouraged her pupils to play. Eager to find her own voice, Judy experimented with different perspectives, toggling between first and third person, and an array of narrative forms.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  For it was Carl, dressed in an old fifties-style football sweater and wearing a neat little multicoloured knapsack. He was pacing the stage in the same relaxed, homely manner with which he’d accompanied Zora to the gates of Wellington College, and he smiled prettily as he spoke, the complex rhymes tripping off his luminous teeth as if he were crooning in a barbershop troupe. The only sign of exertion was the river of sweat that came down his face. Doc Brown, in his enthusiasm, had joined Carl on the stage, and now found himself reduced to hype man, Yo-ing like Levi in the tiny syllabic gaps Carl left in his wake. ‘ What? ’ said Ron, unable to hear anything, not even Carl any more, over the roars and whistles of the audience. ‘I KNOW THAT GUY.’ ‘ THAT GUY ?’ ‘YES.’ ‘OH MY GOD . IS HE STRAIGHT?’ Zora laughed. The alcohol had done its work on all of them now. She smiled in a knowing way about things she did not know, and swayed with the beat as much as her footstool would allow. ‘Let’s try to get closer to the stage,’ suggested Claire, and in the last minute, following Ron’s unabashed elbowed course through the audience, they reached their original seats. ‘OH – MY – WORD !’ yelled Doc Brown, as Carl’s tape finished. He held up Carl’s right hand like a prizefighter’s. ‘I think we have  On Beauty a winner – correction: I know we have a champion – ’ But Carl released himself from Doc’s grip and jumped lightly off the stage on to the floor. Somewhere, underneath the cheering, you could hear the discontented boos of rival factions, but the cheers won out. The Creole boys and Levi were nowhere in sight. From all sides people clapped their hands to Carl’s back and rubbed his head fondly. ‘Hey – you don’t want your jeroboam? Brother’s shy – don’t want his prize!’ ‘No, no, no – hold my champagne,’ shouted Carl. ‘Brother got to wash his face, though. Too much sweat is too much.’ Doc Brown nodded sagely. ‘Well said, well said – gotta be fresh and clean. Ain’t no doubt. DJ, spin it for us in the interim.’ Music started up and the audience ceased being an audience and softened into a crowd. ‘Bring him over here,’ insisted Ron, and then to the class: ‘Zora knows that boy. We need him over here.’ ‘You know him? He’s very talented,’ said Claire. ‘I know him this much,’ said Zora, signifying an inch between her forefinger and thumb. Just as she said this, she turned and found Carl in front of her. He had in his face the elated buzz of the performer, just landed back in the plebeian world of his public.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He was just fourteen and still at times a silly kid, especially just before lights out. We had half an hour (if you please) of “free” time after evening study hall before we had to submit to silence, a rustling, Argus-eyed silence (if Argus was a lonely, horny tribe of kids) intensified by wide-awake yearning. In that brief spasm of freedom before lights-out, competing radios would blare out, tuned to a dozen different stations, and pent-up athletes, sore from two hours of immobility at their desks, would explode into shouting football matches in the corridors. Toilets flushed, steam from showers crept out of the bathrooms into the unheated corridors. In one room five boys were sitting around in the dark lighting farts. One expert—fully clothed of course—was lying on his back, legs above his head, holding a lit match to the seat of his pants. A quick spurt of blue flame was his reward. The whole building trembled with the thundering of boys climbing up and down stairs or now shrieking in a water fight by the cooler. Heberto was also full of energy. Look at the vein pulsing in his neck, the aimless trills his long fingers are playing, the weird ululations hooting out of his mouth—until after the fact he invents an explanation of all this spontaneity by resolving himself into an airplane, the hoots modulating into the drone of jets, his flickering hands freezing into rigid wings, the ticking vein force-feeding fuel into the engine as he runs and runs, hysterical with youth, up and down the halls. After such an outburst he could be visited. I’d sit on his bed and watch him carve bits of balsa wood with an X-Acto knife. His eyes would dart up from his task. Everything about him was high-strung, tentative, off course. I never found out why he’d been shunted off to Eton in the middle of the year. The other newcomer, Howie, was my real companion, friend and enemy, someone whose room I couldn’t resist visiting though I didn’t want the other kids to see me going there. Howie had been a bleak, sit-in-a-stupor nihilist, he told me, but now he’d ascended to the discipline and heartlessness of the Nazi Party. A real Nazi. He’d written away for the “literature” of the American Renaissance Party and proudly showed me his foot-long library of books on race, the Aryan heritage, the Führer’s legacy, Communist lies about the “so-called death camps” and so on. He was almost as fat as he was tall.