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 Wild (2012)

  “Yes,” I agreed. She had, it was true. She did. She did. She did. She’d come at us with maximum maternal velocity. She hadn’t held back a thing, not a single lick of her love. “I’ll always be with you, no matter what,” she said. “Yes,” I replied, rubbing her soft arm. When she’d become sick enough that we knew she was really going to die, when we were in the homestretch to hell, when we were well past thinking any amount of wheatgrass juice would save her, I’d asked her what she wanted done with her body—cremated or buried—though she only looked at me as if I were speaking Dutch. “I want everything that can be donated to be donated,” she said after a while. “My organs, I mean. Let them have every part they can use.” “Okay,” I said. It was the oddest thing to contemplate, to know that we weren’t making impossibly far-off plans; to imagine parts of my mother living on in someone else’s body. “But then what?” I pressed on, practically panting with pain. I had to know. It would fall on me. “What would you like to do with … what’s … left over. Do you want to be buried or cremated?” “I don’t care,” she said. “Of course you care,” I replied. “I really don’t care. Do what you think is best. Do whatever is cheapest.” “No,” I insisted. “You have to tell me. I want to know what you want done.” The idea that I would be the one to decide filled me with panic. “Oh, Cheryl,” she said, exhausted by me, our eyes meeting in a grief-stricken détente. For every time I wanted to throttle her because she was too optimistic, she wanted to throttle me because I would never ever relent. “Burn me,” she said finally. “Turn me to ash.” [image file=image_rsrc2VM.jpg] And so we did, though the ashes of her body were not what I’d expected. They weren’t like ashes from a wood fire, silky and fine as sand. They were like pale pebbles mixed with a gritty gray gravel. Some chunks were so large I could see clearly that they’d once been bones. The box that the man at the funeral home handed to me was oddly addressed to my mom. I brought it home and set it in the cupboard beneath the curio cabinet, where she kept her nicest things. It was June. It sat there until August 18, as did the tombstone we’d had made for her, which had arrived the same week as the ashes. It sat in the living room, off to the side, a disturbing sight to visitors probably, but it was a comfort to me. The stone was slate gray, the writing etched in white. It said her name and the dates of her birth and death and the sentence she’d spoken to us again and again as she got sicker and died: I’m with you always.

• From Wild (2012)

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, but I didn’t answer. I only leaned over and switched on the light. It was up to us to mail the notarized divorce documents. Together Paul and I walked out of the building and into the snow and down the sidewalk until we found a mailbox. Afterwards, we leaned against the cold bricks of a building and kissed, crying and murmuring regrets, our tears mixing together on our faces. “What are we doing?” Paul asked after a while. “Saying goodbye,” I said. I thought of asking him to go back to my apartment with me, as we’d done a few times over the course of our yearlong separation, falling into bed together for a night or an afternoon, but I didn’t have the heart. “Goodbye,” he said. “Bye,” I said. We stood close together, face-to-face, my hands gripping the front of his coat. I could feel the dumb ferocity of the building on one side of me; the gray sky and the white streets like a giant slumbering beast on the other; and us between them, alone together in a tunnel. Snowflakes were melting onto his hair and I wanted to reach up and touch them, but I didn’t. We stood there without saying anything, looking into each other’s eyes as if it would be the last time. “Cheryl Strayed,” he said after a long while, my new name so strange on his tongue. I nodded and let go of his coat. 7 THE ONLY GIRL IN THE WOODS“Cheryl Strayed?” the woman at the Kennedy Meadows General Store asked without a smile. When I nodded exuberantly, she turned and disappeared into the back without another word. I looked around, drunk with the sight of the packaged food and drinks, feeling a combination of anticipation over the things I’d consume in the coming hours and relief over the fact that my pack was no longer attached to my body, but resting now on the porch of the store. I was here. I had made it to my first stop. It seemed like a miracle. I’d half expected to see Greg, Matt, and Albert at the store, but they were nowhere in sight. My guidebook explained that the campground was another three miles farther on and I assumed that’s where I’d find them, along with Doug and Tom eventually. Thanks to my exertions, they hadn’t managed to catch up with me. Kennedy Meadows was a pretty expanse of piney woods and sage and grass meadows at an elevation of 6,200 feet on the South Fork Kern River. It wasn’t a town but rather an outpost of civilization spread out over a few miles, consisting of a general store, a restaurant called Grumpie’s, and a primitive campground.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Because of her low birth, Nell Gwynn’s sons were not included in these fits of generosity. Nell sadly informed her two boys that they “were princes by their father for their elevation, but they had a whore to their mother for their humiliation.”9 One day in 1676 when Charles came to visit, Nell, frustrated by years of waiting for the king to honor her sons, called out to her six-year-old, “Come hither, you little bastard!” When Charles scolded her, she said, “I have no better name to call him by.” Laughing, Charles replied. “Then I must give him one,” and soon after made the boy the earl of Burford.10 After another eight years of Nell’s lobbying, cajoling, and begging, Charles made him the duke of St. Albans. The handsome thirteen-year-old was given splendid apartments in Whitehall Palace and an annual allowance of fifteen hundred pounds. A lucrative marriage was arranged for him with a young heiress. The duke of St. Albans later served his country as ambassador to France. Pushed into War, Sold into MarriageWhile