Guilt

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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  And each new poem is a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher) than the one before. My marriage to Brian probably ended on that day when I walked through the streets of Tijuana with my wisecracking father. My father was trying with all his might to be cheerful and helpful, but I was sunk deep into my own guilt. It was a dilemma: if I stuck by Brian and tried to live with him again, I’d go crazy, or at the very least give up most of my own identity. But if I left him alone with his madness and the ministrations of the doctors, I was abandoning him—just when he needed help the most. In a sense, I was a traitor. It had come down to a choice between me or him, and I chose me. My guilt about this haunts me still. Somewhere deep inside my head (with all those submerged memories of childhood) is some glorious image of the ideal woman, a kind of Jewish Griselda. She is Ruth and Esther and Jesus and Mary rolled into one. She always turns the other cheek. She is a vehicle, a vessel, with no needs or desires of her own. When her husband beats her, she understands him. When he is sick, she nurses him. When the children are sick, she nurses them. She cooks, keeps house, runs the store, keeps the books, listens to everyone’s problems, visits the cemetery, weeds the graves, plants the garden, scrubs the floors, and sits quietly on the upper balcony of the synagogue while the men recite prayers about the inferiority of women. She is capable of absolutely everything except self-preservation. And secretly, I am always ashamed of myself for not being her. A good woman would have given over her life to the care and feeding of her husband’s madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do. But if I was remiss with Brian I made up for it doubly with Charlie Fielding. For sheer masochism—good, healthy, “normal female masochism"—you simply cannot beat my relationship with Charlie (which closely followed the end of my marriage to Brian). Interesting how we always give the next guy all the overflow from the guy who went before. A psychological case of “sloppy seconds.” C THIRTEEN The Conductor Is it an earthquake or simply a shock? Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock? Is it a cocktail—this feeling of joy, Or is what I feel the real McCoy?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Oh you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita! Had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments: There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child. 31 I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world—nymphet love. The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why? The stipulation of the Roman law, according to which a girl may marry at twelve, was adopted by the Church, and is still preserved, rather tacitly, in some of the United States. And fifteen is lawful everywhere. There is nothing wrong, say both hemispheres, when a brute of forty, blessed by the local priest and bloated with drink, sheds his sweat-drenched finery and thrusts himself up to the hilt into his youthful bride. “In such stimulating temperate climates [says an old magazine in this prison library] as St. Louis, Chicago and Cincinnati, girls mature about the end of their twelfth year.” Dolores Haze was born less than three hundred miles from stimulating Cincinnati. I have but followed nature. I am nature’s faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover. 32 She told me the way she had been debauched.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva was harmless. She wasn’t a bad person. She’d done nothing to hurt me. I was the one sitting there full of disgust, wearing her dead mother’s shoes. “Good-bye.” • • • FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, through the proceedings at Solomon Schultz Funeral Home, I stayed by Reva’s side but watched her as though from a distance. I started to feel strange—not guilty per se, but somehow responsible for her suffering. I felt as though she were a stranger I had hit with my car, and I was waiting for her to die so she wouldn’t be able to identify me. When she talked, it was like I was watching a movie. “That’s Ken, over there. See his wife?” The camera panned over the rows, narrowed in on a pretty half-Asian woman with freckles, wearing a black beret. “I don’t want him to see me like this. Why did I invite him? I don’t know what I was thinking.” “Don’t worry,” is all I could think to say. “He’s not going to fire you for being sad at a funeral.” Reva sniffed and nodded, dabbed at her eyes with her tissue. “That’s my mom’s friend from Cleveland,” she said as an obese woman in a black muumuu hoisted herself onto the stage. She sang “On My Own” from Les Misérables, a cappella. It was painful to watch. Reva cried and cried. Tissues stained with mascara like crushed inkblot tests piled up on her lap. A dozen people went up to say nice things about Reva’s mother. A