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Not yet.” Pause. “I hear you gotta warm ’em up.” “That’s correct.” “How do you do it?” I had read a marriage manual. “Well, you turn the lights down and kiss a long time first.” “With your clothes on?” “Of course. Then you take off her top and play with her breasts. But very gently. Don’t get too rough—they don’t like that.” “Does she play with your boner?” “Not usually. An older, experienced woman might.” “You been with an older woman?” “Once.” “They get kinda saggy, don’t they?” “My friend was beautiful,” I said, offended on behalf of the imaginary lady. “Is it real wet and slippery in there? Some guy told me it was like wet liver in a milk bottle.” “Only if the romantic foreplay has gone on long enough.” “How long’s enough?” “An hour.” The silence was thoughtful, as though it were an eyelash beating against a pillowcase. “The guys back home? Guys in my neighborhood?” “Yes?” I said. “We all cornhole each other. You ever do that?” “Sure.” “What?” “I said sure.” “Guess you’ve outgrown that by now.” “Well, yeah, but since there aren’t any girls around …” I felt as a scientist must when he knows he’s about to bring off the experiment of his career: outwardly calm, inwardly jubilant, already braced for disappointment. “We could try it now.” Pause. “If you want to.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt he wouldn’t come to my bed; he had found something wrong with me, he thought I was a sissy, I should have said “Right” instead of “That’s correct.” “Got any stuff?” he asked. “What?” “You know. Like Vaseline?” “No, but we don’t need it. Spit will”—I started to say “do,” but men say “work”—“work.” My penis was hard but still bent painfully down in the jockey shorts; I released it and placed the head under the taut elastic waistband. “Naw, you gotta have Vaseline.” I might be knowledgeable about real sex, but apparently Kevin was to be the expert when it came to cornholing. “Well, let’s try spit.” “I don’t know. Okay.” His voice was small and his mouth sounded dry. I watched him come toward me. He, too, had jockey shorts on, which appeared to glow. Though barechested now, he’d worn a T-shirt all through Little League season that had left his torso and upper arms pale; his ghost shirt excited me, because it reminded me he was captain of his team. We pulled off our shorts. I opened my arms to Kevin and closed my eyes. He said, “It’s colder than a witch’s tit.” I lay on my side facing him and he slipped in beside me. His breath smelled of milk.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  So I trudged upstairs. My right hand clutched muffled Chum in my pocket, my left patted the sticky banisters. Of the three bedrooms I inspected, one had obviously been slept in that night. There was a library full of flowers. There was a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin on the slippery floor. There were still other rooms. A happy thought struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room. Consequently, for at least five minutes I went about—lucidly insane, crazily calm, an enchanted and very tight hunter—turning whatever keys in whatever locks there were and pocketing them with my free left hand. The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lockable locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood. Speaking of bathrooms—I was about to visit a third one when master came out of it, leaving a brief waterfall behind him. The corner of a passage did not quite conceal me. Gray-faced, baggy-eyed, fluffily disheveled in a scanty balding way, but still perfectly recognizable, he swept by me in a purple bathrobe, very like one I had. He either did not notice me, or else dismissed me as some familiar and innocuous hallucination—and, showing me his hairy calves, he proceeded, sleepwalker-wise, downstairs. I pocketed my last key and followed him into the entrance hall. He had half opened his mouth and the front door, to peer out through a sunny chink as one who thinks he has heard a half-hearted visitor ring and recede. Then, still ignoring the raincoated phantasm that had stopped in midstairs, master walked into a cozy boudoir across the hall from the drawing room, through which—taking it