seventeenth-century royal bastards could generally count on a dukedom, their counterparts in the rough-and-tumble medieval world stood a good chance of winning a throne. William the Conqueror, the valiant bastard son of Robert the Devil, duke of Normandy, took up his sword and vanquished English troops in 1066; nearly a thousand years later, his more refined descendant Elizabeth II serenely wears the crown. In twelfth-and thirteenth-century Norway royal bastards were handed the throne when their fathers died without legitimate sons. In the fourteenth century, royal bastards established dynasties in Portugal and Castile. It is ironic that the Renaissance, which ushered in the power of royal mistresses, suppressed the possibilities for their sons. The medieval world, forged by maces and battle axes, boasted few laws of marriage, divorce, and legitimacy compared to the civilized, refined society of later centuries. It should come as no surprise that some royal bastards of the Renaissance and the Baroque era looked back wistfully to earlier centuries, when courageous bastards could win a kingdom for themselves. James, duke of Monmouth, the favorite son of Charles II, plotted to grab the throne of England. His father had no legitimate children, and Charles’s brother and heir, James, was detested for being Catholic. After Charles’s death in 1685, the popular duke raised troops and fought against James II. Monmouth was captured sleeping in a ditch and beheaded at the command of his uncle. Many bastard sons, recognizing the foolhardiness of battling for a throne, found honor and glory fighting on behalf of royal fathers and half brothers. Don Juan of Austria (1547–1578), illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Barbara Blomberg, became an admiral, clearing the seas of pirates and vanquishing the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto for his half brother Philip II.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  The royal mistress who had found such honor in life received strange indignities in death. Household servants stole valuable rings from her dead fingers. Upon hearing the news of her death, Gabrielle’s father harnessed his horses and carted off from storage the royal furniture she had ordered for her queenly apartments. Gabrielle had grimaced so in agony that her mouth twisted around toward the back of her head and, at her death, stuck there as if in concrete; neither the doctor nor her attendants could push it back into its proper place. Her mangled body, exhibiting no traces of her former beauty, was in no condition to view. Nailed in a coffin, it was pushed under the bed in her Paris town house while mourners visited her wax effigy, propped up on the bed, offering it food according to custom. Henri—prevented from holding her funeral at Notre Dame, as Gabrielle had not been royal—was forced to settle for a lesser church. After the funeral, Gabrielle’s effigy was placed in a small chamber in the king’s private apartments in the Louvre and dressed in a new gown daily. Henri wrote, “The root of my love is dead; it will not spring up again.”4 He visited the figure for many years, even after he had caved in to the pope’s wishes and married Marie de Medici and—perhaps as a protest—taken a nubile young mistress. Despite the king’s genuine sadness at the loss of Gabrielle, the root of his love continued to spring up until his dying day. The gloriously beautiful Mademoiselle de Fontanges also died as a result of a pregnancy. In 1680 she gave birth to Louis XIV’s child, who died shortly thereafter. While she survived the delivery, her bleeding did not stop. After several weeks the wan, weakened woman left Versailles to recuperate in a convent. The king had little patience with illness, and his mistress hoped to vanquish his heart once again by returning bursting with health and beauty. Madame de Sévigné described the touching contrast between Mademoiselle de Fontange’s rich emoluments and her deadly illness. “Mademoiselle de Fontanges has left for Chelles,” she wrote. “She had four carriages, drawn by six horses, each, her own carriage drawn by eight, and all her sisters with her, but all so sad that it was pitiful to see—that great beauty losing all her blood, pale, changed, overwhelmed with sorrow, despising the 40,000 ecus annual pension and the tabouret which she has, and wishing for her health and the heart of the King which she has lost.”5

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Nonetheless, three days after the king’s death she was put under house arrest. Her ailing mother was removed, along with her faithful maid. Her frightened children threw themselves into her arms but were dragged away. For six weeks soldiers guarded Wilhelmine as she remained alone inside her shuttered house mourning her lost lover. Finally, the commission investigating her crimes permitted her a two-hour daily walk. When she walked near her lover’s palace, she burst into tears. Wilhelmine was charged with numerous crimes, including taking rings from the fingers of the dying king, as well as a large diamond known as the Solitaire. In response, Wilhelmine described the cabinet in the king’s bedroom where the Solitaire and other jewelry could be found. She had removed the rings at the king’s request so he could wash his hands. Afterward, when she wanted to put them back on, she noticed how swollen Frederick William’s fingers had become. Not wishing to alarm him, she deposited them in the cabinet. Wilhelmine languished under house arrest a total of three months from the day of Frederick William’s death. Finally, a messenger visited her one evening with the decision of Frederick William III. She was permitted to retain any furniture and jewelry the dead king had given her and keep a small pension of four thousand talers a year. However, she would trade her country estate and Berlin palace for a fortress prison in Silesia. Without shedding a tear, she packed her bags and left immediately. But Wilhelmine had some influential friends willing to stand up for her against the tide of royal displeasure. They reminded the new king of how poorly Louis XVI’s treatment of Madame du Barry had reflected on him. A friend of hers, the Italian poet Filistri, frequently cautioned the new king about dishonoring his father’s memory. He also set to work on the queen mother—the dead king’s neglected wife—the young queen, the princes, and the ministers to free Wilhelmine from her fortress. After only two months’ incarceration she was set free. A few years later Napoleon, visiting the court of Berlin, interested himself in her case and, hearing that she was living in great poverty, persuaded Frederick William III to return a part of her confiscated fortune. But the chastened mistress did not go quietly into retirement; she had a series of lovers. At the age of fifty she married a young artist, who left her only two years later. She moved to Vienna and then to Paris, and died in obscurity in 1822 at the age of sixty-eight.