Grief

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 Detransition, Baby (2021)

  That night, however, she gaped at Reese, shocked at how easily Reese had named what she’d gone through. She remembered Ricky telling her about Reese’s uncanny ability to say what you need. Whether she could trust Reese or not, no one had ever said such a thing to her. No one had so casually seen through her hollow stoicism to the accumulated disdain and disgust she harbored within. No one had ever implied that Amy might be wounded or suffering too, least of all Amy. She didn’t know she needed that kind of permission until that moment. She opened her mouth to protest, gulped once, and collapsed into tears all over again, sobbing onto Reese’s chest at all she had done to herself for years, at the hurt she’d inflicted upon herself and on the people she’d been with, while Reese gripped her and didn’t tell her to stop. CHAPTER FIVE Seven weeks after conception () N ONE HAND, Reese figures that the best strategy might be to get any crying out of her system before she meets Katrina at the GLAAD Media Awards gala where Ames has contrived for the two women in his life to first encounter each other. That way, when Reese is called upon to make a first impression, she will have so depleted her emotional energy that she'll be incapable of anything other than somnambulistic agreeableness. Which is why she has spent the last few minutes unpleasantly blerping out sobs on the floor of Ames’s closet. Ames had invited her to meet at his apartment and then take a car together to the awards at the Hilton Midtown. Waiting for him to get ready, she wandered around the apartment and, indulging a nostalgic temptation, opened the closet door. The left side of the closet had once been hers, a fact that was suddenly and viscerally recalled to her by its faded odor of cedar flakes, wool, detergent, and old paint, all of which wafted into her face the moment she opened the door. She swooned backward, the smells forcing her to relive in her mind the day that she’d moved into Amy’s apartment: how she’d grinned impishly at her lover and swept all of Amy’s hanging clothing to the right, declaring the left side conquered. She’d been so full of hope that day. So sure that her crush on Amy meant something new for her. Today, what? Seven? Eight years later, she crumples under the force of memory, her face pressed to the polyurethaned bamboo floorboards. It hurts to remember that first day. It hurts to remember hope like that. It hurts to think that such hope was the naiveté and stupidity of youth, of a person she would never be again.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  His email makes me weep more. I am not a merger. I am not an acquisition. Reading this, I might as well be. I don’t reply. I just don’t know what to say to him. I fumble into my PJs, and wrapping his jacket around me, I climb into bed. As I lie staring into the darkness, I think of all the times he warned me to stay away. Anastasia, you should steer clear of me. I’m not the man for you. I don’t do the girlfriend thing. I’m not a hearts-and-flowers kind of guy. I don’t make love. This is all I know. And as I silently weep into my pillow, it’s this last idea I cling to. This is all I know, too. Perhaps together we can chart a new course. Chapter FourteenChristian is standing over me, grasping a plaited-leather riding crop. He’s wearing old, faded, ripped Levis and that’s all. He flicks the crop slowly into his palm as he gazes down at me. He’s smiling, triumphant. I cannot move. I am naked and shackled, spread-eagled on a large four-poster bed. Reaching forward, he trails the tip of the crop from my forehead down the length of my nose, so I smell the leather, and over my parted, panting lips. He pushes the tip into my mouth so I can taste the smooth, rich leather. “Suck,” he commands, his voice soft. My mouth closes over the tip as I obey. “Enough,” he snaps. I’m panting once more as he tugs the crop out of my mouth, trails it down and under my chin, on down my neck to the hollow at the base of my throat. He swirls it slowly there and then continues to drag the tip down my body, along my sternum, between my breasts, over my torso, down to my navel. I’m panting, squirming, pulling against my restraints that are biting into my wrists and my ankles. He swirls the tip around my navel, then continues to trail the leather tip south, through my pubic hair to my clitoris. He flicks the crop and it hits my sweet spot with a sharp slap, and I come, gloriously, shouting my release. Abruptly, I wake, gasping for breath, covered in sweat and feeling the aftershocks of my orgasm. Holy hell. I’m completely disorientated. What the hell just happened? I’m in my bedroom alone. How? Why? I sit bolt upright, shocked…wow. It’s morning. I glance at my alarm clock—eight o’clock. I put my head in my hands. I didn’t know I could dream sex. Was it something I ate? Perhaps the oysters and my internet research manifesting itself in my first wet dream. It’s bewildering. I had no idea that I could orgasm in my sleep. Kate is skipping around the kitchen when I stagger in. “Ana, are you okay? You look odd. Is that Christian’s jacket you’re wearing?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Tm sorry,” Ames says. “Actually, my mom was crying on the phone, and then I started crying too. And we were both crying about the same thing—that I did and didn’t have a grandma.” Ames nods. He had a grandma, who was fine, he guessed. His family was a chain he’d voluntarily decoupled from in order to breathe, so he couldn’t quite relate—but now wasn’t the time to say that. “T thought about what you were saying about redemption, and I realized that I felt the same thing. That I had a chance to connect my mother to my child, to relink the maternal line that my birth broke.” Ames couldn’t help but sit up abruptly, suddenly wildly alert. “So you're going to keep the baby?” “Well, that’s the thing. I was talking to my mom. About you and what you proposed. About this woman, Reese. About my career, and my finances, and my time commitments, and what I want in a relationship, and well, so much. We were talking for hours, listening to each other—and you know what she said?” Katrina doesn’t wait for Ames to ask but pushes on. “This is going to sound crazy, but somehow, even though I’m nearly forty, when my mom approves of something, it makes it seem possible, like, not rebellious. You know? Like, when you want to do something wild as a teenager, and you realize your mom also thinks it’s cool, suddenly it’s like, doable?” “Katrina,” Ames cuts in and puts his hand on his sternum to settle himself. He thinks he sees where Katrina is headed, and can’t tell if his sudden anxiety would be better alleviated if he were right or if he were wrong about his suspicion. “I know youre really good at dramatic presentations, but please, the suspense is killing me.” “My mom, well, after we talked about everything, she was like, ‘The one thing I learned raising you—through successes and failures —is that the best way to be a mother is to do so with as many other moms around as possible.’ You laid out a number of options for me to choose from, and the thing is, honestly—what if we had them all? I want my career, I want to build and commit with you, and a child is a lovely time-tested way for that. Meanwhile, you want this woman Reese as your family, and she wants a baby and respect and purpose as a mother; and my mom wants to be a grandma; and you and I could be good to a child, I think, and we all want it to be something redemptive.” Ames waits and Katrina angles her glance at him slightly askance. “So,” she says, “I’m just asking you what my mom asked, as like, a question to explore...But during your time, uh, in the queer world, was it common for people to raise children in a family that is— What do you call it? Something like a triad?” CHAPTER FOUR

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Jon selects a thirty-five-inch bat, gigantic by the standards of today’s major-league players, who finesse their bat speeds and swing paths with smaller, lighter bats. But Jon bats as he always has, in the way of the old players, using his heavy frame to club the ball whenever it gets near him. When Amy transitioned, she lost her dog. There was just her. She and her body were one and the same. Every sensation simply belonged to her, unmediated. It was supposed to be good. Sometimes it was. She didn’t have to guess what was going on from her dog’s behavior. But without a dog to hurt for her, on her behalf, her life as a woman arrived with pain; pain that had to be endured, withstood, pain that was the same as being alive, and so was without end. As Jon bats, Ames tries to listen to his body. He has not thought about his dog in a long time. Does he still have a dog? In his detransition, he supposed he’d get his dog back, but he didn’t. He has simply lost the vibrancy of both pain and pleasure. The world has receded to a tolerable distance, the colors unsaturated, while the dog stayed dead. In a certain cowardly way, he supposes that he has avoided thinking about it, hoping that this is enough. But of course, he has lived the last three years of his life in a way that requires so little of him—an office job of moderate ambition; a relationship that, as much as he really believes he loves Katrina, came to him without quite searching for it; friends who know him well, but not too well. Only now, with this baby, this work of his traitorous, animal body, does he need an inclination of his truest feelings. When Jon wears himself out, Ames takes a second turn. The bat goes round and round, and each time it is a prayer, beseeching the dead to speak. When he goes over to Katrina’s that evening, he throws himself to his knees and presses himself against her, kissing her belly, her inner thighs, cultivating his want, sussing out his edges, feeling for a way to let it speak to him, even as his hands are all over her, and he’s murmuring over and over how much he wants her, how hungry he is for her. It has been in moments of desire with her that he’s felt the most vibrant these past years, sweet moments when the distance between his body and his self narrows. At first she protests, but then he feels her body release, give in to him, and she laughs softly. “Easy, easy, all right. ’'ve missed seeing this in you.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Tl'm coming,” Patrick had said, breaking the silence and loosening Amy’s grip on the place she had gone, so that it slipped away from her as when you let go of a ledge; and she fell careening back through the wormhole, through time and space, back to Patrick’s bed, where she opened her eyes, and saw him on top of her thrusting, then one last hard thrust, with his eyes locked on the television. She didn’t say anything. Not like with Delia. No encouragement. No pretending that she had ever been present. Wordlessly, she and Patrick both understood the rules—rules that she would henceforth employ for all sexual encounters with men: Neither of them would actually be there for the sex. They would take from each other what they could, each from their own places. They would use what they could of each other’s bodies. But encouragement, or solace, or care—no, neither of them wanted any of that. Just give me enough of yourself to put me in touch with the part of me that can believe I’m a girl, and beyond that, you can go fuck yourself, in whatever theoretical dimension you need to be in to do that. “Baby, why are you crying?” Reese had asked. Because some combination of hormones and poppers had made possible the sex that Amy had given up on. The poppers made her too dumb to flee into herself, to send herself somewhere. So there she was with Reese. Not off elsewhere working to see herself as a woman when she lay on top of a woman, or replacing a man with someone else while he lay on top of her. She simply was a woman present with a woman. It felt like some kind of healing, some kind of redemption. And all she could do was cry. Later that night, Reese stroked her hair and whispered to her, “Tm sorry you've been in so much pain for so long.” Any night before that one, Amy would have denied it, would have told Reese about all the privileges she had, about how lucky she had been compared to other trans women, how many advantages she’d been granted. How few of the readily nameable traumas she ever suffered. And without legible traumas to point to, what would pain make her? At best, a trans version of those Didion-worshipping bourgeois white girls who subscribed to a Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, those minor-wound-dwelling brooders with no particular difficulties but for an inchoate sense of their own wronged-ness, a wronged-ness that fell apart when put into words but nonetheless justified all manner of petulance and self-pity. In pain? No, not Amy.