easy, knowing he was safe—I now went away from him, and in a bar-adorned kitchen gingerly unwrapped dirty Chum, taking care not to leave any oil stains on the chrome—I think I got the wrong product, it was black and awfully messy. In my usual meticulous way, I transferred naked Chum to a clean recess about me and made for the little boudoir. My step, as I say, was springy—too springy perhaps for success. But my heart pounded with tiger joy, and I crunched a cocktail glass underfoot. Master met me in the Oriental parlor. “Now who are you?” he asked in a high hoarse voice, his hands thrust into his dressing-gown pockets, his eyes fixing a point to the northeast of my head. “Are you by any chance Brewster?” By now it was evident to everybody that he was in a fog and completely at my so-called mercy. I could enjoy myself. “That’s right,” I answered suavely. “Je suis Monsieur Brustère. Let us chat for a moment before we start.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Chuck was so sure of himself he was always seeking out “characters” in order to introduce dissonance into his otherwise tonic experience. Chuck was famous for his escapades. He’d regale me for hours with the details. His current girl was the pert granddaughter of an almost comically conservative senator, one of those mastodons my father voted for. At the moment Janie had her own house, an unusual possession for a girl of seventeen. Her mother, who was supposed to live with her, was off sailing the Aegean with an Argentine. Her playboy father, about to divorce his third wife and already separated from her, lived on a neighboring estate by himself. He’d lost his license after repeated arrests for drunk driving, and his daughter had to chauffeur him everywhere. They looked like brother and sister. A maid cooked and cleaned for Janie, but the maid didn’t live in. Someone else maintained the indoor pool. At night Janie was alone and she was free to invite anyone she liked to stay over. That would usually be Chuck on weekends. Even on some weeknights Chuck would escape the dorm after lights-out. Janie would be waiting for him at the gate in her battered old MG, lights off. She’d return him to school before dawn. In the interval he’d persuade her to perform some new sexual stunt. They’d experiment with exotic lubricants (papaya juice, chocolate syrup, cold bacon grease). He’d insert a balloon in her and then inflate it. Eventually she would return the favor as they both drifted on an air mattress across the heated swimming pool on a sub-zero December night. Snow blew up in banks against the thick glass doors and spun in minor swirls under the porch lights. Farther up the hill stood pines laden with snow like ermined dons gathering for the procession. Chuck grew more boisterous, reckless, impatient after every adventure. No outrage was enough for him. Only a war would have been equal to his hunger for danger. He and several members of the Butt Club became friends with Beattie. Just before supper every other afternoon they’d sit around with him down in the music building and smoke cigarettes in one of the record-listening booths. They’d spin jazz records. Sometimes Beattie would play along on his own drums. The noise of their talk, laughter and drumming was confined to the soundproof room. Whoever might report they were smoking off limits and at an impermissible time of day could be spotted at a safe distance through the glass window set into the wall separating the booth from the glee club’s big practice room. Beattie wore black suede shoes and had his hair cut in a flattop, longer in back than in front.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Conservatives were trying to legislate girls like Katherine Danziger—bright, feminist, sexually empowered from a relatively young age—out of existence. If Judy Blume was the Pied Piper, as the Christian Science Monitor wrote, then the Reagan administration and its champions were trying to barricade the gates to Hamelin. But they didn’t account for the fact that making a big show of locking her out only amplified her music. Chapter Twenty-Two Notoriety “Isolated and alone” In 1984, Judy appeared on an episode of CNN’s Crossfire , then a two-year-old entertainment news show hosted by Tom Braden, a former CIA operative and liberal journalist, and Pat Buchanan, a former advisor to the Nixon White House and leading voice in conservative Christian politics. As the guest, Blume was seated between them, the set sparse with three stately leather armchairs against a black backdrop. She was dressed stylishly in a green sweater, khaki skirt, and tan knee-high boots, a patterned green and purple scarf looped around her neck. Her curly hair was cut into a flattering