Exposure Dread

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 The Lover (1984)

  Never again shall I travel in a native bus. From now on I’ll have a limousine to take me to the high school and back from there to the boarding school. I shall dine in the most elegant places in town. And I’ll always have regrets for everything I do, everything I’ve gained, everything I’ve lost, good and bad, the bus, the bus driver I used to laugh with, the old women chewing betel in the back seats, the children on the luggage racks, the family in Sadec, the awfulness of the family in Sadec, its inspired silence. He talked. Said he missed Paris, the marvelous girls there, the riotous living, the binges, ooh là là, the Coupole, the Rotonde, personally I prefer the Rotonde, the nightclubs, the “wonderful” life he’d led for two years. She listened, watching out for anything to do with his wealth, for indications as to how many millions he had. He went on. His own mother was dead, he was an only child. All he had left was his father, the one who owned the money. But you know how it is, for the last ten years he’s been sitting staring at the river, glued to his opium pipe, he manages his money from his little iron cot. She says she sees. He won’t let his son marry the little white whore from Sadec. The image starts long before he’s come up to the white child by the rails, it starts when he got out of the black car, when he began to approach her, and when she knew, knew he was afraid. From the first moment she knows more or less, knows he’s at her mercy. And therefore that others besides him may be at her mercy too if the occasion arises. She knows something else too, that the time has now probably come when she can no longer escape certain duties toward herself. And that her mother will know nothing of this, nor her brothers. She knows this now too. As soon as she got into the black car she knew: she’s excluded from the family for the first time and forever. From now on they will no longer know what becomes of her. Whether she’s taken away from them, carried off, wounded, spoiled, they will no longer know. Neither her mother nor her brothers. That is their fate henceforth. It’s already enough to make you weep, here in the black limousine. Now the child will have to reckon only with this man, the first, the one who introduced himself on the ferry. • • • It happened very quickly that day, a Thursday. He’d come every day to pick her up at the high school and drive her back to the boarding school. Then one Thursday afternoon, the weekly half-holiday, he came to the boarding school and drove off with her in the black car.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It was the first time I had seen the front gates of the courtyard, the drawbridge and moat and all the soldiers assembled. The Queen's open coach stood in the courtyard, and she was already seated surrounded by her footmen and her Pages who rode on the sides, and her coachmen with their fine caps, their plumes and their gleaming spurs. A great mounted force of soldiers was ready. "Before being led out, I was fitted with the bit by Leon, who gave my hair a last thorough combing. He wedged the leather bit well back into my mouth, wiped my lips and then told me the hardest thing would be to keep my chin raised. I must never let it drop to a normal position. The bridle, which the Queen would hold idly in her lap could of course keep my head raised, but I must never lower my head. She would feel it if I did and be in a fury. "Then he showed me the leather phallus. It had no straps, no belts attached to it. It was as big as a man's erect cock, and I was afraid. How should I ever keep it in? From it hung a horse's tail of thin black leather thongs for a mere decoration. He told me to spread my legs. He forced it up into my anus and told me I must keep it in place, as the Queen would suffer me to be covered with nothing. The thin leather thongs hung down and stroked my thighs. They would swing like a horse's tail when I trotted along but they were short, they would conceal nothing. "Then he oiled my pubic hair again, my cock and my balls. He rubbed some oil into my belly. I had my hands clasped behind my back and he gave me a small leather-covered bone to hold with them saying it would make it easier to keep them clasped. But my tasks were these: to keep my chin raised, to keep the phallus in place, and to keep my own penis hard and presentable to the Queen. "Then I was led out by the little bridle into the courtyard. The bright noonday sun flashed on the spears of the Knights and the soldiers. The horses' hooves made a loud clatter on the stones. "The Queen who was in fast conversation with the Grand Duke at her side scarcely noticed me. She threw me one quick smile. The bridle was given her. It went up over the door of the coach and kept my head quite turned up. "'Keep your eyes down at all times, respectfully,' Leon said. "And soon the carriage moved out of the gates and over the drawbridge. "Well, you can imagine what that day was like. You were brought here naked through the villages of your own Kingdom.