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  The kids on other basketball teams are only relevant when they come to campus. It’s a self-contained universe. There are trips to McDonald’s and Coosa Liquors, but they’re all about Pudge and his fellow students. (In the case of the Coosa Liquors trip, Pudge never even gets out of the car.) This is totally destroyed with Alaska’s death. She doesn’t even die among them: She dies off campus, away from this insular, highly integrated world, and so what follows feels like a disintegration. Pudge later uses the phrase “falling apart” to describe the general condition of things in the universe, but in that intensely personal moment, it doesn’t feel like a general falling apart. It feels like his specific world has disintegrated. Were the theological aspects of Looking for Alaska influenced by your background in religious studies? Definitely. I could never have written this book without the religion classes I took in college, and the theology/philosophy/worldview/whatever at the core of the book comes directly from conversations I had with Don Rogan, my mentor and professor at Kenyon. Even in private conversations, I was never quite sure what Rogan believed, but he was very interested in formulations of what is called radical hope—the belief that hope is available to all people at all times—possibly even including the dead. And the argument that Pudge makes at the very end of the book, that he believes Alaska forgives him, is a rather theistic thing for Pudge to say. (Of course, this isn’t the only viewpoint presented in the novel. There is also the Colonel’s, “The labyrinth sucks but I choose it,” which is not necessarily a theistic point of view, although I’d argue it’s still a very hopeful thing to say.) Basically, I wanted to think about all kinds of different ways that young people respond thoughtfully to loss and grief, and show a bunch of different ways that people can prove resilient. Dr. Hyde tells Pudge to “be present.” What does that mean to you? It means listening. Listening is a rare skill, and in these noisy times, it is more and more valuable. Pudge writes, “Teenagers think they are invincible.” Did you when you were a teen? Do you, now, as an adult? I was aware as a teenager of the fact that I might die, and it scared me a little. But I never felt like dying would affect my overall invincibility, if that makes sense. It’s a little like what Muhammad Ali said after his third fight with Joe Frazier. After the fight, which Ali won, Ali said that he thought at times that Frazier might kill him. “If he had killed me,” Ali said, “I would have gotten back up and won the fight. I would have been the first dead heavyweight champion of the world.” I felt like that as a teenager.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “That was Reese’s friend Thalia,” Ames says. “She told me that Reese is in the hospital. A suicide attempt.” Have you ever heard of Wim Hof? He’s this weird-ass Dutchman, known as the Iceman, who developed a method to withstand extreme pain. Among other superhuman feats, he climbed Mount Everest in just a pair of shorts, submerged himself in a block of ice for two hours without his core body temperature dropping, and ran a marathon across a desert without drinking water. He’s in his late fifties and looks like an ancient Northern European hermit or an extra from Game of Thrones. He’s usually filmed shirtless in frozen landscapes, icicles entangled in his beard, exhorting listeners in his staccato Dutch accent: “The cold trains your power. Your mind must deal with the elements. You must be healthy electromagnetically.” His followers, as near as Reese can tell, are bros without girlfriends who read Kerouac between MMA workouts and don’t own sheets. Reese discovered Wim Hof a couple of years back, through a Grindr hookup. She went to a guy’s apartment and he seemed normal enough—he worked at Saks and answered the door in a button-down with French cuffs. He offered Reese vodka, and they commenced to make out. After about ten minutes of dry-humping on the couch, they moved to the bedroom, where he stripped Reese to her bra and panties. Then, abruptly, he walked into the bathroom, took a five-minute icy cold shower, and after toweling off only cursorily, got into bed with her. His skin was so cold that she felt as though she were embracing a corpse. But the guy fucked like a god. Afterward, he admitted that he’d always had trouble maintaining erections. So he started doing this thing called the Wim Hof method —a combination of breathing exercises and cold endurance trials, beginning with cold showers and moving to immersion in frozen lakes—intended to help adherents withstand pain and even control autonomic bodily systems, like blood flow or adrenaline. After a few months on the Wim Hof training regimen, her Grindr date claimed to have taken control of his erections again. The price was simply to freeze himself beyond performance anxiety before any intimacy. As Reese lay under the covers beside his finally warmed-up body, he pulled out a laptop in order to show her a half-hour Vice documentary on Wim Hof. It was a typical Vice piece: a credulous white guy doing things that he ought not to, filmed in a neutered gonzo style. But Wim Hof intrigued Reese—not for his physical feats of endurance, but for his apparent grief.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  well. When we hear about the death of a woman who had been estranged from her daughter for many years, we want to know whether they were reconciled as death approached. We do not care only about the daughter’s feelings—it is the narrative of the mother’s life that we wish to improve. Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings. Indeed, we can be deeply moved even by events that change the stories of people who are already dead. We feel pity for a man who died believing in his wife’s love for him, when we hear that she had a lover for many years and stayed with her husband only for his money. We pity the husband although he had lived a happy life. We feel the humiliation of a scientist who made an important discovery that was proved false after she died, although she did not experience the humiliation. Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero. The psychologist Ed Diener and his students wondered whether duration neglect and the peak-end rule would govern evaluations of entire lives. They used a short description of the life of a fictitious character called Jen, a never- married woman with no children, who died instantly and painlessly in an automobile accident. In one version of Jen’s story, she was extremely happy throughout her life (which lasted either 30 or 60 years), enjoying her work, taking vacations, spending time with her friends and on her hobbies. Another version added 5 extra years to Jen’s life, who now died either when she was 35 or 65. The extra years were described as pleasant but less so than before. After reading a schematic biography of Jen, each participant answered two questions: “Taking her life as a whole, how desirable do you think Jen’s life was?” and “How much total happiness or unhappiness would you say that Jen experienced in her life?” The results provided clear evidence of both duration neglect and a peak-end effect. In a between-subjects experiment (different participants saw different forms), doubling the duration of Jen’s life had no effect whatsoever on the desirability of her life, or on judgments of the total happiness that Jen experienced. Clearly, her life was represented by a prototypical slice of time, not as a sequence of time slices. As a consequence, her “total happiness” was the happiness of a typical period in her lifetime, not the sum (or integral) of happiness over the duration of her life. As expected from this idea, Diener and his students also found a less-is-more effect, a strong indication that an average (prototype) has been substituted for a sum. Adding 5 “slightly happy” years to a very happy life caused a substantial drop in evaluations of the total happiness of that life. At my urging, they also collected data on the effect of the extra 5 years in a

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  I saw a dorm room—the same cinder-block walls, the same dimensions, even the same layout as my own. Their couch was nicer, and they had an actual coffee table instead of COFFEE TABLE. They had two posters on the wall. One featured a huge stack of hundred-dollar bills with the caption THE FIRST MILLION IS THE HARDEST. On the opposite wall, a poster of a red Ferrari. “Uh, I see a dorm room.” “You’re not looking, Pudge. When I go into your room, I see a couple of guys who love video games. When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.” She walked over to the couch and picked up a plastic soda bottle. “Look at this,” she said, and I saw that it was half filled with a brackish, brown liquid. Dip spit. “So they dip. And they obviously aren’t hygienic about it. So are they going to care if we pee on their toothbrushes? They won’t care enough, that’s for sure. Look. Tell me what these guys love.” “They love money,” I said, pointing to the poster. She threw up her hands, exasperated. “They all love money, Pudge. Okay, go into the bathroom. Tell me what you see there.” The game was annoying me a little, but I went into the bathroom as she sat down on that inviting couch. Inside the shower, I found a dozen bottles of shampoo and conditioner. In the medicine cabinet, I found a cylindrical bottle of something called Rewind. I opened it—the bluish gel smelled like flowers and rubbing alcohol, like a fancy hair salon. (Under the sink, I also found a tub of Vaseline so big that it could have only had one possible use, which I didn’t care to dwell on.) I came back into the room and excitedly said, “They love their hair.” “Precisely!” she shouted. “Look on the top bunk.” Perilously positioned on the thin wooden headboard of the bed, a bottle of STA-WET gel. “Kevin doesn’t just wake up with that spiky bedhead look, Pudge. He works for it. He loves that hair. They leave their hair products here, Pudge, because they have duplicates at home. All those boys do. And you know why?” “Because they’re compensating for their tiny little penises?” I asked. “Ha ha. No. That’s why they’re macho assholes. They love their hair because they aren’t smart enough to love something more interesting. So we hit them where it hurts: the scalp.” “Ohh-kaay,” I said, unsure of how, exactly, to prank someone’s scalp. She stood up and walked to the window and bent over to shimmy out. “Don’t look at my ass,” she said, and so I looked at her ass, spreading out wide from her thin waist. She effortlessly somersaulted out the half-opened window. I took the feetfirst approach, and once I got my feet on the ground, I limboed my upper body out the window. “Well,” she said. “That looked awkward.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  I hope it was amusing. But you should know I cannot accept any responsibility for what comes out of my mouth when I am unconscious. In fact—you probably misheard me. A man of your advanced years is surely a little deaf. From: Christian Grey Subject: Pleading Guilty Date: June 2 2011 19:52 To: Anastasia Steele Dear Miss Steele, Sorry, could you speak up? I can’t hear you. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: Pleading Insanity Again Date: June 2 2011 22:54 ET To: Christian Grey You are driving me crazy. From: Christian Grey Subject: I Hope So… Date: June 2 2011 19:59 To: Anastasia Steele Dear Miss Steele, I intend to do exactly that on Friday evening. Looking forward to it. ;) Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: Grrrrrr Date: June 2 2011 23:02 ET To: Christian Grey I am officially pissed at you. Good night. Miss A. R. Steele From: Christian Grey Subject: Wild Cat Date: June 2 2011 20:05 To: Anastasia Steele Are you growling at me, Miss Steele? I possess a cat of my own for growlers. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. Cat of his own? I’ve never seen a cat in his apartment. No, I am not going to answer him. Oh, he can be so exasperating sometimes. Fifty shades of exasperating. I clamber into bed and lie glaring at the ceiling as my eyes adjust to the dark. I hear another ping from my computer. I am not going to look. No, definitely not. No, I am not going to look. Gah! Like the fool I am, I cannot resist the lure of Christian Grey’s words. From: Christian Grey Subject: What You Said in Your Sleep Date: June 2 2011 20:20 To: Anastasia Steele Anastasia, I’d rather hear you say the words that you uttered in your sleep when you’re conscious. That’s why I won’t tell you. Go to sleep. You’ll need to be rested with what I have in mind for you tomorrow. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. Oh no. What have I said? It’s as bad as I think, I’m sure. Chapter Twenty-FiveMy mother hugs me tightly. “Follow your heart, darling, and please, please—try not to overthink things. Relax and enjoy yourself. You are so young, sweetheart. You have so much of life to experience yet, just let it happen. You deserve the best of everything.” She whispers in my ear, her heartfelt words comforting. She kisses my hair. “Oh, Mom.” Hot, unwelcome tears prick my eyes as I cling to her. “Darling, you know what they say. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.” I give her a lopsided, bittersweet smile. “I think I’ve kissed a prince, Mom. I hope he doesn’t turn into a frog.” She gives me her most endearing, motherly, absolute-unconditional-love smile, and I marvel at the love I feel for this woman as we hug again.