long shag. She smiled nervously at the camera as an announcer introduced her as “award-winning writer of children’s books Judy Blume.” Buchanan, his hair slicked into a camera-ready comb-over, glanced at her warmly. “Ms. Blume looks like a very nice lady,” he began, “and what I wanted to ask you, I looked through three of your books, what is this preoccupation with sex in books for ten-year-old children?” Judy raised her eyebrows and blinked a few times while he continued. “I have looked through several of these, Ms. Blume. One of them talks about masturbation, another one talks about a little boy who is window-peeping on his neighbor, a little girl, another one talks about somebody throwing up.” She tilted her head to interrupt him. “Throwing up is sex?” “Well, it has to do with bodily functions,” Buchanan said. “What is all this doing in a book for ten-year-olds?” “There is no preoccupation with sex,” Blume countered quickly. “Did you read the whole book or did you just read pages that were paper clipped?” The question didn’t ruffle Buchanan. The tenor of the conversation heightened as he started reading passages aloud to Blume from her own novels. “Why can’t… you write an interesting, exciting book for ten-year-olds without getting into a discussion of masturbation?” he asked. Judy threw him a skeptical look, her mouth tightening. “First of all, Deenie is not about masturbation, it’s about a girl with scoliosis,” she corrected. Buchanan was literally shaking her book at her. Judy looked like she was going to pop. “Are you hung up on masturbation?” she asked him, an uncomfortable laugh catching in her throat. “You are! You’re hung up about this stuff,” Buchanan insisted. “One scene in one book,” Blume said, barely letting him finish. Blume came off as tough.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My father, my mother and the woman who’d eventually be my stepmother took turns giving speeches, although my father was mostly silent unless prodded into murmurs by the women. My mother was saying, “If she is the one you really want, then far be it from me to stand in the way of your happiness, yet if I might speak in my own behalf …” The complex sentences with their unfamiliar locutions sometimes tripped my mother up, as though she were a debutante in her first long dress. Everything about the conference seemed dramatic—the late hour, the formal tone, even the notion that something momentous could or should be decided all at once. Soon my sister and I, sitting in the bleachers of the dark stairwell and peering down into the brightness, had sworn our own complicity by dissembling: both of us were excited by the prospect of living in a new city and shedding our difficult father, but we both pretended to be grief-struck. The real excitement, of course, lay in learning that a life could be changed and that one could enter a brand-new, better world (“I shall move wherever the children will have the cultural and eductional advantages of a major metropolis,” our mother was saying). That a life could be changed posited the still more thrilling notion that one had a thing called a life , a wonderful being that was growing silently inside like an infant. How its body would be formed and what its temperament would be like would surely remain unknown—along with the color of its eyes, the cubits of its height and the beauty of its face—up to the moment of birth. Until I heard the three adults discussing their lives and our lives (“I cannot lead my life in this way,” “The children have their whole lives before them”) I had never suspected that I’d been impregnated with this “life,” this tragic embryo. The divorce, for me, was primarily an accession into self-consciousness. It was also a deliverance from my father. Since he slept all day, I seldom saw him. But sometimes my mother would say, “Your father’s awake. Why don’t you go in and rub his back?” Reluctantly I’d enter the bedroom, in which the drawn curtains stained the late afternoon light. On the bed, face down, lay my naked father under sheets, like a sea monster beached and sick in a tide pool of foam. The mingled smells of night sweat and stale cigar smoke awed me; I toddled out and told my mother he was still sleeping. “No, no,” she said, smiling and guiding me back in.