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Grandparents are supposed to die first, but they’re supposed to die of old age. They’re supposed to die of a heart attack or a stroke or of cancer or of Alzheimer’s. THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO GET RUN OVER AND KILLED BY A DRUNK DRIVER! I mean, the thing is, plenty of Indians have died because they were drunk. And plenty of drunken Indians have killed other drunken Indians. But my grandmother had never drunk alcohol in her life. Not one drop. That’s the rarest kind of Indian in the world. I know only, like, five Indians in our whole tribe who have never drunk alcohol. And my grandmother was one of them. “Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,” she used to say. “Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn’t touch the world with all of my senses intact?” Well, my grandmother has left this world and she’s now roaming around the afterlife. Wake We held Grandmother’s wake three days later. We knew that people would be coming in large numbers. But we were stunned because almost two thousand Indians showed up that day to say good-bye. And nobody gave me any crap. I mean, I was still the kid who had betrayed the tribe. And that couldn’t be forgiven. But I was also the kid who’d lost his grandmother. And everybody knew that losing my grandmother was horrible. So they all waved the white flag that day and let me grieve in peace. And after that, they stopped hassling me whenever they saw me on the rez. I mean, I still lived on the rez, right? And I had to go get the mail and get milk from the trading post and just hang out, right? So I was still a part of the rez. People had either ignored me or called me names or pushed me. But they stopped after my grandmother died. I guess they realized that I was in enough pain already. Or maybe they realized they’d been cruel jerks. I wasn’t suddenly popular, of course. But I wasn’t a villain anymore. No matter what else happened between my tribe and me, I would always love them for giving me peace on the day of my grandmother’s funeral. Even Rowdy just stood far away. He would always be my best friend, no matter how much he hated me. We had to move the coffin out of the Spokane Tribal Longhouse and set it on the fifty-yard line of the football field. We were lucky the weather was good. Yep, about two thousand Indians (and a few white folks) sat and stood on the football field as we all said good-bye to the greatest Spokane Indian in history. I knew that my grandmother would have loved that send-off. It was crazy and fun and sad. My sister wasn’t able to come to the funeral. That was the worst part about it.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I drew a full-page comic for a friend who had quit her job at the ice cream parlor where we both worked—the piece was called “The Trials and Tribulations of Tina-Beena,” and included a bunch of little stories about the way South Philly girls pronounced “Oreos” and the time she argued with a customer—stuff like that. She loved it and hung it up in her kitchen under a piece of plastic wrap. How did you and Sherman work together? Sherman would give me a few chapters of his manuscript and ideas for what I might draw, and I’d do thumbnail sketches using his list as a bouncing-off point. Later, we’d go over what I’d come up with. About a third of the graphics were Sherman’s ideas, a third were real collaborations, and a third were my ideas that struck me as I read the text. How was it getting into the head of Arnold Spirit? Intense. Sherman describes Arnold so well in the text that I felt I had a good grip on who Arnold was. But to draw like him, to think of jokes that he might tell, I had to really immerse myself in being him, and it wasn’t an easy place to be. For instance, while drawing my last round of thumbnail sketches, I was working in a café, with manuscripts and sketches spread out all over the table. I’d worked for hours, hadn’t eaten in a long time, and I drank too much coffee. I was deep in Arnold’s head and felt like I had to keep going. So much heavy stuff was happening in the story, that’s when I came up with some of Arnold’s darkest humor, like the comic about the last sip of wine and the Burning Love book cover cartoon when Arnold’s sister died. Then when I got to the end of the manuscript, where Arnold and Rowdy play basketball, and as it was getting dark outside, I felt a tightening in my chest and I realized I was about to bawl. It felt like I was playing a bittersweet basketball game with Rowdy. I had a split second to decide whether or not I would cry in the café, and I put my head in my hands, sobbed once, and thought about something else. I had read that section so many times, but until then I hadn’t been so deep in Arnold’s mind. What was your biggest concern/objective when creating the art for the book? My absolute biggest concern was to make Arnold’s comics look authentic.