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Her head was then forced between her calves, so that Beauty could see her face clearly. And a leather strap was bound around her, securely pressing her upturned legs against her torso. But the most cruel and frightening aspect of it for Beauty was the exposure of the Princess's secret parts, for she was hung so that anyone could see her full sex with its pink lips and its dark hair even to the tiny brown orifice between her buttocks. And all this just below her scarlet face. Beauty could imagine no worse exposure and she looked down timidly, glancing up again and again to the girl whose suspended body moved slightly as with a current in the air, the leather links at her wrists and ankles creaking. But she was not alone. Beauty realized that only yards away, other doubled bodies hung from the same beam just as helplessly. Princess Lizetta's face remained colored with rage, but she had quieted somewhat and now she turned and tried to conceal her expression against her leg, but the Page nearby adjusted her face forward. Quickly Beauty looked at the others. Not very far to the right a young man was mounted in the very same fashion. He appeared very young, no more than sixteen at best, and he was blond with curly hair, and his pubic hair was slightly reddish. His organ was erect, its tip glossy, and there exposed to all the world was his scrotum and again the tiny opening of his anus. There were more of them, another young Princess and another Prince, but these first two engaged Beauty completely. The blond Prince was moaning painfully. His eyes were dry, but he appeared to struggle, to shift as he hung from the black leather manacles, and he caused his body to turn a little to the left as he did so. A young man, meantime, looking somewhat more impressive than the Pages, and differently costumed in dark blue velvet, came down the line of doubled and manacled slaves and appeared to inspect each face and each configuration of mercilessly exposed organs. He smoothed back the hair from the young Prince's forehead. The young Prince moaned. It seemed he tried to thrust himself forward, and this man in blue velvet stroked the Prince's penis causing the Prince to main all the louder and more with the sound of one imploring. Beauty bent her head but she continued to watch the man in velvet as he approached the Princess Lizetta. "Stubborn one, most difficult," he said to Lord Gregory. "A day and night of punishment will subdue her," Lord Gregory answered. And Beauty was shocked to think of being exposed for so long, and so uncomfortably. She knew at once she would do anything to prevent this punishment, yet she had the terrible fear that despite all her efforts it might befall her.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It might enclose a whole world, it seemed, and its open gates yawned like a mouth before the drawbridge. Now from everywhere the subjects of the Prince, mere specks in the distance growing ever and ever larger, ran toward the road that wound down and then up again before them. Riders came over the drawbridge and rode toward them with a blast of trumpets, their banners streaming behind them. The air was warmer here, as if this place were protected from the sea breeze. It was nothing as dark as the narrow villages and forests through which they had passed. And Beauty could see everywhere the peasants dressed in lighter and brighter colors. But they were drawing ever nearer to the castle, and in the distance Beauty could see not the peasants whose admiration she had received all along the road, but a great crowd of magnificently dressed Lords and Ladies. She must have uttered a little cry and bowed her head, because the Prince came up alongside of her. She felt his arm gather her close to the horse, and he whispered: "Now, Beauty, you know what I expect of you." But they had already reached the steep approach to the bridge, and Beauty could see it was just as she feared, men and women of her own rank and all clad in white velvet trimmed in gold, or gay and festive colors. She dared not look, and felt the blush in her cheeks again and for the first time was tempted to throw herself on the mercy of the Prince and beg him to conceal her. It was one thing to be shown to the rustics who praised her and would make a legend of her, but she could already hear the babble of haughty speech and laughter. This was unendurable to her. But when the Prince dismounted, he ordered her down on her hands and knees and told her softly that this was how she must enter his castle. She was petrified, her face burning, but she fell quickly to obey, glimpsing the Prince's boots to her left as she struggled to keep up with him in crossing the drawbridge. Through a great dim corridor she was led, not daring to raise her eyes, though she could see rich gowns and shining boots all around her. Lords and Ladies were bowing to the Prince on either side of her. There were whispers of greeting, and kisses being thrown, and she was naked, moving on her hands and knees as if she were only some poor animal. But they had reached the mouth of the Great Hall, a room far more vast and shadowy than any in her own castle. An immense fire roared on the hearth, though the sun streamed warm through high narrow windows.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  It was freezing cold outside that afternoon. As I crossed Broadway, a sliver of moon appeared in the pale sky, then disappeared behind the buildings. The air had a metallic tinge to it. The world felt still and eerie, vibrating. I was glad not to see many people on the street. Those I did see looked like lumbering monsters, human shapes deformed by puffy coats and hoods, mittens and hats, snow boots. I assessed my reflection in the windows of a darkened storefront as I walked up West Fifteenth Street. It did comfort me to see that I was still pretty, still blond and tall and thin. I still had good posture. One might have even confused me for a celebrity in slovenly incognito. Not that people cared. I hailed a cab at Union Square and gave the driver the cross streets of Rite Aid uptown. It was already getting dark out, but I kept my sunglasses on. I didn’t want to have to look anybody in the eye. I didn’t want to relate to anybody too keenly. Plus, the fluorescent lights at the drug store were blinding. If I could have purchased my medications from a vending machine, I would have paid double for them. The pharmacist on duty that evening was a young Latina woman— perfect eyebrows, fake nails. She knew me on sight. “Give me ten minutes,” she said. Next to the vitamins, there was