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Everybody laughed and applauded heartily while I just sat there like Gulliver among the Yahoos. I was furrowing my brows and thinking of the end of the world. We would all go down to a nuclear hell while these clowns sat around singing about their analysts. Gloom. I didn’t see Adrian anywhere. Bennett was discussing training with another candidate from the London Institute and I eventually struck up a conversation with the guy across from me, a Chilean psychoanalyst studying in London. All I could think of when he said he was from Chile was Neruda. So we discussed Neruda. I got myself worked up into one of my enthusiastic snow jobs and told him how lucky he was to be South American at a time when all the greatest living writers were South American. I was thinking what a total fraud I was, but he was pleased. As if I’d really complimented him. The conversation went on in that absurd literary-chauvinist vein. We were discussing surrealism and its relation to South American politics—which I know nothing whatever about. But I know about surrealism. Surrealism, you might say, is my life. Adrian tapped me on the shoulder just as I was spouting something about Borges and his Labyrinths. Talk about the minotaur. He was right there behind me—all horns. My heart catapulted up into my nose. Did I want to dance? Of course I wanted to dance and that wasn’t all. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon,” he said. “Where were you?” “With my husband.” “He looks a bit wet, doesn’t he? What have you been making him miserable with?” “You, I guess.” “Better watch that,” he said. “Don’t let jealousy rear its ugly head.” “It already has.” We talked as if we were already lovers, and, in a sense, we were. If intent is all, we were as doomed as Paolo and Francesca. But we had no place to go, no way to sneak out of there and away from the people who were watching us, so we danced. “I can’t dance very well,” he said. And it was true, he couldn’t. But he made up for it by smiling like Pan. He shuffled his little cloven hooves. I was laughing a bit too hysterically. “Dancing is like fucking,” I said, “it doesn’t matter how you look—just concentrate on how you feel.” Wasn’t I the brazen one? What was this woman-of-the-world act anyway? I was half-crazed with fear. I closed my eyes and gyrated inside the music. I bumped and ground and undulated. Somewhere back in the ancient days of the Twist, it had suddenly occurred to me that nobody knew how to do these dances—so why feel self-conscious? In social dancing, as in social life, chutzpah is all. From then on I became a “good dancer,” or at least I enjoyed it. It was like fucking—all rhythm and sweat.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “We, we, we—the smug editorial ‘we.’ My—it must be awfully cozy to be boringly married and use the editorial we. But is it conducive to art? Isn’t all that coziness stultifying? Isn’t it high time you changed your life?” “Iago—that’s what you are. Or the serpent in the Garden of Eden.” “If what you have is Paradise—I thank God I’ve never had the experience.” “I’ve got to get back.” “Back where?” “To Paradise, to my cozy little marital boredom, to my editorial we, to my stultification. I need it like a fix.” “Just as you need me like a fix when you get bored with Bennett.” “Look—you said it—it’s over.” “So it is.” “Well, then drive me back to the hotel. Bennett will be back soon. I don’t want to be late again. He’s just heard a paper on ‘Aggression in Large Groups.’ It might give him ideas.” “We’re a small group.” “True, but you never can tell.” “You’d really like him to beat the shit out of you—wouldn’t you? Then you’d feel properly martyred.” “Perhaps.” I was aping Adrian’s cool. It was infuriating him. “Look—we might just do a communal thing—you and me and Bennett. We could drive across the Continent à trois.” “Fine with me, but you’ll have to convince him. It won’t be easy. He’s just a bourgeois doctor married to a little housewife who writes in her spare time. He doesn’t swing—like you do. Now please take me home.” He started the car in earnest this time and pulled out. We began our familiar meandering way through the back streets of Vienna, getting lost at every turn. After about ten minutes of this we were laughing and in high spirits again. Our mutual ineptitude never failed to make us delighted with each other. It couldn’t last, of course, but it was intoxicating for the moment. Adrian stopped the car and leaned over to kiss me. “Let’s not go back—let’s spend the night together,” Adrian said. I debated with myself. What was I—some scared housewife? “OK,” I said (and instantly regretted it). But after all, what difference could one night make? I was going back to New York with Bennett. — The evening which followed was another one of those dreamy blurs. We started drinking at a workingman’s café off the Ringstrasse, kissed and kissed between beers, passed beer from his mouth to mine, from mine to his, listened avidly to an elderly female lush criticize the expenditures of the American space program, and how they should spend that money on earth (to build crematoria?) instead of wasting it on the moon, then ate (kissing throughout dinner) at an outdoor garden restaurant, fed each other Leberknödel and Bauernschnitzel in passionate bites, and very drunkenly made our way back to Adrian’s pension where we made love adequately for the first time. “I think I’d love you,” he said while he was fucking me, “if I believed in love.