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Grandparents are supposed to die first, but they’re supposed to die of old age. They’re supposed to die of a heart attack or a stroke or of cancer or of Alzheimer’s. THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO GET RUN OVER AND KILLED BY A DRUNK DRIVER! I mean, the thing is, plenty of Indians have died because they were drunk. And plenty of drunken Indians have killed other drunken Indians. But my grandmother had never drunk alcohol in her life. Not one drop. That’s the rarest kind of Indian in the world. I know only, like, five Indians in our whole tribe who have never drunk alcohol. And my grandmother was one of them. “Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,” she used to say. “Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn’t touch the world with all of my senses intact?” Well, my grandmother has left this world and she’s now roaming around the afterlife. Wake [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] We held Grandmother’s wake three days later. We knew that people would be coming in large numbers. But we were stunned because almost two thousand Indians showed up that day to say good-bye. And nobody gave me any crap. I mean, I was still the kid who had betrayed the tribe. And that couldn’t be forgiven. But I was also the kid who’d lost his grandmother. And everybody knew that losing my grandmother was horrible. So they all waved the white flag that day and let me grieve in peace. [image "An illustration of a person with a blank face and tears, surrounded by three figures with arms extended, forming a circle." file=image_rsrc4T1.jpg] And after that, they stopped hassling me whenever they saw me on the rez. I mean, I still lived on the rez, right? And I had to go get the mail and get milk from the trading post and just hang out, right? So I was still a part of the rez. People had either ignored me or called me names or pushed me. But they stopped after my grandmother died. I guess they realized that I was in enough pain already. Or maybe they realized they’d been cruel jerks. I wasn’t suddenly popular, of course. But I wasn’t a villain anymore. No matter what else happened between my tribe and me, I would always love them for giving me peace on the day of my grandmother’s funeral. Even Rowdy just stood far away. He would always be my best friend, no matter how much he hated me. We had to move the coffin out of the Spokane Tribal Longhouse and set it on the fifty-yard line of the football field. We were lucky the weather was good. Yep, about two thousand Indians (and a few white folks) sat and stood on the football field as we all said good-bye to the greatest Spokane Indian in history. I knew that my grandmother would have loved that send-off.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  But I didn’t cry. I just hugged my mother back and wanted all of it to be over. I wanted to fall asleep again and dream about killer wasps. Yeah, I figured any nightmare would be better than my reality. And then it was over. My mother fell asleep and let me go. I stood and walked into the kitchen. I was way hungry but my cousins had eaten most of our food. So all I had for dinner were saltine crackers and water. Like I was in jail. Man. Two days later, we buried my sister in the Catholic graveyard down near the powwow ground. I barely remember the wake. I barely remember the funeral service. I barely remember the burial. I was in this weird fog. No. It was more like I was in this small room, the smallest room in the world. I could reach out and touch the walls, which were made out of greasy glass. I could see shadows but I couldn’t see details, you know? And I was cold. Just freezing. Like there was a snowstorm blowing inside of my chest. But all of that fog and greasy glass and snow disappeared when they lowered my sister’s coffin into the grave. And let me tell you, it had taken them forever to dig that grave in the frozen ground. As the coffin settled into the dirt, it made this noise, almost like a breath, you know? Like a sigh. Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap. That was it. I had to get out of there. I turned and ran out of the graveyard and into the woods across the road. I planned on running deep into the woods. So deep that I’d never be found. But guess what? I ran full-speed into Rowdy and sent us both sprawling. Yep, Rowdy had been hiding in the woods while he watched the burial. Wow. Rowdy sat up. I sat up, too. We sat there together. Rowdy was crying. His face was shiny with tears. “Rowdy,” I said. “You’re crying.” “I ain’t crying,” he said. “You’re crying.” I touched my face. It was dry. No tears yet. “I can’t remember how to cry,” I said. That made Rowdy sort of choke. He gasped a little. And more tears rolled down his face. “You’re crying,” I said. “No, I’m not.” “It’s okay; I miss my sister, too. I love her.” “I said I’m not crying.” “It’s okay.” I reached out and touched Rowdy’s shoulder. Big mistake. He punched me. Well, he almost punched me. He threw a punch but he MISSED! ROWDY MISSED A PUNCH! His fist went sailing over my head. “Wow,” I said. “You missed.” “I missed on purpose.” “No, you didn’t.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  What a strange gift this woman gave me, the ability to accomplish what all my spiritual searching, ultimately, could not—the ability to break the chain of pain, right here, right now. Not only for me, but for my fragile four-year-old self. She did, after all, live with me still. It was time to dry her face and take her home. AFTER ACCOUNTING 4/3/3/3/3/3/3/1/2/0/0/0/0/0/2/0/0/0/0/3/2/1/2/1/2/1/1/0/0/0/1/1/2/3/1/2/2/3/1/1/0/0/0/0/0 The above is an accounting of anal penetrations per week for year three. All the zeros represent one of us being out of town. Except the last five. Number 298 was our last. The walls I had so carefully constructed around our love had split wide open. The world was in, and we were over. I sent A-Man away. It was Time. Yes, it was that sudden. That unexpected. Totally unplanned. Time to end the pain, time to end the beauty: they had become inseparable, a sadomasochistic adagio. So the search for the end of my end ended as abruptly as it had begun three years before. A symmetry of sorts. A single, swift, clean cut. No negotiations, no begging, no manipulations, no blame. After #298—it was again a Friday afternoon—it was over with A-Man while it was still hot as a volcano and beautiful as art. Try that for courage. Though for me, it wasn’t courage at all, it was necessity. I never would have had the courage to send him away. Curious how another woman was always the catalyst for him and me: the Pre-Raphaelite had joined us and, now, the mousy brunette separated