few made jokes, a few broke down shamelessly. Everyone agreed that Reva’s mother had been a good woman, that her death was sad, but that life was mysterious, death more so, and what’s the use in speculating so let’s remember the good times—at least she’d lived at all. She’d been brave, she’d been generous, she’d been a good mother and wife, a good cook and a good gardener. “My wife’s only wish was that we move on quickly and be happy,” Reva’s father said. “Everyone has already said so much about her.” He looked out at the crowd, shrugged, then seemed to get flummoxed, turned red, but instead of bursting into tears, he started coughing into the microphone. Reva covered her ears. Someone brought her father a glass of water and helped him back to his seat. Then it was Reva’s turn to speak. She checked her makeup in her compact mirror, powdered her nose, dabbed her eyes with more tissues, then went up and stood at the rostrum and read lines off index cards, shuffling them back and forth as she sniffled and cried. Everything she said sounded like she’d read it in a Hallmark card. Halfway through, she stopped and looked down at me as though for approval. I gave her a thumbs-up. “She was a woman of many talents,” Reva said, “and she inspired me to follow my own path.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  As he walked along the street, he plotted how he would lure her into an affair. Suddenly he felt a hand on his arm and he turned to see her walking along- side him. It was too hot to work—would he be a gentleman and escort her home? Of course. Do you have a lover? he asked her. No, she said, "I am mozita"—pure, a virgin. Conchita lived with her mother in a rundown part of town. Don Ma- teo exchanged pleasantries, slipped the mother some money (he knew from experience how important it was to keep the mother happy), then left. He considered waiting a few days, but he was impatient, and returned the fol- lowing morning. The mother was out. He and Conchita resumed their playful banter from the day before, and to his surprise she suddenly sat in his lap, put her arms around him, and kissed him. His strategy flying out the window, he took hold of her and returned the kiss. She immediately jumped up, her eyes flashing with anger: you are trifling with me, she said, using me for a quick thrill. Don Mateo denied having any such intentions, and apologized for going too far. When he left, he felt confused: she had started it all; why should he feel guilty? And yet he did. Young girls can be so unpredictable; it is best to break them in slowly Over the next few days Don Mateo was the perfect gentleman. He visited every day, showered mother and daughter with gifts, made no advances—at least not at first. The damned girl had become so familiar The more one pleases generally, the less one pleases profoundly. —STENDHAL, LOVE, TRANSLATED BY GILBERT AND SUZANNE SALE You should mix in the odd rebuff \ With your cheerful fun. Shut him out of the house, let him wait there \ Cursing that locked front door, let him plead \ And threaten all he's a mind to. Sweetness cloys the palate, \ Bitter juice is a freshener. Often a small skiff \ Is sunk by favoring winds: it's their husbands' access to them, \ At will, that deprives so many wives of love. \ Let her put in a door, with a hard-faced porter to tell him \ "Keep out," and he'll soon be touched with desire \ Through frustration. Put down your blunt foils, fight with sharpened weapons \ (I don't doubt that my own shafts \ Will be turned against me). When a new-captured lover \ Is stumbling into the toils, then let him believe \ He alone has rights to your bed—but later, make him 371 372 • The Art of Seduction with him that she would dress in front of him, or greet him in her night- gown.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Thinking about her while he was teaching gave him a kind of naughty thrill. That night he went back to the club, still determined to catch Lohmann in the act, and once again found himself in Rosa's dressing room, drinking wine and becoming strangely passive. She asked him to help her get dressed; that seemed quite an honor and he obliged her. Helping her with her corset and her makeup, he forgot about Lohmann. He felt he was being initiated into some new world. She pinched his cheeks and stroked his chin, and occa- sionally let him glimpse her bare leg as she rolled up a stocking. Now Professor Mut showed up night after night, helping her dress, watching her perform, all with a strange kind of pride. He was there so often that Lohmann and his friends no longer showed up. He had taken their place—he was the one to bring her flowers, pay for her champagne, the one to serve her. Yes, an old man like himself had bested the youthful Lohmann, who thought himself so suave! He liked it when she stroked his chin, complimented him for doing things right, but he felt even more ex- cited when she rebuked him, throwing a powder puff in his face or pushing him off a chair. It meant she liked him. And so, gradually, he