a contraption to measure your blood pressure and pulse. I sat in the seat of the machine, took my arm out of the sleeve of my coat and stuck it in for testing. A pleather pillow inflated around my bicep. I watched numbers on the digital screen go up and down. Pulse 48. Pressure 80/50. That seemed appropriate. I went to the rack of DVDs to browse the latest selection of pre-owned movies. The Nutty Professor, Jumanji, Casper, Space Jam, The Cable Guy. It was all kids’ stuff. Then an orange discount sticker on the bottom shelf caught my eye— 9½ Weeks. I picked it up. Trevor had claimed that it was one of his favorite movies. I still hadn’t seen it. “Mickey Rourke’s performance in this is unparalleled. Who knows? You might relate to it.” I resembled Kim Basinger, he explained, and just like me, her character worked in an art gallery. “This movie inspires me to try new things,” he said. “Like what?” I asked, amused by the thought that he might have the courage to do more in bed than reposition himself to get “better leverage.” He took me into his kitchen, turned his back, and said, “Get on your knees.” I did as I was told and knelt down on the cold marble tile. “Keep your eyes closed,” he said. “And open your mouth.” I almost laughed, but I played along. Trevor took his blow jobs very seriously. “Have you seen Sex, Lies, and Videotape?” I asked him. “James Spader in that—” “Be quiet,” he said. “Open up.”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  I understood her at once. My buttocks were now smarting and throbbing with pain. I arched my back, my knees opening all the more, my legs stiff and aching from the strain of the squatting, and I moaned without reservation, my moans growing louder with each crack of the paddle. Understand, nothing restrained me. I was unshackled and ungagged. "All rebelliousness was gone from me. When next the Queen ordered me paddled about the room, I was only too willing. She threw down a handful of small gold balls the size of large purple grapes, and she bid me bring each one to her, just as you were commanded to fetch the roses. The stable boy, my groom as she called him, was to achieve no more than five cracks of the paddle before I had placed one in her hand, or she should be very displeased with me. These gold balls had rolled far and wide, and you cannot imagine how I scurried to gather them. I ran from the paddle as though it were burning me. Of course I was tender and sore by this time, and broken out in plenty of hard welts, but it was to please her that I hurried. "I brought the first one with only three blows. I was very proud. But as I put it in her hand I saw she had put on a Black leather glove, the fingers of which were traced with small emeralds. She bid me turn around and part my legs and show her my anus. I obeyed at once, and immediately felt the shock of those leather sheathed fingers opening my anus. "As I told you, I had been raped and washed out repeatedly by my crude captors in the kitchen. Yet this was a new exposure to me, to be opened thus by her, and so simply and thoughtlessly, without the violence of rape. It made me feel softened with love and weak and totally her possession. At once I realized she was forcing the gold ball which I had retrieved into my anus. And now she instructed me that I was to hold it inside me, unless I wanted her fierce displeasure. "I had no to fetch another. The paddle came at me quickly. I hurried, brought back another gold ball, was made to turn around, and it was forced into me. "The game went on for a long time. My buttocks were ever the more sore. It felt quite enormous to me.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  everything made me cringe. I was like a baby being born—the air hurt, the light hurt, the details of the world seemed garish and hostile. I relied on alcohol only on the days of these excursions—a shot of vodka before I went out and walked past all the little bistros and cafes and shops I’d frequented when I was out there, pretending to live a life. Otherwise I tried to limit myself to a one-block radius around my apartment. The men who worked at the bodega were all young Egyptians. Besides my psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, my friend Reva, and the doormen at my building, the Egyptians were the only people I saw on a regular basis. They were relatively handsome, a few of them more than the others. They had square jaws and manly foreheads, bold, caterpillary eyebrows. And they all looked like they had eyeliner on. There must have been half a dozen of them— brothers or cousins, I assumed. Their style deterred me. They wore soccer jerseys and leather racing jackets and gold chains with crosses and played Z100 on the radio. They had absolutely no sense of humor. When I’d first moved to the neighborhood, they’d been flirty, even annoyingly so. But once I’d begun shuffling in with eye boogers and scum at the corners of my mouth at odd hours, they quit trying to win my affection. “You have something,” the man behind the counter said one morning, gesturing to his chin with long brown fingers. I just waved my hand. There was toothpaste crusted all over my face, I discovered later. After a few months of sloppy, half-asleep patronage, the Egyptians started calling me “boss” and readily accepted my fifty cents when I asked for a loosie, which I did often. I could have gone to any number of places for coffee, but I liked the bodega. It was close, and the coffee was consistently bad, and I didn’t have to confront anyone ordering a brioche bun or no-foam latte. No children with runny noses or Swedish au pairs. No sterilized professionals, no people on dates. The bodega coffee was working-class coffee—coffee for doormen and deliverymen and handymen and busboys and housekeepers. The air in there was heavy with the perfume of cheap cleaning detergents and mildew. I could rely on the clouded freezer full of ice cream and popsicles and plastic cups of ice. The clear Plexiglas compartments above the counter were filled with gum and candy. Nothing ever changed: cigarettes in neat rows, rolls of scratch tickets, twelve different brands of bottled water, beer, sandwich bread, a case of meats and cheeses nobody ever bought, a tray of stale Portuguese rolls, a basket of plastic-wrapped fruit, a whole wall of magazines that I avoided. I didn’t want to read more than newspaper headlines. I steered clear of anything that might pique my intellect or make me envious or anxious. I kept my head down.