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me—not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience—that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong side of the road. In a way, it was a very spiritual itch. Gently, dreamily, not exceeding twenty miles an hour, I drove on that queer mirror side. Traffic was light. Cars that now and then passed me on the side I had abandoned to them, honked at me brutally. Cars coming towards me wobbled, swerved, and cried out in fear. Presently I found myself approaching populated places. Passing through a red light was like a sip of forbidden Burgundy when I was a child. Meanwhile complications were arising. I was being followed and escorted. Then in front of me I saw two cars placing themselves in such a manner as to completely block my way. With a graceful movement I turned off the road, and after two or three big bounces, rode up a grassy slope, among surprised cows, and there I came to a gentle rocking stop. A kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis linking up two dead women.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I begin peeling off francs as if in penance. I’d pay anything just to be home now recollecting this whole thing in tranquillity. That’s the part of it all I really do like best. Why kid myself? I’m no existentialist. Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down—revising and embellishing as I go. I’m always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper. “What happened?” Adrian says, appearing from the men’s room. “All I know for sure is that he’s not in New York.” “Maybe he’s in London.” “Hey—maybe he is.” My heart is pounding at the thought of seeing him again. “Why don’t we drive to London together,” I suggest, “and part good friends?” “Because I think you have to face this on your own,” says Adrian the Moralist. I see nothing sinister in his proposal. In a way, he’s right. I got myself into this mess—why count on him to get me out? “Let’s go have a drink and think things over,” I say, stalling for time. “Right.” And we take off in the Triumph, a map of Paris on my lap, the top down, and the sun gleaming on the city—as in the movie version of our story. I direct Adrian toward the Boul’ Mich and am delighted to find that I remember the avenues, the landmarks, and the turns. Gradually, my French is coming back. “Il pleure dans mon coeur/Comme il pleut sur la ville!” I shout, thrilled to be able to remember two lines of the one poem I managed to memorize in all those years of French classes. Suddenly (and for no reason, except the sight of Paris) I’m flying higher than a kite. “She was born with a shot of adrenalin,” my mother used to say. And it was true—when I wasn’t horribly depressed, I was bursting with energy, giggles, and wisecracks. “What do you mean il pleut?” says Adrian. “It’s the sunniest bloody day I’ve seen in weeks.” But he’s catching the giggles from me and even before we get to the café we’re both high. We park the car on the Rue des Ecoles (the nearest parking place we can find) and leave all our gear in the car. For a moment I hesitate because there’s no way to lock up our things—the Triumph only has a canvas flap—but after all, what do I care about permanence or possessions? Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose—right? We make for a café on the Place St. Michel, babbling to each other about how great it is to be back in Paris, how Paris never changes, how the cafés are always right where you left them, and the streets are always right where you left them, and Paris is always right where you left it. Two beers each and we are kissing ostentatiously in public. (Anyone would think we were the world’s greatest lovers in private.)