began to pay for all her caprices. It cost him a pretty penny but kept her away from other men. Eventually he proposed to her. They married, and scandal ensued: he lost his job, and soon all his money; finally he landed in prison. To the very end, however, he could never get angry with Rosa. Instead he felt guilty: he had never done enough for her. Interpretation. Professor Mut and Rosa Fröhlich are characters in the novel The Blue Angel, written by Heinrich Mann in 1905, and later made into a film starring Marlene Dietrich. Rosa's seduction of Mut follows the classic oedipal regression pattern. First, the woman treats the man the way a mother would treat a little boy. She scolds him, but the scolding is not threatening; it is tender, and has a teasing edge. Like a mother, she knows she is dealing with someone weak, who cannot help his naughty behavior. She mixes plenty of praise and approval in with her taunts. Once the man begins to regress, she adds physical excitement—some bodily contact to ex- cite him, subtle sexual overtones. As a reward for his regression, the man may get the thrill of finally sleeping with his mother. But there is always an ele- ment of competition, which the mother figure must heighten.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I remembered how dreadful I had felt about breaking up my marriage to Brian and it occurred to me that I had felt I deserved to spend the rest of my life immersed in his madness. My parents and Brian’s parents and the doctors had bullied me out of it. You’re only twenty-two, Brian’s psychiatrist had said; you can’t throw away your life. And I had fought him. I had accused him of betraying us both, of betraying our love. The fact was that I might easily have stayed with Brian if money and parental protestations hadn’t intervened. I felt I belonged with him. I felt I deserved to lose my life that way. I never suspected I had a life of my own at that point, and I was never good at leaving people, no matter how badly they treated me. Something in me always insisted on giving them another chance. Or perhaps it was cowardice. A kind of paralysis of the will. I stayed and wrote out my anger instead of acting on it. Leaving Bennett was my first really independent action, and even there it had been partly because of Adrian and the wild sexual obsession I had felt for him. Obviously it was dangerous to stare at your eyes in mirrors too long. I stood back to examine my body. Where did my body end and the air around it begin? Somewhere in an article on body image I had read that at times of stress—or ecstasy—we lose the boundaries of our bodies. We forget we own them. It was a sensation I often had and I recognized it as a significant part of my panics. Constant pain could do it, too. My broken leg had made me lose touch with the boundaries of my body. It was a paradox: great bodily pain or great bodily pleasure made you feel you were slipping out of your body. I tried to examine my physical self, to take stock so that I could remember who I was—if indeed my body could be said to be me. I remembered a story about Theodore Roethke alone in his big old house, dressing and undressing himself before the mirror, examining his nakedness in between bouts of composition. Perhaps the story was apocryphal, but it had the ring of truth for me. One’s body is intimately related to one’s writing, although the precise nature of the connection is subtle and may take years to understand. Some tall thin poets write short fat poems. But it’s not a simple matter of the law of inversion. In a sense, every poem is an attempt to extend the boundaries of one’s body. One’s body becomes the landscape, the sky, and finally the cosmos. Perhaps that’s why I often find myself writing in the nude.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Three doctors and the Farlows presently arrived on the scene and took over. The widower, a man of exceptional self-control, neither wept nor raved. He staggered a bit, that he did; but he opened his mouth only to impart such information or issue such directions as were strictly necessary in connection with the identification, examination and disposal of a dead woman, the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood. The sun was still a blinding red when he was put to bed in Dolly’s room by his two friends, gentle John and dewy-eyed Jean; who, to be near, retired to the Humberts’ bedroom for the night; which, for all I know, they may not have spent as innocently as the solemnity of the occasion required. I have no reason to dwell, in this very special memoir, on the pre-funeral formalities that had to be attended to, or on the funeral itself, which was as quiet as the marriage had been. But a few incidents pertaining to those four or five days after Charlotte’s simple death, have to be noted. My first night of widowhood I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as the child who had slept in that bed. Next morning I hastened to inspect the fragments of letters in my pocket. They had got too thoroughly