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I used to walk the streets of the old town alone in the rain. I spent hours wandering through department stores fingering merchandise I knew I’d never buy, dreaming in crowds, overhearing long conversations which at first I understood only snatches of, listening to the demonstration hucksters barking out the virtues of stretch wigs, false fingernails, carving sets, meat grinders, chopping blocks…. “Meine Damen und Heren …” they begin, and every long sentence is interlarded with that phrase. It rings in your ears after a while. All the potato-shaped ladies would stand around me, forming a gray wall of loden cloth. Germany is patrolled by armies of gray-coated ladies in Tyrolean hats and sensible shoes and jowls crimson with exploded capillaries. Up close, their cheeks seem laced with tiny fireworks caught, as in a photograph, at the moment of bursting. These sturdy widows are everywhere: carrying string bags with bananas sticking out, riding broad-assed on narrow bicycle seats, taking the rain-streaked trains from München to Hamburg, from Nürnberg to Freiburg. A world of widows. The final solution promised by the Nazi dream: a Jewless world without men. Sometimes, wandering around aimlessly, riding the Strassenbahn , stopping for beer and pretzels in a café, or Kaffee und Kuchen in a Konditorei , I would have the fantasy that I was the ghost of a Jew murdered in a concentration camp on the day I was born. Who was to tell me I was not? I devised complicated plots which I pretended to myself were merely surrealistic tales I planned to write. But they were more than tales and I was not writing. At times I thought I was going mad. For the first time in my life, I became intensely interested in the history of the Jews and the history of the Third Reich. I went to the USIS or Special Services Library and began poring over books which detailed the horrors of the deportations and death camps. I read about the Einsatzgruppen and imagined digging my own grave and standing on the brink of a great pit clutching my baby while the Nazi officers readied their machine guns. I imagined the shrieks of terror and the sounds of bodies falling. I imagined being wounded and rolling into the pit with the twitching bodies and having dirt shoveled over me. How could I protest that I wasn’t a Jew but a pantheist? How could I plead worship of the Winter Solstice and the Rites of Spring? For the purposes of the Nazis, I was as Jewish as anyone. Would I turn back into earth and become a flower or a fruit? Was that what had happened to the souls of all the Jews murdered on the day I was born?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It was then that we came closer to detection than ever before, and no wonder the experience curbed forever my yearning for rural amours. I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year! I had just retracted some silly promise she had forced me to make in a moment of blind impatient passion, and there she was sprawling and sobbing, and pinching my caressing hand, and I was laughing happily, and the atrocious, unbelievable, unbearable, and, I suspect, eternal horror that I know now was still but a dot of blackness in the blue of my bliss; and so we lay, when with one of those jolts that have ended by knocking my poor heart out of its groove, I met the unblinking dark eyes of two strange and beautiful children, faunlet and nymphet, whom their identical flat dark hair and bloodless cheeks proclaimed siblings if not twins. They stood crouching and gaping at us, both in blue play-suits, blending with the mountain blossoms. I plucked at the lap-robe for desperate concealment—and within the same instant, something that looked like a polka-dotted pushball among the undergrowth a few paces away, went into a turning motion which was transformed into the gradually rising figure of a stout lady with a raven-black bob, who automatically added a wild lily to her bouquet, while staring over her shoulder at us from behind her lovejy carved bluestone children. Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I know that I am a courageous man, but in those days I was not aware of it, and I remember being surprised by my own coolness. With the quiet murmured order one gives a sweatstained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes the young beast’s flanks pulsate, what black stars pierce the heart of the tamer!), I made Lo get up, and we decorously walked, and then indecorously scuttled down to the car. Behind it a nifty station wagon was parked, and a handsome Assyrian with a little blue-black beard, un monsieur très bien, in silk shirt and magenta slacks, presumably the corpulent botanist’s husband, was gravely taking the picture of a signboard giving the altitude of the pass. It was well over 10,000 feet and I was quite out of breath; and with a scrunch and a skid we drove off, Lo still struggling with her clothes and swearing at me in language that I never dreamed little girls could know, let alone use. There were other unpleasant incidents. There was the movie theatre once, for example. Lo at the time still had for the cinema a veritable passion (it was to decline into tepid condescension during her second high school year).