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “Yes, yes”—I could hear my voice rising higher and higher; somehow I had to convey the excitement of my prospects—“she’s only a freshman but she goes out with college boys and everything and she’s been to Europe and she’s—well, the other girls say top-heavy but only from sour grapes. And she’s the leader of the Crowd or could be if she cared and didn’t have such a reputation.” My mother was intent upon her sewing. She was dressed to go out and this, yes, it must be a rip in the seam of her raincoat; once she’d fixed it she’d be on her way. “Wonderful, dear.” “But isn’t it exciting?” I insisted. “Well, yes, but I hope she’s not too fast.” “For me?” “For anyone. In general. There, now.” My mother bit the thread off, her eyes suddenly as wide and empty and intelligent as a cat’s. She stood, examined her handiwork, put the coat on, moved to the door, backtracked, lifted her cheek toward me to peck. “I hope you have fun. You seem terribly nervous. Just look at your hands. You’re wringing them—never saw anyone literally wring his hands before.” “Well, it’s terribly exciting,” I said in wild despair. My sister wasn’t home, so I was alone once my mother had gone—alone to take my second bath of the day in the mean, withholding afternoon light permeating the frosted glass window and to listen to the listless hum of traffic outside, in such contrast to my heart’s anticipation. It was as though the very intensity of my feeling had drained the surroundings of significance. I was the unique center of consciousness, its toxic concentration. I was going out on a date with Helen Paper and I had to calm myself by then because the evening would surely be quicksilver small talk and ten different kinds of smile and there would be hands linking and parting as in a square dance you had to be very subtle to hear called, subtle and calm. I wanted so badly to be popular, to have the others look back as I ran to catch up, then to walk with my left hand around his waist, the right around hers, her long hair blown back on my shoulder, pooling there for a moment in festive intimacy, a sort of gold epaulet of the secret order of joy.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Bus Stop? No . . . no, um, supposedly Zora’s taking me to some frat party or other, down in – ’ ‘Bus Stop tonight!’ said Choo over him and whistled. ‘It will be incredible! You see all those guys?’ He pointed to their silent companions. ‘When they get on stage, they tear up everything .’ ‘It’s deep,’ confided Levi. ‘Political. Serious lyrics. About struggle. About – ’ ‘Getting back what is ours ,’ said Choo impatiently. ‘Taking back what has been stolen from our people.’ Jerome winced at the collective term. ‘It’s profounding,’ explained Levi. ‘Deep lyrics. You’d really be into it.’ Jerome, who doubted this very much, smiled politely. ‘Anyway,’ said Levi, ‘I’m out.’ He touched fists with Choo and each of the men in the doorway.  on beauty and being wrong Last was Jerome, who received not a touched fist, nor the hug of Levi’s younger days, but rather an ironic chuck on the chin. Levi crossed the square. He went through Wellington’s main gate, across the quad, out the other side, into the Humanities Faculty site, into the building, along the halls, into the English Department, out the other side, down another hallway, and arrived finally at the door of the Black Studies Department. It had never struck him before how easy it was to walk these hallowed halls. No locks, no codes, no ID cards. Basically, if you looked even vaguely like a student, nobody stopped you at all. Levi shouldered open the Black Studies door and smiled at the cute Latino girl on the desk. He walked through the department, idly mouthing the names on each door. The department had that last-Friday-before-a-vacation feeling – people hurrying to finish off their odds and ends. All these industrious black folk – like a mini-university within a university! It was crazy. Levi wondered whether Choo realized that Wellington had this little black enclave. Maybe he would speak more kindly of it if he knew. A familiar name now arrested Levi’s stroll. Prof. M. Kipps. The door was closed, but to the left a half-pane of glass revealed the office inside. Monty was not in. Levi lingered here, none the less, taking in the luxurious details to relay to Choo later. Nice chair. Nice table. Nice painting. Thick carpet. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Levi jumped. ‘Levi! Cool – you came – ’ Levi looked puzzled. ‘The library – it’s through here.’ ‘Oh, yeah . . .’ said Levi, knocking the fist that Carl offered to him. ‘Yeah – that’s right. You . . . you said come, so I came.’ ‘You just caught me, man – I was just about to quit for the day. Come in, man, come in.’ Carl walked him into the Music Library and sat him down. ‘You wanted to hear something? Name it.’ He clapped his hands. ‘I got every damn thing.’  On Beauty