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

  If less care is given, as in Billy’s case, because the mother is ready for new interests and a different life, parents need to understand that the child will take this as pure rejection. It will break his heart. Like Billy, he may react with depression, anger, or rebelliousness, and there is no reason to assume that his hurt will lessen. His loss is enormous and can be the defining event of his growing up years. This is because every ill or handicapped child carries a double burden. First, he must deal with his own handicap in an often pitiless world. Second, and even more difficult, he must cope with his parents’ disappointment in him, for he knows that they had hoped for a healthy baby. He mustn’t disappoint them any further. As the vulnerable child sees his parents’ struggle to contain their grief, he is likely to feel anxious, ashamed, or depressed. He is likely to be hyperalert to their moods and more likely than a healthy child to feel responsible for any troubles in the family. The vulnerable child needs a double dose of praise and encouragement for every step he takes toward realistic independence. He needs assurance that there is a great deal he can do by himself and that he can master important ways to care for himself. He especially needs praise for his courage in trying. When the parent of a vulnerable child remarries, he or she needs to proceed gradually. Billy’s mother, for example, could have set aside exclusive time with her son in the early months, which would have helped him make the transition. In planning remarriage, a parent needs to work out the complex feelings of love and resentment between caregiver and child. Just as weaning means gradually giving up a dependency for both mother and baby, the vulnerable child and his mother need to respect their relationship and give it time to adapt to new conditions. Boys who are ill and lack stamina usually cannot compete in the world of sports, which in our society is often a major link between fathers and sons. A sensitive father will help his son cope with this loss, finding other ways to bond and real achievements that he can take pride in. In a good intact family, parents spell each other in taking care of their children; when one person is exhausted, the other takes over. This sort of sharing is even more needed in homes with a vulnerable child, where physical and emotional exhaustion are constant undercurrents of daily life.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  The apartment is achingly empty and unfamiliar. I have not lived here long enough for it to feel like home. I head straight to my room, and there, hanging limply at the end of my bed, is a very sad, deflated helicopter balloon. Charlie Tango, looking and feeling exactly like me. I grab it angrily off my bedrail, snapping the tie, and hug it to me. Oh, what have I done? I fall onto my bed, shoes and all, and howl. The pain is indescribable—physical, mental…metaphysical. It is everywhere, seeping into the marrow of my bones. Grief. This is grief—and I’ve brought it on myself. Deep down, a nasty, unbidden thought comes from my inner goddess, her lips contorted in a snarl—the physical pain from the bite of a belt is nothing, nothing compared to this devastation. I curl up, desperately clutching the flat foil balloon and Taylor’s handkerchief, and surrender to my grief. Excerpt from Fifty Shades DarkerChapter OneI have survived Day Three Post-Christian, and my first day at work. It has been a welcome distraction. The time has flown by in a haze of new faces, work to do, and Mr. Jack Hyde. Mr. Jack Hyde… he smiles down at me, his blue eyes twinkling, as he leans against my desk. “Excellent work, Ana. I think we’re going to make a great team.” Somehow, I manage to curl my lips in a semblance of a smile. “I’ll be off, if that’s okay with you.” “Of course, it’s five thirty. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Good night, Jack.” “Good night, Ana.” Collecting my bag, I shrug on my jacket and head for the door. Out in the early evening air of Seattle, I take a deep breath. It doesn’t begin to fill the void in my chest, a void that’s been present since Saturday morning, a painful hollow reminder of my loss. I walk toward the bus stop with my head down, staring at my feet and contemplating being without my beloved Wanda, my old Beetle… or the Audi. I shut the door on that thought immediately. No. Don’t think about him. Of course, I can afford a car—a nice, new car. I suspect he has been overgenerous in his payment, and the thought leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but I dismiss it and try to keep my mind as numb and as blank as possible. I can’t think about him. I don’t want to start crying again—not out on the street. The apartment is empty. I miss Kate, and I imagine her lying on a beach in Barbados sipping a cool cocktail. I turn on the flat-screen television so there’s noise to fill the vacuum and provide an illusion of company, but I don’t listen or watch. All I can do is sit and stare blankly at the brick wall. I am numb. I feel nothing but the pain. How long must I endure this?