mixed up to be sorted into three complete sets. I assumed that “… and you had better find it because I cannot buy …” came from a letter to Lo; and other fragments seemed to point to Charlotte’s intention of fleeing with Lo to Parkington, or even back to Pisky, lest the vulture snatch her precious lamb. Other tatters and shreds (never had I thought I had such strong talons) obviously referred to an application not to St. A. but to another boarding school which was said to be so harsh and gray and gaunt in its methods (although supplying croquet under the elms) as to have earned the nickname of “Reformatory for Young Ladies.” Finally, the third epistle was obviously addressed to me. I made out such items as “… after a year of separation we may …” “… oh, my dearest, oh my …” “… worse than if it had been a woman you kept …” “… or, maybe, I shall die …” But on the whole my gleanings made little sense; the various fragments of those three hasty missives were as jumbled in the palms of my hands as their elements had been in poor Charlotte’s head.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I wondered, would my mother have been better off if I had stolen all her pills, as Reva had stolen all of mine? Reva was lucky to be plagued only by the image of her mother’s burning body. “Individual pans.” At least her mother’s body was ruined. It didn’t exist anymore. My dead mother was lying in a coffin, a shriveled skeleton. I still felt like she was up to something down there, bitter and suffering as the flesh on her body withered and sank away from her bones. Did she blame me? We buried her in a carnation pink Thierry Mugler suit. Her hair was perfect. Her lipstick was perfect, blood red, Christian Dior 999. If I unearthed her now, would the lipstick have faded? Either way, she’d be a stiff husk, like the sloughed- off exoskeleton of a huge insect. That was what my mother was. What if I’d flushed away all those prescriptions before I went back to school, poured all her alcohol down the sink? Did she secretly want me to do that? Would that have made her happy for once? Or would it have pushed her further away? “My own daughter!” I sensed a bit of remorse in me. It smelled like pennies in the room, I thought. The air tasted like when you test a battery with your tongue. Cold and electric. “I’m not fit to occupy space. Excuse me for living.” Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe I was having a stroke. I wanted Xanax. I wanted Klonopin. Reva had even taken my empty bottle of chewable peppermint melatonin. How could she? In my mind, I made a list of pills I wanted to take and then I imagined taking them. I cupped my hand and plucked the invisible pills out of my palm. I swallowed them one by one. It didn’t work. I started sweating. I went back to the kitchen and drank water from the tap, then stuck my head in the freezer and found a bottle of Jose Cuervo wrapped in a crinkly white plastic bag. I was glad it wasn’t a human head. I drank the tequila and glared at Reva’s Polaroid picture. Then I remembered that I had a set of keys to her apartment. • • • I HADN’T BEEN TO the Upper West Side in several years, not since the last time I’d been over to Reva’s. It felt safe in that part of town, sobering. The buildings were heavier. The streets were wider. Nothing there had really changed since I’d graduated from Columbia. Westside Market. Riverside Park. 1020. The West End. Cheap pizza by the slice. Maybe that’s why Reva loved it, I thought. Cheap binges.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “You’re right,” I said. What was that I had just said? You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. Bennett was right and Adrian was also right. Men have always liked me because I agree with them. Not just lip service either. At the moment I say it, I really do agree. “Let’s go back to New York right after the Congress is over.” “OK,” I said, meaning it. I looked at Bennett and thought how well I knew him. He was serious and sober almost to the point of madness at times, but it was also that which I loved about him. His utter dependability. His belief that life was a puzzle which could ultimately be figured out through hard work and determination. I shared that with him as much as I shared laughter with Adrian. I loved Bennett and knew it. I knew my life was with him, not with Adrian. Then what was tugging so hard at me to leave him and go off with Adrian? Why did Adrian’s arguments speak to my very bones? “You could have had an affair without my knowing,” he said. “I gave you plenty of freedom.” “I know.” I hung my head. “You really did it for my benefit, didn’t you? You must have been terribly angry with me.” “He’s impotent most of the time anyway,” I said. Now I had betrayed them both. I had told Adrian Bennett’s secrets. And Bennett Adrian’s. Carrying tales from one to the other. And myself the most betrayed of all. Shown up for the traitor I was. Had I no loyalty at all? I wanted to die. Death was the only suitable punishment for traitors. “I’d have thought