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "But he wants this for me," she thought. "Not just that he see me but that all see me." "It gives the people such pleasure to see you," he had said tonight as they entered this little town. He had prodded her on up ahead of him, and she had been crying so fiercely as she saw all about her those shoes and boots from which she dared not look up. "But you are so lovely, Princess, and they will be telling their grandchildren about it," said the tavern girl. "They cannot wait to feast their eyes upon you, and you will not disappoint them, no matter what they have heard. Imagine that, never disappointing anyone..." The girl's voice trailed off as though she were in thought. "O, I wish I could follow you to see it." "But you don't understand," Beauty whispered, unable suddenly to contain herself. "You don't realize..." "Yes, I do," said the girl. "Of course I do...I've seen the Princesses when they come through in their magnificent gowns covered with jewels, and I know how it must feel to be opened to the world as if you were a flower, all of their eyes like fingers prying at you, but you are so...so splendid finally, Princess, and so rare. And you are his Princess, and he has claimed you and all know you are in his power and must do as he commands you. It is no shame to you, Princess. How could it be, with so great a Prince to command you? O, do you think that there aren't women who would give up everything to take your place, if only they had your beauty?" Beauty was startled by this. She thought about it. Women giving up everything, taking her place. It had not occurred to her. She remembered that moment in the forest. But then she remembered being spanked in the Inn, and all of those others watching. She remembered sobbing helplessly, and hating her buttocks propped up in the air, and her legs open, and that paddle coming down again and again. Finally the pain was the least of it. She thought of the crowds on the road. She tried to picture it. It would happen to her tomorrow. She would feel this drenching humiliation, this pain, but all those people would be there to witness her humiliation, to amplify it. The door had opened. The Prince had come into the room. And the little tavern girl jumped up and was bowing to him. "Your Highness," the girl said breathlessly. "You've done your work very well," said the Prince. "It was a great honor, your Highness," said the girl. The Prince came to the bed, and clasping Beauty's right wrist, he drew her up out of the bed and stood her beside it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Mind,” he said, pointing to the open window opposite the coachman. He got up and pulled up the window. “What did you consider unbecoming?” she repeated. “The despair you were unable to conceal at the accident to one of the riders.” He waited for her to answer, but she was silent, looking straight before her. “I have already begged you so to conduct yourself in society that even malicious tongues can find nothing to say against you. There was a time when I spoke of your inward attitude, but I am not speaking of that now. Now I speak only of your external attitude. You have behaved improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again.” She did not hear half of what he was saying; she felt panic-stricken before him, and was thinking whether it was true that Vronsky was not killed. Was it of him they were speaking when they said the rider was unhurt, but the horse had broken its back? She merely smiled with a pretense of irony when he finished, and made no reply, because she had not heard what he said. Alexey Alexandrovitch had begun to speak boldly, but as he realized plainly what he was speaking of, the dismay she was feeling infected him too. He saw the smile, and a strange misapprehension came over him. “She is smiling at my suspicions. Yes, she will tell me directly what she told me before; that there is no foundation for my suspicions, that it’s absurd.” At that moment, when the revelation of everything was hanging over him, there was nothing he expected so much as that she would answer mockingly as before that his suspicions were absurd and utterly groundless. So terrible to him was what he knew that now he was ready to believe anything. But the expression of her face, scared and gloomy, did not now promise even deception. “Possibly I was mistaken,” said he. “If so, I beg your pardon.” “No, you were not mistaken,” she said deliberately, looking desperately into his cold face. “You were not mistaken. I was, and I could not help being in despair. I hear you, but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you.... You can do what you like to me.” And dropping back into the corner of the carriage, she broke into sobs, hiding her face in her hands. Alexey Alexandrovitch did not stir, and kept looking straight before him. But his whole face suddenly bore the solemn rigidity of the dead, and his expression did not change during the whole time of the drive home. On reaching the house he turned his head to her, still with the same expression. “Very well! But I expect a strict observance of the external forms of propriety till such time”—his voice shook—“as I may take measures to secure my honor and communicate them to you.”

• From Querelle (1953)

  203 I QUE.RELLE "Oh, come on, you and your brother ... I beg your pardon! But Nona, is he a good lover?" "Come on, �1ario, let's change the subject ... " But he said that with a smile. The detective kept his hand on Querelle's shoulder, as if leading him to the gallows, gently but irresistibly. "But why not tell me? Or isn't he too good at it?" "\Vhy d'you ask me? Is this how you get your kicks? Or are you planning on trying it yourself?" "And why shouldn't I, if it's good fun? Come on, tell me. How does he go about it?" ''He's pretty good at it. So there. Come on, Mario, you're not trying to get a rise out of me, are you?" "Hell no, we're just talking. Ain't no one here to listen. Did it feel good, to you?" "\Vhy don't you try it!" He laughed, but this time with some embarrassment. He felt nervous, what with the copper's paw on his shoulder and all. Querelle still did not understand that Mario had a crush on him, but his emotions were stirred by those questions, precise as those in an interrogation, by their urgency, by the insinuating tone of voice, by the method that seemed to be pushing for a confession, never mind what it would be. Querelle was aware of th e strangeness of the surroundings and of th e density of fog and night, further uniting the cop and his victim, together in th is solitude that seemed to create a feeling of complicity. "I ca n't stand talking about it too much, it gives me a hard on." "Wow! No kidding." Querelle realized that this exclamation (as well as his pre vious admission that "it didn't disgust him") was only one more move in an entire ga me that would inevitably lead to an ac t he had begun tq suspect and that would put an end to his sense of freedom. He did not regret that he had agreed to head