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  No, it doesn’t. I groan in frustration, rolling my eyes heavenward, and Christian narrows his eyes. And for the first time in a long time, I want to laugh. I try hard to stifle the giggle that threatens to escape. Christian’s face softens as I struggle to keep a straight face, and a trace of a smile kisses his lovely sculptured lips. “Well?” he asks, his voice softer. “Pasta alla vongole, last Friday,” I whisper. He closes his eyes as fury, and possibly regret, sweeps across his face. “I see,” he says, his voice expressionless. “You look like you’ve lost at least five pounds, possibly more since then. Please eat, Anastasia,” he scolds. I stare down at the knotted fingers in my lap. Why does he always make me feel like an errant child? He shifts and turns toward me. “How are you?” His voice is still soft. Well, I’m shit, really… I swallow. “If I told you I was fine, I’d be lying.” He inhales sharply. “Me, too,” he murmurs and reaches over and clasps my hand. “I miss you.” Oh no. Skin against skin. “Christian, I—” “Ana, please. We need to talk.” I’m going to cry. No. “Christian, I…please…I’ve cried so much.” I try to keep my emotions in check. “Oh, baby, no.” He tugs my hand, and before I know it I’m on his lap. He has his arms around me, and his nose is in my hair. “I’ve missed you so much, Anastasia.” I want to struggle out of his hold, to maintain some distance, but his arms are wrapped around me. He’s pressing me to his chest and I melt. Oh, this is where I want to be. I rest my head against him, and he kisses my hair. This is home. He smells of linen, fabric softener, body wash, and my favorite smell—Christian. For a moment, I allow myself the illusion that all will be well, and it soothes my ravaged soul. A few minutes later Taylor pulls to a stop at the curb, even though we’re still in the city. “Come”—Christian shifts me off his lap—“we’re here.” What? “Helipad—on the top of this building.” Christian glances toward the building by way of explanation. Of course. Charlie Tango. Taylor opens the door and I slide out. He gives me a warm, avuncular smile that makes me feel safe. I smile back. “I should give you back your handkerchief.” “Keep it, Miss Steele, with my best wishes.” I blush as Christian comes around the car and takes my hand. He looks quizzically at Taylor, who stares impassively back at him, revealing nothing. “Nine?” Christian says to him. “Yes, sir.” Christian nods as he turns and leads me through the double doors into the grandiose foyer. I revel in the feel of his hand and his long, skilled fingers curled around mine. The familiar pull is there—I’m drawn, Icarus to his sun. I’ve been burned already, and yet here I am again.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  And as I slowly made my way out of the gym, I told anyone who would listen, “No. It wasn’t us. It was Alaska.” The four of us returned to Room 43, aglow in the success of it, convinced that the Creek would never again see such a prank, and it didn’t even occur to me that I might get in trouble until the Eagle opened the door to our room and stood above us, and shook his head disdainfully. “I know it was y’all,” said the Eagle. We looked at him silently. He often bluffed. Maybe he was bluffing. “Don’t ever do anything like that again,” he said. “But, Lord, ‘subverting the patriarchal paradigm’—it’s like she wrote the speech.” He smiled and closed the door. one hundred fourteen days after A WEEK AND A HALF LATER, I walked back from my afternoon classes, the sun bearing down on my skin in a constant reminder that spring in Alabama had come and gone in a matter of hours, and now, early May, summer had returned for a six-month visit, and I felt the sweat dribble down my back and longed for the bitter winds of January. When I got to my room, I found Takumi sitting on the couch, reading my biography of Tolstoy. “Uh, hi,” I said. He closed the book and placed it beside him and said, “January 10.” “What?” I asked. “January 10. That date ring a bell?” “Yeah, it’s the day Alaska died.” Technically, she died three hours into January 11, but it was still, to us anyway, Monday night, January 10. “Yeah, but something else, Pudge. January 9. Alaska’s mom took her to the zoo.” “Wait. No. How do you know that?” “She told us at Barn Night. Remember?” Of course I didn’t remember. If I could remember numbers, I wouldn’t be struggling toward a C-plus in precalc. “Holy shit,” I said as the Colonel walked in. “What?” the Colonel asked. “January 9, 1997,” I told him. “Alaska liked the bears. Her mom liked the monkeys.” The Colonel looked at me blankly for a moment and then took his backpack off and slung it across the room in a single motion. “Holy shit,” he said. “WHY THE HELL DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT!” Within a minute, the Colonel had the best solution either of us would ever come up with. “Okay. She’s sleeping. Jake calls, and she talks to him, and she’s doodling, and she looks at her white flower, and ‘Oh God my mom liked white flowers and put them in my hair when I was little,’ and then she flips out. She comes back into her room and starts screaming at us that she forgot—forgot about her mom, of course—so she takes the flowers, drives off campus, on her way to—what?” He looked at me. “What? Her mom’s grave?”