us. I must have much unfinished business with women, with my mother. But this is the Daddy story, not the Mommy story—or so I thought. I started counting the zeros week after week after week, as if they would add up to something other than zero. Zeros marking the empty space in me where the nearly unbearable pain of loss grew and grew. I festered. And I died. The core of me that he had touched died. I felt that I would grieve for him all my life. And I do. I had been grieving for him since the first time he came in my ass; why stop now just because he was no longer there? If heaven is a taste of eternity in a moment of real time, then hell is an eternity of loss in a moment of real time. Completely bereft. We didn’t even make it to three hundred. RECLAMATION After many months without A-Man, the love bubble in which I had lived for so long began to deflate. I couldn’t keep living like this. I used to be such a happy little sodomite; now I was a miserable little sodomite with only memories to taunt me.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  The few notes and photos I had I hid in a drawer, along with the small plastic bag of his pubic hair, the hair from that first trim. Nothing was thrown away, all was carefully preserved. You throw things away when love has turned to hate. That wasn’t what had happened to me. And then there was the Box. Sitting on my dresser, overflowing with the evidence of all I was trying to overcome, get beyond. I realized that I needed a bigger box—and one with a lock. There it was, waiting for me in the antique store: square, with a hinged lid, a red satin lining, and a tiny padlock with a key. In gold leaf. Perfect. I made the transfer, took one last, long, searing look, closed the lid, and locked it. I put the tiny key away. The casket was sealed—with tears, K-Y, and a wink to its future finder. This shrine of sacred relics was my monument—to the divinity of my masochism, to the great joy that once so frequently passed my way, to a state of consciousness I can no longer access, to a chemical connection that reached far beyond any logic or rationale, to the sacred insanity that so blessedly pervaded my being. Now, where to put it? Nearby . . . but out of reach. Like a smoker’s last pack, close by . . . but out of sight. Available . . . but forbidden. Climbing out of love with him, I felt like a pelican trying to extract itself from an oil spill: lurching, falling, getting up, trying again. But even if the bird breaks free, its feathers remain saturated, forever marked. I realized that until the pain of loving him no longer interested me, I wouldn’t be able to move on. Why was the pain so very interesting? It felt as though the key to my soul was buried inside it. The unmatched enormity of the ache begged for attention. Taking solace in other compulsions, I made lots of lists. Lists of pros and cons. Lists of what I lost in losing him and what I would have lost if I’d kept him. Lists of what I have gained, what I have accomplished, whom I’ve dated. They meant nothing in the end, those lists, but they gave me something to do while I cried. I realized that I had to change in order to not want him. Who I had become wanted only him. I had to become someone else, yet again. This is how my former self died, how I killed her. But she did not go quietly into the night. No, she raged herself into extinction with one last blast of scorching pain. Pain to stop the pain. But perhaps masochism never heals, just changes form. Different objects, different manifestations. I feared I could not be happy without my pain. But I had to direct it outside myself now; inside I was soaked to the bone.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The woman called her “Mrs Banner” - imagine that! She was good enough, I suppose, but rather strict. She wouldn’t let us in the room with her; we had to sit down here and listen to the cries, Ralph wringing his hands and weeping all the while. I thought, “Let the baby die, oh, let the baby die, so long as she is safe... !” ‘But Cyril did not die, as you see, and Lilian herself seemed well enough, only tired, and the midwife said to let her sleep. We did so - and, when I went to her a little later, I found that she’d begun to bleed. By then, of course, the midwife had gone. Ralph ran for a doctor - but she couldn’t be saved. Her dear, good, generous heart bled quite away -’ Her voice failed. I moved to her and squatted beside her, and touched my knuckles to her sleeve; and she acknowledged me kindly, with a slight, distracted smile. ‘I wish I’d known,’ I said quietly; inwardly, however, it was as if I had myself by the throat, and was banging my own head against the parlour wall. How could I have been so foolish as not to have guessed it all? There had been the business of the birthday - the anniversary, I realised now, of Lilian’s death. There had been Florence’s strange depressions; her tiredness, her crossness, her brother’s gentle forbearance, her friends’ concern. There had been her odd ambivalence towards the baby - Lilian’s son, yet also, of course, her murderer, whom Florence had once wished dead, so that the mother might be saved... I gazed at her again, and wished I knew some way to comfort her. She was so bleak, yet also somehow so remote; I had never embraced her, and felt squeamish about putting a hand upon her, even now. So I only stayed beside her, stroking gently at her sleeve... and at last she roused herself, and gave a kind of smile; and then I moved away. ‘How I have talked,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, what made me speak of all this, tonight.’ ‘I’m glad you did,’ I said. ‘You must - you must miss her, terribly.’ She gazed blankly at me for a moment - as if missing was rather a paltry emotion, terrible too mild a term, for her great sadness - and then she nodded and looked away. ‘It has been hard; I have been strange; sometimes I’ve wished that I might die, myself. I have, I know, been very poor company for you and Ralph! And I was not very kind when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little under six months then, and the idea of having another girl about the place - especially you, who I had met the very week I had found her - well!