he’d be impotent, or else homosexual. At any rate, it’s clear he hates women.” “How do you know?” “From you.” “Bennett, do you know I love you?” “Yes, and that only makes it worse.” We stood looking at each other. “Sometimes I just get so tired of being serious all the time. I want to laugh. I want to have fun.” “I guess my somberness drives everyone away in the end,” he said sadly. And then he enumerated all the girls it had driven away. I knew them all by name. I put my arms around him. “I could have had affairs without your knowing. I know lots of women who do that….” (Actually, I knew only three who made a constant habit of it.) “But that would be even worse, in a way. To lead a secret life and go home to you as if nothing had happened. That would be even harder to take. At least, I couldn’t bear it.” “Maybe I should have understood how lonely you were,” he said. “Maybe it was my fault.” Then we made love. I didn’t pretend Bennett was anyone but Bennett. I didn’t have to. It was Bennett I wanted.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Charlie calls me in Florence to beg forgiveness (he is still in Paris with Sally) and that precipitates another joyless orgy…. Then Pia and I repent and decide to purify ourselves. We douche with Italian white chianti vinegar. We kneel before the statue of Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi and ask forgiveness. We go to the top of Giotto’s Campanile and pray to the ghost of Giotto (any famous old ghost will do, really). We give up food for two days and drink only San Pellegrino. We douche with San Pellegrino. Finally, as the ultimate act of expiation, we decide to mail our diaphragms to our faithless lovers and try to make them feel guilty instead. But what to wrap them in? Pia has an old Motta Panetone box under the bed of our hurricane-struck pensione room. I look and look but can’t find an appropriate box to mail my diaphragm in, so I abandon the project rather hastily. (What good would it do to send my diaphragm to Charlie and Sally in a panetone box anyway?) But Pia is undeterred. She is bustling around looking for brown paper and tape. She is scrawling addresses and return addresses. She reminds me of myself at thirteen furtively sending away for Kotex booklets in “plain brown wrappers.” We troop off to American Express (where we have slept with half the leering Florentine mail clerks). We are told to make out a customs declaration. But what to put on the customs declaration? “One diaphragm, used?” “One diaphragm, much abused?” “Used clothing” perhaps? Can a diaphragm be considered an article of clothing? Pia and I debate this. “You do wear it,” she says. I maintain that she ought to send it to Boston as an antique and thus avoid all import duty. What if her erring boyfriend had to pay duty on her old diaphragm? Would that be adding expense to injury, insult to guilt? “Fuck him!” Pia says. “ Let him pay import duty on it and be as embarrassed as possible.” And with that she labels the package: “1 Florentine leather bag—valuation $100.” Pia and I parted company shortly after that. I went on to visit Randy in Beirut and she went on to Spain, where, having no diaphragm, she had to content herself with fellatio for the rest of the summer. About blowing and being blown she had no guilt whatsoever. It seems ridiculous somehow, but I understand the feeling well. After all, we were good girls of the fifties. FOURTEEN Arabs & Other Animals I’m the sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “I don’t know.” “You don’t even have the guts to stay with him. If you’re in love with him—why don’t you commit yourself to it and meet his kids and go to London. But you can’t even do that. You don’t know what you want.” He paused. “We ought to go home right now.” “What’s the use? You’ll never trust me again. I’ve ruined it. It’s hopeless.” And I think I really believed it. “Maybe if we go home and you go right back into analysis, if you understand why you did this, if you work it through, maybe we can salvage our marriage.” “If I go back into analysis! Is that the condition?” “Not for my sake—but for yours. So you won’t be doing this sort of thing forever.” “Have I ever done it before? Have I? Even when you were horrible to me, even that time in Paris when you wouldn’t speak to me, even those years in Germany when I was so unhappy, when I needed someone to turn to, when I felt so lonely and shut out by you and your constant depression—I never got involved with anyone else. Never. You certainly provoked me then. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to me. You used to say you didn’t know if you wanted to be married to a writer. You used to say you had no empathy for my problems. You never said you loved me. And when I cried and felt miserable because all I wanted was closeness and affection you sent me to an analyst. You used the analyst as a substitute for everything. Whenever any kind of closeness threatened, you sent me to a goddamned analyst.” “Where the hell would you be now without the analyst? You’d still be rewriting one poem over and over. You’d still be unable to send work anywhere. You’d still be terrified of everything. When I met you, you were running around like a lunatic, never working steadily at anything, full of a million plans that never got finished. I gave you a place to work, encouraged you when you hated yourself, believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself, paid for your goddamned analyst so you could grow and develop as a human being instead of floundering around with all the other members of your crazy family. Go blame me for all your problems. I was the only one who ever gave you support and encouragement and this is all you can do in return—go running after some asshole Englishman and whining to me about not knowing what you want. Go to hell! Follow him wherever you want, I’m going back to New York.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet: The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. 32 There was the day, during our first trip—our first circle of paradise—when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn—to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on—a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face … that look I cannot exactly describe … an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration—and every limit presupposes something beyond it—hence the neutral illumination.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  What marks the New Prude, though, as well as the old one, is that deep down they are actually excited and intrigued by guilty, transgressive pleasures. Frightened by this attrac- tion, they run in the opposite direction and become the most correct of all. They tend to wear drab colors; they certainly never take fashion risks. They can be very judgmental and critical of people who do take risks and are less correct. They are also addicted to routine, which gives them a way to tamp down their inner turmoil. New Prudes are secretly oppressed by their correctness and long to transgress. Just as sexual prudes make prime targets for a Rake or Siren, the New Prude will often be most tempted by someone with a dangerous or naughty side. If you desire a New Prude, do not be taken in by their judg- ments of you or their criticisms. That is only a sign of how deeply you fas- cinate them; you are on their mind. You can often draw a New Prude into a seduction, in fact, by giving them the chance to criticize you or even try to reform you. Take nothing of what they say to heart, of course, but now you have the perfect excuse to spend time with them—and New Prudes can be seduced simply through being in contact with you. These types ac- tually make excellent and rewarding victims. Once you open them up and get them to let go of their correctness, they are flooded with feelings and energies. They may even overwhelm you. Perhaps they are in a relationship with someone as drab as they themselves seem to be—do not be put off. They are simply asleep, waiting to be awakened. The Crushed Star. We all want attention, we all want to shine, but with most of us these desires are fleeting and easily quieted. The problem with Crushed Stars is that at one point in their lives they did find themselves the center of attention—perhaps they were beautiful, charming and efferves- cent, perhaps they were athletes, or had some other talent—but those days are gone. They may seem to have accepted this, but the memory of having once shone is hard to get over. In general, the appearance of wanting atten- tion, of trying to stand out, is not seen too kindly in polite society or in the workplace. So to get along, Crushed Stars learn to tamp down their desires; but failing to get the attention they feel they deserve, they also become re- sentful. You can recognize Crushed Stars by certain unguarded moments: they suddenly receive some attention in a social setting, and it makes them glow; they mention their glory days, and there is a little glint in the eye; a little wine in the system, and they become effervescent. Seducing this type is simple: just make them the center of attention.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  cent, in fact beautiful, with a sparkle in her eye that suggested a taste for adventure. The perfect prey. He listened to her song (which seemed vaguely suggestive), tossed her a coin that was equal to a month's salary, tipped his You should mix in the odd hat, then left. It was never good to come on too strong too early. As he rebuff \ With your cheerful fun. Shut him out of the walked along the street, he plotted how he would lure her into an affair. house, let him wait there \ Suddenly he felt a hand on his arm and he turned to see her walking along- Cursing that locked front side him. It was too hot to work—would he be a gentleman and escort her door, let him plead \ And threaten all he's a mind to. home? Of course. Do you have a lover? he asked her. No, she said, "I am Sweetness cloys the palate, mozita" —pure, a virgin. \ Bitter juice is a freshener. Conchita