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was starting school in the middle of the year and knew no one. Two other fourth-formers were also entering between semesters, and they became my companions. One, whose room was just next door, had a Spanish mother. I once caught a glimpse of her trim body in a black suit, her glossy, painted red lips barely visible through the bouquet of violets she was sniffing to distract herself during a dull sermon in the school chapel, her eyes lifting and hanging there like amber worry beads bright from having been told so often. Heberto had those same fine eyes and his mother’s olive skin and those teeth as white as the apples he was always eating. He was just fourteen and still at times a silly kid, especially just before lights out. We had half an hour (if you please) of “free” time after evening study hall before we had to submit to silence, a rustling, Argus-eyed silence (if Argus was a lonely, horny tribe of kids) intensified by wide-awake yearning. In that brief spasm of freedom before lights-out, competing radios would blare out, tuned to a dozen different stations, and pent-up athletes, sore from two hours of immobility at their desks, would explode into shouting football matches in the corridors. Toilets flushed, steam from showers crept out of the bathrooms into the unheated corridors. In one room five boys were sitting around in the dark lighting farts. One expert—fully clothed of course—was lying on his back, legs above his head, holding a lit match to the seat of his pants. A quick spurt of blue flame was his reward. The whole building trembled with the thundering of boys climbing up and down stairs or now shrieking in a water fight by the cooler. Heberto was also full of energy. Look at the vein pulsing in his neck, the aimless trills his long fingers are playing, the weird ululations hooting out of his mouth—until after the fact he invents an explanation of all this spontaneity by resolving himself into an airplane, the hoots modulating into the drone of jets, his flickering hands freezing into rigid wings, the ticking vein force-feeding fuel into the engine as he runs and runs, hysterical with youth, up and down the halls. After such an outburst he could be visited. I’d sit on his bed and watch him carve bits of balsa wood with an X-Acto knife. His eyes would dart up from his task. Everything about him was high-strung, tentative, off course. I never found out why he’d been shunted off to Eton in the middle of the year.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  III Since Edmund White was born in 1940, he lived in round-number allegorical relation to the last six decades of our recent quick-change century. No intelligence stands readier to remember with perfect pitch a period whole-cloth: who else can tell us so exactly how its citizens then talked, dressed, contracepted, proceeded politically? So, at age forty, just at the start of the sexually liberated eighties (in 1982, the year after HIV first sent its silent tentacles among the erotically adventurous in Manhattan and San Francisco), White offered the world a seemingly autobiographical novel. It appears to map a boy’s coming to terms not simply with solitude, not just with his social destiny, but with a completely aestheticized vision only some scholastical and witty kid could so utterly perfect. The novel shows a child learning to face then exploit not just homo-sex, but sex in general. This work of principled sweep and great observational power also champions the centrality of Art as a governing quest. It offers this view with a faith that must recall Proust’s life project, his attempt to hold all of time, its characters at synchronous ages, all its warring textures, in one head, one work. But crucially, White also places the Erotic on a level of expressive possibility alongside the pursuit of work itself. “Love and Work.” Freud promised us two choices, in that order. But here sex replaces romantic love, even while groping elsewhere for it. If Love, in modern life, is really Sex, then Sex, undertaken with concentration and ambition enough, can ascend to Work, can’t it? The erotic is ranked, by the young man at the center of this fiction, as a great Darwinian organizing force for the good. We are told by White in 1982—using the voice of an erotically and cerebrally advanced fifteen-year-old facing his inaugural analyst—that life’s great divide really seems between those who are sexual, are “getting it” on a regular basis, and the others, lonely and—because silent—powerless: My first sight of the analytic couch constituted the primal scene, for only its existence jarred me into recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway over a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). In 1982, this view of erotic power offered veriest catnip to the loud-because-too-long-silent cause of Gay Liberation. And A Boy’s Own Story , with mixed results for the book itself, became one of that young Movement’s essential works. It was read not simply as the rich entertainment and provocation it is, but, alas, as Theory.