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Muse? And with whom? Perhaps with a man who is difficult to love. A-Man provided no challenge in this regard. Loving him was so easy, too easy; not loving him was hell. So perhaps the opposite: loving that is difficult, leaving that is easy. Would I not then learn some tolerance? A-Man is now long gone. But was he ever really here? Did he ever really inhabit my ass and me? Was he indeed the demon-lover who avenged my anger, the ever-ready erection to which I so willingly and joyously martyred myself? Or was he the God of my own creation, the God I always wanted but couldn’t have, couldn’t find? Perhaps I finally found a place for Him, and A-Man entered my expectant space. I believe the equation goes like this: sex can only be truly deep, truly life changing, truly transcendent if you are being fucked by God; if you love your man like he was God. But—and here’s the rub that no lube can assuage—if your man is God and shifts your world, then you are, by definition, in the very center of your female masochism, open, willing, vulnerable. A-Man was my God, but he was my Last God. I fear no man can be God again for me. Lucky for all of us, perhaps: less far to fall. But I mourn this with all my being; it is the loss, finally, of my insistent innocence. It has been a long process, the extrication of him and the excavation of my soul. He no longer lives in my ass. I live there now. What a place. I have been to the precipice. I looked over, and fell off the ledge. But now I am back, back from the great valley of my masochism, back to bear witness —for myself but also for you—to my survival, to my return from a world where depth was all that mattered. If you don’t fuck with death chasing you, you are mistaken. So long as love, crazy, crazy love, can be survived, there is no excuse. No excuse at all. Go. Come. Slowly, resentfully, I have moved out of slavery, though I cannot forget its freedom. But I am no longer blinded by obsession. I can now recognize what is commonly termed reality, wretched reality. I even live in it on occasion, when feeling perverse. I have endured the loss. Choice is mine. But I know what to do—and where to go—should I need a fix of beauty, of submission, of relief, of bliss. And, besides, I still have the Box. It does not only contain his DNA. It contains my very own madness—safely captured under its gilded lid. But I don’t need to open it. I have the key. Acknowledgments I would like to extend my deep appreciation to Alix Freedman for true friendship and to John Tottenham for being the first to say, yes, you must.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  There were some things to tidy up. I put the few clothes of his I had inside several plastic bags and hid them away. I resisted smelling them one last time, and in doing so, I knew I would have the strength to do what was necessary to move on. The few notes and photos I had I hid in a drawer, along with the small plastic bag of his pubic hair, the hair from that first trim. Nothing was thrown away, all was carefully preserved. You throw things away when love has turned to hate. That wasn’t what had happened to me. And then there was the Box. Sitting on my dresser, overflowing with the evidence of all I was trying to overcome, get beyond. I realized that I needed a bigger box—and one with a lock. There it was, waiting for me in the antique store: square, with a hinged lid, a red satin lining, and a tiny padlock with a key. In gold leaf. Perfect. I made the transfer, took one last, long, searing look, closed the lid, and locked it. I put the tiny key away. The casket was sealed—with tears, K-Y, and a wink to its future finder. This shrine of sacred relics was my monument—to the divinity of my masochism, to the great joy that once so frequently passed my way, to a state of consciousness I can no longer access, to a chemical connection that reached far beyond any logic or rationale, to the sacred insanity that so blessedly pervaded my being. Now, where to put it? Nearby . . . but out of reach. Like a smoker’s last pack, close by . . . but out of sight. Available . . . but forbidden. Climbing out of love with him, I felt like a pelican trying to extract itself from an oil spill: lurching, falling, getting up, trying again. But even if the bird breaks free, its feathers remain saturated, forever marked. I realized that until the pain of loving him no longer interested me, I wouldn’t be able to move on. Why was the pain so very interesting? It felt as though the key to my soul was buried inside it. The unmatched enormity of the ache begged for attention. Taking solace in other compulsions, I made lots of lists. Lists of pros and cons. Lists of what I lost in losing him and what I would have lost if I’d kept him. Lists of what I have gained, what I have accomplished, whom I’ve dated. They meant nothing in the end, those lists, but they gave me something to do while I cried. I realized that I had to change in order to not want him. Who I had become wanted only him. I had to become someone else, yet again.

• From Less (2017)

  We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding. Didn’t Roman generals hire slaves to march beside them in a triumphant parade and remind them that they too would die? Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: “I really wish you weren’t crying right now”). Don’t little children, awakened one morning and told, “Now you’re five!”—don’t they wail at the universe’s descent into chaos? The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death—shouldn’t we all wail to the stars? But some people do take it a little too hard. It’s just a birthday, after all. There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, “You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!” And the man is taken after all. Arthur Less has traveled halfway around the world in a cat’s cradle of junkets, changing flights and fleeing from a sandstorm into the Atlas Mountains like someone erasing his trail or outfoxing a hunter—and yet Time has been waiting here all along. In a snowy alpine resort. With cuckoos. Of course Time would turn out to be Swiss. He tosses back the champagne. He thinks: Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man. Indeed: even Less can’t feel bad for Swift anymore. Like a wintertime swimmer too numb to feel cold, Arthur Less is too sad to feel pity. For Robert, yes, breathing through an oxygen tube up in Sonoma. For Marian, nursing a broken hip that might ground her forever. For Javier in his marriage, and even for Bastian’s tragic sports teams. For Zohra and Janet. For his fellow writer Mohammed. Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross’s. But he can no more feel sorry for Swift—now become a gorgon of Caucasian male ego, snake headed, pacing through his novel and turning each sentence to stone—than Arthur Less can feel sorry for himself. He hears the balcony door open beside him and sees the short waiter, returned from his smoke break. The man points to a cuckoo on the railing and speaks to him in perfectly understandable French (if only he understood French). Laughable.