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  A VAST MENTAL LANDSCAPE The plot of this book can be summed up as: Is she going to untie this Gordian/Freudian knot of her relationship with her mother? For a book with so many shots of the author in therapy or reading in bed, the story is utterly gripping. Bechdel’s quest for answers is a search for locations in an internal landscape laid out decades earlier. She searches for these answers in a few significant ways. First, she starts off each of the seven chapters with an eventful and symbol-filled dream, which sets a tone and establishes a language of symbols for the chapter. The dream that begins chapter five, for instance, gives us images of Alison on a dangerous, isolated precipice of ice in the sea. She makes the harrowing climb to safety and sees that it was her childhood house all along. These images echo with the themes of working through her relationship with her father and his obsession with their family house, but also with her more dangerous dealings with her mother. Bechdel also connects her own questions and explorations with two modernist thinkers, Virginia Woolf and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. She sets up parallels between the two with a momentary flight of fancy, drawing them into the same London scene in 1924. From there, she constantly triangulates in on their ideas to locate herself in her own story. As she tells her story, she explores it by looking for reflections of its dynamics everywhere, in other relationships, in her dreams, and in her actions with her lovers. And she sees her story in uncommon places, too: in the tightly wound wool of her teddy bear, in symbolic Dr. Seuss drawings, and in the themes and dialogue of a television show that played in her house, The Forsythe Saga. Bechdel overlaps themes and dialogues from this show with her own family dialogues in a blistering, raw scene cushioned with indirection, as most things were in her childhood, within art and culture. Bechdel wanders the external world as in a dream; her quest is so steeped in the psychological world that she sees symbols and meanings everywhere in everyday life. She sees visual images as manifestations of her fraught internal dynamic. The casual naming of young Alison on this old photograph, for instance, seems like an arrow boring right into her head. She is later accidentally hit in the eye with a twig while walking in the woods. She sees this as a self-punishment for looking too closely at her family, for staring at the unconscious too intently. It leads her to a meditation on a dream about a glistening spiderweb that opened the chapter. Alison by Alison The TV dialogue sets up the tone of the real conversation in this panel. Bechdel’s search for material to help her unlock her story is relentless; she is looking for new material even as she’s working on the book.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what. I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together…. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. I added that I was supporting Hillary Clinton based only on her greater experience. About Obama, I wrote, “If he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer….To clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.” The first response was overwhelmingly positive. Because Hillary Clinton unexpectedly won that New Hampshire primary, my column was even given some of the credit. The New York Times published a letter from a voter there to that effect. It was as if I’d written what many people were thinking. Most just seemed glad that I’d spoken up about the humiliation of a good woman. But then a few calls came in from interviewers assuming that by supporting Hillary I was ranking sex over race—despite my lifetime of arguing that sexism and racism were linked, not ranked, and despite writing in that same op-ed that the caste systems of sex and race could only be uprooted together, I was seen as asking people to take sexism more seriously than racism. When I went on a television show, an Obama supporter, a black woman academic, accused me by saying that “white women have been complicit in the oppression of black men and black women.” She talked many times more than I did, mentioned lynching, and said, “To take this kind of position in The New York Times struck me as the very worst of what feminism can offer.” I was left saying things like “I refuse to be divided on this” and pointing out that whether Hillary or Obama won the primary, she and I would be united in the general election. Afterward I felt as if I had been hit by a Mack truck. From then on, every morning brought new attacks. I came to dread the particular ring of my cell phone. Though I had been called many things, from a baby killer to a destroyer of the family, those had come from people with whom I really disagreed.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  In Evidence, we learned how to discredit a witness on the stand. We learned the exceptions that would allow you to introduce a witness’s sexual history to undermine the idea that she was raped. How much did you have to drink that night? Would you say it was your usual custom to dress in this way when going out? And you gave him your phone number? Do you normally accept a drink from any man who buys you one? Did you have sexual relations with him in the past? How many, would you say? And all of those times were consensual? Did you ever say no? You didn’t scream? And you continued to be in a relationship with him? But it’s hard to remember now what happened on that day, isn’t it? In Ethics, I learned that an attorney who collected money from his friends for a football game was disbarred because he kept the money for himself. I also learned that a senior attorney who repeatedly sexually harassed a female attorney was not disbarred because the court did not consider his daily groping to be conduct involving “moral turpitude.” In seminars, I wrote papers with facts that would not fade from my mind4 and that made me pick fights with my girlfriend because it was easier to accuse than admit. In