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  Now please do not refer to yourself as “some woman I fuck occasionally” because, quite frankly, it makes me MAD, and you really wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: Careful Yourself Date: May 26 2011 23:57 To: Christian Grey Dear Mr. Grey, I’m not sure I like you anyway, especially at the moment. Miss Steele From: Christian Grey Subject: Careful Yourself Date: May 27 2011 00:03 To: Anastasia Steele Why don’t you like me? Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: Careful Yourself Date: May 27 2011 00:09 To: Christian Grey Because you never stay with me. There, that’s given him something to think about. I shut the machine down with a flourish I don’t really feel and crawl into my bed. I switch off my sidelight and stare up at the ceiling. It’s been one long day, one emotional wrench after another. It was heartwarming to spend some time with Ray. He looked well, and weirdly, he approved of Christian. Jeez, Kate and her gargantuan mouth. Hearing Christian speak about being hungry. What the hell is that all about? God, and the car. I haven’t even told Kate about the new car. What was Christian thinking? And then this evening, he actually hit me. I’ve never been hit in my life. What have I gotten myself into? Very slowly, my tears, halted by Kate’s arrival, begin to slide down the side of my face and into my ears. I have fallen for someone who’s so emotionally shut down, I will only get hurt—deep down I know this—someone who by his own admission is completely fucked up. Why is he so fucked up? It must be awful to be as affected as he is, and the thought that as a toddler he suffered some unbearable cruelty makes me cry harder. Perhaps if he were more normal, he wouldn’t want you, my subconscious contributes snidely to my musings…and in my heart of hearts I know this is true. I turn into my pillow and the sluice gates open…and for the first time in years, I am sobbing uncontrollably into my pillow. I am momentarily distracted from my dark night of the soul by Kate shouting. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” “Well, you can’t!” “What the fuck have you done to her now?” “Ever since she’s met you she cries all the time.” “You can’t come in here!” Christian bursts into my bedroom and unceremoniously switches on the overhead light, making me squint. “Jesus, Ana,” he mutters. He flicks the switch off again and is at my side in a moment. “What are you doing here?” I gasp between sobs. Crap. I can’t stop crying. He switches on the sidelight, making me squint again. Kate comes and stands in the doorway. “Do you want me to throw this asshole out?” she asks, radiating thermonuclear hostility.

• From The Lover (1984)

  We met again once, he spoke about our dead brother. He said of his death, What an awful thing, how dreadful, our little brother, our little Paulo. There remains this image of our kinship: a meal in Sadec. All three of us are eating at the dining-room table. They’re seventeen, eighteen. My mother’s not with us. He watches us eat, my younger brother and me, then he puts down his fork and looks at my younger brother. For a very long time he looks at him, then suddenly, very calmly, says something terrible. About food. He says he must be careful, he shouldn’t eat so much. My younger brother doesn’t answer. The other goes on. Reminds him the big pieces of meat are for him, and he mustn’t forget it. Or else, he says. I ask, Why are they for you? He says, Because that’s how it is. I say, I wish you’d die. I can’t eat any more. Nor can my younger brother. He waits for my younger brother to dare to speak, just one word, his clenched fists are poised ready over the table to bash his face in. My younger brother says nothing. He’s very pale. Between his lashes, the beginning of tears. It was a dreary day, the day he died. In spring, I think it was, April. Someone telephones. They don’t say anything else, nothing, just that he’s been found dead, on the floor, in his room. But death came before the end of his story. When he was still alive it had already happened, it was too late now for him to die, it had been all over since the death of my younger brother. The conquering words: It is finished. She asked for him to be buried with her. I don’t know where, in which cemetery. I just know it’s in the Loire. Both in the same grave. Just the two of them. It’s as it should be. An image of intolerable splendor. Dusk fell at the same time all the year round. It was very brief, almost like a blow. In the rainy season, for weeks on end, you couldn’t see the sky, it was full of an unvarying mist which even the light of the moon couldn’t pierce. In the dry season, though, the sky was bare, completely free of cloud, naked. Even moonless nights were light. And the shadows were as clear-cut as ever on the ground, and on the water, roads, and walls.