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  A-Man is now long gone. But was he ever really here? Did he ever really inhabit my ass and me? Was he indeed the demon-lover who avenged my anger, the ever-ready erection to which I so willingly and joyously martyred myself? Or was he the God of my own creation, the God I always wanted but couldn’t have, couldn’t find? Perhaps I finally found a place for Him, and A-Man entered my expectant space. I believe the equation goes like this: sex can only be truly deep, truly life changing, truly transcendent if you are being fucked by God; if you love your man like he was God. But—and here’s the rub that no lube can assuage—if your man is God and shifts your world, then you are, by definition, in the very center of your female masochism, open, willing, vulnerable. A-Man was my God, but he was my Last God. I fear no man can be God again for me. Lucky for all of us, perhaps: less far to fall. But I mourn this with all my being; it is the loss, finally, of my insistent innocence. It has been a long process, the extrication of him and the excavation of my soul. He no longer lives in my ass. I live there now. What a place. I have been to the precipice. I looked over, and fell off the ledge. But now I am back, back from the great valley of my masochism, back to bear witness—for myself but also for you—to my survival, to my return from a world where depth was all that mattered. If you don’t fuck with death chasing you, you are mistaken. So long as love, crazy, crazy love, can be survived, there is no excuse. No excuse at all. Go. Come. Slowly, resentfully, I have moved out of slavery, though I cannot forget its freedom. But I am no longer blinded by obsession. I can now recognize what is commonly termed reality, wretched reality. I even live in it on occasion, when feeling perverse. I have endured the loss. Choice is mine. But I know what to do—and where to go—should I need a fix of beauty, of submission, of relief, of bliss. And, besides, I still have the Box. It does not only contain his DNA. It contains my very own madness—safely captured under its gilded lid. But I don’t need to open it. I have the key. Acknowledgments I would like to extend my deep appreciation to Alix Freedman for true friendship and to John Tottenham for being the first to say, yes, you must. I am eternally grateful to David Hirshey whose inexhaustible good humor and unwavering enthusiasm kept me laughing and gave me faith when mine faltered. And to Alice Truax, thank you for everything: guidance, intelligence, impeccable taste, and relentless pursuit.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Before day- break I reached the forest's edge and was soon upon that little hill from which, six long months before, I had, to my sorrow, espied that frightful monastery; I rest a few minutes, I am bathed in perspiration; my first thought is to fall upon my knees and beg God to forgive the sins I unwillingly committed in that odious asylum of crime and impurity; tears of regret soon flowed from my eyes. Alas! I said, I was far less a criminal when last year I left this same road, guided by a devout principle so fatally deceived! O God! In what state may I now behold myself! These lugubrious reflections were in some wise mitigated by the pleasure of discovering I was free; I continued along the road toward Dijon, supposing it would only be in that capital my complaints could be legitimately lodged.... At this point Madame de Lorsange persuaded Therese to catch her breath for a few minutes at least; she needed the rest; the emotion she put into her narrative, the wounds these dreadful recitals reopened in her soul, everything, in short, obliged her to resort to a brief respite. Monsieur de Corville had refreshments brought in, and after collecting her forces, our heroine set out again to pursue her deplorable adventures in great detail, as you shall see. By the second day all my initial fears of pursuit had dissipated; the weather was extremely warm and, following my thrifty habit, I left the road to find a sheltered place where I could eat a light meal that would fortify me till evening. Off the road to the right stood a little grove of trees through which wound a limpid stream; this seemed a good spot for my lunch. My thirst quenched by this pure cool water, nourished by a little bread, my back leaning against a tree trunk, I breathed deep draughts of clear, serene air which relaxed me and was soothing. Resting there, my thoughts dwelled upon the almost unexampled fatality which, despite the thorns strewn thick along the career of Virtue, repeatedly brought me back, whatever might happen, to the worship of that Divinity and to acts of love and resignation toward the Supreme Being from Whom Virtue emanates and of Whom it is the image. A kind of enthusiasm came and took possession of me; alas! I said to myself, He abandons me not, this God I adore, for even at this instant I find the means to recover my strength. Is it not to Him I owe this merciful favor? And are there not persons in the world to whom it is refused?

• From Manhunt (2022)

  When she straightened up, Rachel dead weight in her arms, Teach staggered through the door to the observation tower, hands bloody, half her coat soaked through and her hair dripping wet, and slammed the door behind her. Something banged against it from within. She smiled hugely as she raised the same blunt little Uzi she’d had on her that day in the forest. A typewriter clatter. A horrible red looseness in Fran’s stomach. Her right hip. Her thigh. She fell against a pile of rubble, her hands slipping from Rachel’s. Oh. Metal clanging. More gunfire. An arrow zipped past. She could hear someone screaming her name, but it felt as though it must be from a long, long way away. Indi put Persephone’s guts back inside her. No time to check for perforations. No time to resterilize her hands. There was only her against the tide of shredded flesh that poured in through the house’s doors. The entire west wing of the house had collapsed in on itself. She was almost sure someone had been inside it when it came down. Maybe they were trapped in there, alive and slowly suffocating as fire sucked the oxygen from their lungs. She stapled her assistant shut and turned to Linden, lying on the couch, but they were gone. Outside, the sounds of gunfire and the screams of men. Beth hit the concrete on her knees beside where Fran lay, not far from Rachel, who Fran didn’t think was breathing anymore. Teach had fled across the roof and down through one of the crevasses in the fort’s ruined east wing. “No,” Beth moaned, pressing her hands against the parts of Fran that didn’t feel like anything anymore. Fran watched her do it. She felt as though something important had come loose from her and floated away over the sea. “I was a bad friend to you,” she said. “Don’t say that,” Beth sobbed. “Don’t say it. I’m going to get you back to Indi.” “No,” said Fran. She felt calm, though tears poured down her cheeks. “No you’re not, baby.” She took a deep, hitching breath. Something shifted in her belly that should not have moved. Cold and slippery. “Can you kiss me, Beth?” she asked, her voice small. “Will you kiss me, please?” Beth kissed her. She realized that in some way she would never unravel, in some strange and hazy confluence of gentleness and violence and self-mortification, Beth was more a woman than she’d ever been. She tried to say it, but what came was, “You’re beautiful.” She stroked the other girl’s cheek as they broke apart, her fingers leaving smears of blood. “Bethy, you’re so beautiful.” Beth’s tears fell on Fran’s upturned face. They felt warm. “I don’t want to do this without you.” “It’s okay,” said Fran. “You’ll be all right.” “Don’t leave me. Please, Fran. Please.” “Shhh,” said Fran, reaching out to cup Beth’s face in her hands. Her arms felt so heavy. “I love you.