clinical classes, I talked with my public defender friends who told me how to make a witness seem like a “lying bitch” on the stand. In the hallways, we debriefed from classes and criticized our classmates. “I’ve woken up after a lot of drunk sex and regretted it, but I didn’t say it was rape,” a girl told me. She was my closest friend. It was isolating. Maybe it was retraumatizing, but I didn’t let myself use that word. Trauma was for other people, I thought. And so I did not speak often in class. I had no interest in debating the law, in briefing a case, or commenting on the intersection of trigger warnings and the First Amendment. But law school—the law as it was taught, as it was received, as my classmates minimally questioned it, and as I understood it—was a trigger warning. That night when I was twenty-one had shifted a bullet into the chamber. And I spent three years trying to move away from the line of fire. IV. “She must follow the natural instinct of every proud female to resist, by more than mere words, the violation of her person by a stranger or an unwelcomed friend. She must make it plain that she regards such sexual acts as abhorrent and repugnant to her natural sense of pride.” STATE V. RUSK, 424 A.2D 720 (1981) (COLE J., DISSENTING)

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  “I’ve been clean for eight months,” he says seriously. “I’m just beginning to believe I exist.” Finally, I ask about that drawing of a huge eye. “My girlfriend made that,” he says, “to remind me to see with my own eyes.” I learned from him. I’m trying to see with my own eyes, too. • In Kyle, Texas, driving is a way of life. Taxis are mostly for people too drunk or too old to drive, on welfare with no car, or visitors like me going to the Austin airport. I see that my Chicana driver has turned her taxi into a world. She has a baby in a laundry basket on the seat next to her and a mobile toy secured by the glove compartment. When I remark on this inventiveness, she explains that this way, she makes a living without being separated from her baby daughter. Since it’s six a.m. on what is going to be a very hot day, I ask if this is hard. “No,” she says firmly. “What’s hard is worrying about my older daughter coming home from school by herself. Driving with each of my girls has been the happiest part of my life.” • I notice that a tough-looking, youngish white driver in Detroit is dressed in a shirt, bow tie, and suit jacket, like a Mormon missionary. He says it’s his wife’s birthday, and asks my advice about buying her a gift of lingerie. Gradually, his questions about panties grow ever more detailed. I begin to realize there is no wife. Even his pronouns switch from she to I. Then he’s off on the relative merits of string bikinis, and trying to get me to talk about my own underwear. It’s like a dirty phone call on wheels. Not only that, but he seems to be enjoying my escalating discomfort. I bet I’m not the first female passenger who’s been left with the choice of getting out or letting him reach what is clearly his climactic destination. Since we’re speeding along a highway with no place to find another taxi, I try for a third option. With all the stern authority I can muster, I tell him that if he doesn’t stop laying his fantasies on me and passengers, I’ll report his name and taxi number to his boss and to the cops. He apologizes frantically, swears he’ll never do it again, and even promises to go into therapy. Then all is quiet. Too quiet. We’re at our destination and I’m almost out the door when he says with suspicious calm and an air of release, “I’m so glad you were severe with me. Thank you for punishing me.” I’m on the sidewalk before I realize: I’ve done exactly what he had in mind. Years pass, and I forget this weird guy. Then I’m in Detroit again and I get a rare woman driver in her forties, overly made up and drenched in perfume.

• From Querelle (1953)

  direction of his thoughts (as though he wanted to veil them, or show them a touch of insolence ) , his lips remained slightly drawn apart from his teeth, whose beauty he knew, their whiteness dimmed, now, by the night and the shadow cast by his upper lip. Watching Gil and Roger, now reunited by glance and smile, he could not make up his mind to withdraw, to enclose within hin1self those teeth and their gentle splendor, which had the same restful effect on his vague thoughts as the blue of the sea has on our eyes. Meanwhile, he was lightly running his tongue over his palate. It was alive. One of the sailors started to go through the motions of buttoning his peacoat, turning up the collar. Querelle was not used to the idea, one that had never really been formulated, that he was a monster. He considered, he observed his past with an ironic smile, frightened and tender at the same time, to the extent that this past became confused with what he himself was. Thus might a young boy whose soul is evident in his eyes, but who has been metamorphosed into an alligator, even if he were not fully conscious of his horrendous head and jaws, consider his scaly body, his solemn, gigantic tail, with which he strikes the water or the beach or brushes against that of other monsters, and which extends him with the same touching, heart-rending and indesbuctible majesty as the train of a robe, adorned with lace, with crests, with battles, With a thousand crimes, worn by a Child Empress, extends her. He knew the horror of being alone, seized by an immortal enchantment in the midst of the world of the living. Only to him had been accorded !he horrendous privilege to perceive his monstrous participation in the realms of the great muddy rivers and the rain forests. And he was apprehensive that some light, emanating from within his body, or from his hue consciousness, might not be illuminating him, might not, in some way from inside the scaly carapace, -give off a reflection of that true form and make him visible to men, who would then have to hunt him down. In some places along the ramparts of Brest, trees have been 15 I QUERELLE