• From The Lover (1984)

  And another time, on the same route, during the crossing of the same ocean, night had begun as before and in the lounge on the main deck there was a sudden burst of music, a Chopin waltz which she knew secretly, personally, because for months she had tried to learn it, though she never managed to play it properly, never, and that was why her mother agreed to let her give up the piano. Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat, of that she was sure, and she’d been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliancies. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea. As later she had seen the eternity of her younger brother, through death. Around her, people slept, enveloped but not awakened by the music, peaceful. The girl thought she’d just seen the calmest night there had ever been in the Indian Ocean. She thinks it’s during that night too that she saw her younger brother come on deck with a woman. He leaned on the rails, she put her arms around him, and they kissed. The girl hid to get a better view. She recognized the woman. Already, with her younger brother, the two were always together. She was a married woman, but it was a dead couple, the husband appeared not to notice anything. During the last few days of the voyage the younger brother and the woman spent all day in their cabin, they came out only at night. During these same days the younger brother looked at his mother and sister as if he didn’t know them. The mother grew grim, silent, jealous. She, the girl, wept. She was happy, she thought, and at the same time she was afraid of what would happen later to her younger brother. She thought he’d leave them, go off with the woman, but no, he came back to them when they got to France. She doesn’t know how long it was after the white girl left that he obeyed his father’s orders, married as he was told to do the girl the families had chosen ten years ago, a girl dripping, like the rest, with gold, diamonds, jade. She too was a Chinese from the north, from the city of Fushun, and had come there with relations.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Yes, I tell you, when she was already quite old she did it again. She opened a French-language school, the Nouvelle Ecole Française, which made enough for her to help me with my studies and to provide for her elder son as long as she lived. • • • My younger brother died in three days, of bronchial pneumonia. His heart gave out. It was then that I left my mother. It was during the Japanese occupation. Everything came to an end that day. I never asked her any more questions about our childhood, about herself. She died, for me, of my younger brother’s death. So did my elder brother. I never got over the horror they inspired in me then. They don’t mean anything to me any more. I don’t know any more about them since that day. I don’t even know how she managed to pay off her debts to the chettis, the Indian moneylenders. One day they stopped coming. I can see them now. They’re sitting in the little parlor in Sadec wearing white dhotis, they sit there without saying a word, for months, years. My mother can be heard weeping and insulting them, she’s in her room and won’t come out, she calls out to them to leave her alone, they’re deaf, calm, smiling, they stay where they are. And then one day, gone. They’re dead now, my mother and my two brothers. For memories too it’s too late. Now I don’t love them any more. I don’t remember if I ever did. I’ve left them. In my head I no longer have the scent of her skin, nor in my eyes the color of her eyes. I can’t remember her voice, except sometimes when it grew soft with the weariness of evening. Her laughter I can’t hear any more—neither her laughter nor her cries. It’s over, I don’t remember. That’s why I can write about her so easily now, so long, so fully. She’s become just something you write without difficulty, cursive writing.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I forget the words of the telegram from Saigon. Forget whether it said my younger brother was dead or whether it said, Recalled to God. I seem to remember it was Recalled to God. I realized at once, she couldn’t have sent the telegram. My younger brother. Dead. At first it’s incomprehensible, and then suddenly, from all directions, from the ends of the earth, comes pain. It buried me, swept me away, I didn’t know anything, I ceased to exist except for pain, what pain, I didn’t know what pain, whether it was the pain returning of having lost a child a few months before, or a new pain. Now I think it was a new pain, I’d never known my stillborn child and hadn’t wanted to kill myself then as I wanted to now. It was a mistake, and that momentary error filled the universe. The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn’t noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother’s body while he was alive, and we hadn’t noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother’s body was dead, and immortality with it. And the world went on without that visited body, and without its visitation. It was a complete mistake. And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe. • • • Since my younger brother was dead, everything had to die after him. And through him. Death, a chain reaction of death, started with him, the child. The corpse of the child was unaffected, itself, by the events of which it was the cause. Of the immortality it had harbored for the twenty-seven years of its life, it didn’t know the name. No one saw clearly but I. And since I’d acquired that knowledge, the simple knowledge that my younger brother’s body was mine as well, I had to die. And I am dead. My younger brother gathered me to him, drew me to him, and I am dead.

• From The Lover (1984)

  She must have stayed on in Saigon from 1932 until 1949. It was in December 1942 that my younger brother died. She couldn’t move any more. She stayed on—to be near the grave, she said. Then finally she came back to France. My son was two years old when we met again. It was too late for us to be reunited. We knew it at first glance. There was nothing left to reunite. Except for the elder son, all the rest was over. She went to live, and die, in the department of Loir-et-Cher, in the sham Louis XIV chateau. She lived there with Dô. She was still afraid at night. She bought a gun. Dô kept watch in the attics on the top floor. She also bought a place for her elder son near Amboise. With woods. He cut them down. Then went and gambled the money away in a baccarat club in Paris. The woods were lost in one night. The point at which my memory suddenly softens, and perhaps my brother brings tears to my eyes, is after the loss of the money from the woods. I know he’s found lying in his car in Montparnasse, outside the Coupole, and that he wants to die. After that, I forget. What she did, my mother, with that chateau of hers, is simply unimaginable, still all for the sake of the elder son, the child of fifty incapable of earning any money. She buys some electric incubators and installs them in the main drawing room. Suddenly she’s got six hundred chicks, forty square meters of them. But she made a mistake with the infrared rays, and none of the chicks can eat, all six hundred of them have beaks that don’t meet or won’t close, they all starve to death and she gives up. I came to the chateau while the chicks were hatching, there were great rejoicings. Afterwards the stench of the dead chicks and their food was so awful I couldn’t eat in my mother’s chateau without throwing up. She died between Dô and him she called her child, in her big bedroom on the first floor, where during heavy frosts she used to put the sheep to sleep, five or six sheep all around her bed, for several winters, her last.