• From Less (2017)

  Sunrise. We had arrived at the hotel in the dark, but gradually, light began to reveal that our room was covered on three sides by windows; I realized the house was set out in the ocean itself, like a thrust stage, and that the view from every window was of the water and the sky. I watched as they took on shades of iris and myrtle, sapphire and jade, until all around me, in sea and sky alike, I recognized a particular shade of blue. And I understood that I would never see Arthur Less again. Not in the way I had; not in the casual sprawl of all those years. It was as if I had been informed of his death. So many times I had left his house and closed the door, and now, carelessly, I had locked it behind me. Married—it seemed instantly so stupid of me. Around me everywhere, that shade of Lessian blue. We would run into each other now, of course, on the street or at a party somewhere, and maybe even get a drink together, but it would be having a drink with a ghost. Arthur Less. It could never be anyone else. From somewhere high above the earth, I began a plummeting descent. There was no air to breathe. The world was rushing in to fill the void where Arthur Less had always been. I hadn’t known that I assumed he would wait there forever in that white bed below his window. I hadn’t known I needed him there. Like a landmark, a pyramid-shaped stone or a cypress, that we assume will never move. So we can find our way home. And then, inevitably, one day—it’s gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid. Arthur Less, who was supposed to remain in that bed forever, now on a trip around the world—and who knows where he might be? Lost to me. I started shaking. It seemed so long ago I had seen him at that party, looking like a man lost in Grand Central Station, that crown prince of innocence. Watching him only a moment before my father introduced me: “Arthur, you remember my son, Freddy.” I sat upright in bed for a long time, shivering, though it was warm in Tahiti. Shivering, shaking; I suppose it was what you would call an attack of something or other. From behind me, I heard rustling and then a stillness. Then I heard his voice, my new husband, Tom, who loved me, and therefore saw everything: “I really wish you weren’t crying right now.” And he is standing up within his paper room, our brave protagonist.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  What a strange gift this woman gave me, the ability to accomplish what all my spiritual searching, ultimately, could not—the ability to break the chain of pain, right here, right now. Not only for me, but for my fragile four-year-old self. She did, after all, live with me still. It was time to dry her face and take her home. AFTER ACCOUNTING 4/3/3/3/3/3/3/1/2/0/0/0/0/0/2/0/0/0/0/3/2/1/2/1/2/1/1/0/0/0/1/1/2/3/1/2/2/3/1/1/0/0/0/0/0 The above is an accounting of anal penetrations per week for year three. All the zeros represent one of us being out of town. Except the last five. Number 298 was our last. The walls I had so carefully constructed around our love had split wide open. The world was in, and we were over. I sent A-Man away. It was Time. Yes, it was that sudden. That unexpected. Totally unplanned. Time to end the pain, time to end the beauty: they had become inseparable, a sadomasochistic adagio. So the search for the end of my end ended as abruptly as it had begun three years before. A symmetry of sorts. A single, swift, clean cut. No negotiations, no begging, no manipulations, no blame. After #298—it was again a Friday afternoon—it was over with A-Man while it was still hot as a volcano and beautiful as art. Try that for courage. Though for me, it wasn’t courage at all, it was necessity. I never would have had the courage to send him away. Curious how another woman was always the catalyst for him and me: the Pre-Raphaelite had joined us and, now, the mousy brunette separated us. I must have much unfinished business with women, with my mother. But this is the Daddy story, not the Mommy story—or so I thought. I started counting the zeros week after week after week, as if they would add up to something other than zero. Zeros marking the empty space in me where the nearly unbearable pain of loss grew and grew. I festered. And I died. The core of me that he had touched died. I felt that I would grieve for him all my life. And I do. I had been grieving for him since the first time he came in my ass; why stop now just because he was no longer there? If heaven is a taste of eternity in a moment of real time, then hell is an eternity of loss in a moment of real time. Completely bereft. We didn’t even make it to three hundred. RECLAMATION After many months without A-Man, the love bubble in which I had lived for so long began to deflate. I couldn’t keep living like this. I used to be such a happy little sodomite; now I was a miserable little sodomite with only memories to taunt me.