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Vronsky knew that further efforts were useless, and that he had to spend these few days in Petersburg as though in a strange town, avoiding every sort of relation with his own old circle in order not to be exposed to the annoyances and humiliations which were so intolerable to him. One of the most unpleasant features of his position in Petersburg was that Alexey Alexandrovitch and his name seemed to meet him everywhere. He could not begin to talk of anything without the conversation turning on Alexey Alexandrovitch; he could not go anywhere without risk of meeting him. So at least it seemed to Vronsky, just as it seems to a man with a sore finger that he is continually, as though on purpose, grazing his sore finger on everything. Their stay in Petersburg was the more painful to Vronsky that he perceived all the time a sort of new mood that he could not understand in Anna. At one time she would seem in love with him, and then she would become cold, irritable, and impenetrable. She was worrying over something, and keeping something back from him, and did not seem to notice the humiliations which poisoned his existence, and for her, with her delicate intuition, must have been still more unbearable. Chapter 29 One of Anna’s objects in coming back to Russia had been to see her son. From the day she left Italy the thought of it had never ceased to agitate her. And as she got nearer to Petersburg, the delight and importance of this meeting grew ever greater in her imagination. She did not even put to herself the question how to arrange it. It seemed to her natural and simple to see her son when she should be in the same town with him. But on her arrival in Petersburg she was suddenly made distinctly aware of her present position in society, and she grasped the fact that to arrange this meeting was no easy matter.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Sophie watched him then, and he wanted to retreat from her. To hide from her probing gaze. He made a silly face and asked, “Is there another hole in my shirt?” “So you wrote ‘French Whatchamacallit’ on the board and just hung out for two hours?” Sophie tucked her chin between her knees. It was the same posture she had assumed at the potluck, and it brought to mind the cold of the time they spent on the porch after dinner, how close they had gotten, her hand in his palm, the gritty texture of the porch. He swallowed the coffee. Felt his nasal cavities fill with heat and a burning smell. “Yeah—like I said, even an idiot like me couldn’t mess it up.” Sophie narrowed her eyes at him and reached for his mug of coffee, as if she’d read his mind, and he pushed it gently toward her until she drew it back to herself. She drank from it, and Lionel felt a thrill of pleasure in his stomach, the idea of her lips touching a place where his lips had been, and there was something like a presentiment or a premonition or some other ephemeral, fleeting thought, that Charles had been a similar kind of conduit. A thing that they had both touched and been touched by, and he got a little hard remembering it, Charles sliding into him that first time, the awful discomfort of it, the smell like sweat and breath and piss, but it wasn’t just remembering that Charles had fucked him, it was remembering it while sitting here with Sophie, and thinking that Sophie, too, had fucked Charles. She drank from his mug, and he felt exposed. “Tell me about last night,” she said calmly. “Was he good? Did you like it?” “The potluck?” “Charles,” she said, her lips tracing his name. Lionel closed his eyes and saw Charles before him, how beautiful his body was, how solid, how real, how warm. He felt dizzy again, as if his center of gravity had shifted violently and suddenly upward. He gripped the underside of the table. Opened his eyes. Sophie was watching him, her lids low, lips parted just so. “He came to my apartment. I thought—I don’t know what I thought, but apparently, he was calling my name and chasing me and I ran.” “You ran?” “And kind of slid? By the time he caught up with me, I couldn’t really use my keys. But he helped me.” “You poor thing,” she said, and she meant it. She actually meant it. Lionel’s mouth was dry and he motioned for the cup back. She shook her head, refused him. “But then he came in. I made coffee, we talked a bit.” “What did you talk about?” “That’s so funny,” Lionel said. “People say that, We talked. But I don’t remember a single thing we said to each other. He asked, Where do you sleep?” “No.” “He did.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  What happened to her between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four? First, she described her decision to leave Nick, a journey that took her to a new life in Washington, D.C., where she stayed with a close friend from college and examined her options. “I realized that I wanted to help children but that to make a difference I’d need a degree, I’d need some expertise,” she said. Working her contacts, Karen soon heard about a masters of public health program at Johns Hopkins that would allow her to combine her interest in child welfare and community organization. Drawing on student loans and what remained from her grandmother’s inheritance, she applied and was accepted into the three-year program, moved to Baltimore, and worked part-time in a pediatric outreach program while attending school. Karen, at last following her own desires, was an outstanding student who soon caught the attention of senior professors who mentored her as she negotiated career opportunities. “I have the best job,” Karen informed me. “I work with severely handicapped children in five southern states where I run a rural outreach program. We’re based in Chapel Hill. I love my work, Judy. I make it my business to spend a lot of time out in the community working with the children. People ask how I can stand it but I don’t find it depressing because I get a lot of gifts from the children. They open up and share things with me, their hopes, their dreams, the things they want to do, and the many things they fear. I realize from being with them how precious life is and how you only have this day.” “Karen, you’ve been helping other people ever since I met you, when you were ten years old. But now it looks like you decided to take a chance on what you want. Maybe the dice will fall your way.” “That’s right. I decided to take a chance and I discovered what I want. And I finally figured out what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationships with my mom or dad. I don’t want a man who is dependent on me.” “And you do want?” “I want a lover and a husband. I’m no longer frantic to find just anybody because if I have to, I can live alone. I can stand on my own two feet. I’m no longer afraid.” And then the sadness around her eyes returned. “But it’s not really all behind me. Like I told you, part of me is always waiting for disaster to strike. I keep reminding myself that I’m doing this to myself, but the truth is that I live in dread that something bad will happen to me. Some terrible loss that will change my life.