lived with her mother in a rundown part of town. Don Ma- Often a small skiff \ Is sunk by favoring winds: it's teo exchanged pleasantries, slipped the mother some money (he knew from their husbands' access to experience how important it was to keep the mother happy), then left. He them, \ At will, that considered waiting a few days, but he was impatient, and returned the fol- deprives so many wives of love. \ Let her put in a lowing morning. The mother was out. He and Conchita resumed their door, with a hard-faced playful banter from the day before, and to his surprise she suddenly sat in porter to tell him \ "Keep his lap, put her arms around him, and kissed him. His strategy flying out out," and he'll soon be the window, he took hold of her and returned the kiss. She immediately touched with desire \ Through frustration. Put jumped up, her eyes flashing with anger: you are trifling with me, she said, down your blunt foils, fight using me for a quick thrill. Don Mateo denied having any such intentions, with sharpened weapons \ and apologized for going too far. When he left, he felt confused: she had (I don't doubt that my own shafts \ Will be turned started it all; why should he feel guilty? And yet he did. Young girls can be against me). When a so unpredictable; it is best to break them in slowly new-captured lover \ Is Over the next few days Don Mateo was the perfect gentleman. He stumbling into the toils, then let him believe \ He visited every day, showered mother and daughter with gifts, made no alone has rights to your advances—at least not at first. The damned girl had become so familiar bed— but later, make him 371 372 • The Art of Seduction conscious \ Of rivals, of

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  ploited the story. A mix of the masculine and the feminine, the violent and the tender, will always seem transgressive and appealing. Love is supposed to be tender and delicate, but in fact it can release violent and destructive emotions; and the possible violence of love, the way it breaks down our normal reasonableness, is just what attracts us. Approach romance's violent side by mixing a cruel streak into your tender attentions, particularly in the latter stages of the seduction, when the target is in your clutches. The courtesan Lola Montez was known to turn to violence, using a whip now and then, and Lou Andreas-Salomé could be exceptionally cruel to her men, playing coquettish games, turning alternately icy and demanding. Her cruelty only kept her targets coming back for more. A masochistic involvement can represent a great transgressive release. The more illicit your seduction feels, the more powerful its effect. Give your targets the feeling that they are committing a kind of crime, a deed whose guilt they share with you. Create public moments in which the two of you know something that those around you do not. It could be phrases and looks that only you recognize, a secret. Byron's seductive appeal to Lady Frances was connected to the nearness of her husband—in his company, for example, she had a love letter of Byron's hidden in her bosom. Johannes, the protagonist of Søren Kierkegaard's The Seducer's Diary, sent a message to his target, the young Cordelia, in the middle of a dinner party they were both attending; she could not reveal to the other guests that it was from him, for then she would have to do some explaining. He might also say something in public that would have a special meaning for her, since it referred to something in one of his letters. All of this added spice to the affair by giving it a feeling of a shared secret, even a guilty crime. It is critical to play on tensions like these in public, creating a sense of complicity and collusion against the world. In the Tristan and Isolde legend, the famous lovers reach the heights of bliss and exhilaration exactly because of the taboos they break. Isolde is engaged to King Mark; she will soon be a married woman. Tristan is a loyal subject and warrior in the service of King Mark, who is his father's age. The whole affair has a feeling of stealing away the bride from the father. Epitomizing the concept of love in the Western world, the legend has had immense influence over the ages, and a crucial part of it is the idea that without obstacles, without a feeling of transgression, love is weak and flavorless.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  incalculable weakness: one château, and wrote him to that effect; he reluctantly agreed, but on one challenges the other to be condition—that she allow him to write to her from Paris. She consented, as taken i n . . . . • T o seduce long as the letters were not offensive. When he told Madame de Rose-is to appear weak. To seduce is to render weak. monde that he was leaving, the Présidente felt a pang of guilt: his host-We seduce with our ess and aunt would miss him, and he looked so pale. He was obviously weakness, never with suffering. strong signs or powers. In seduction we enact this Now the letters from Valmont began to arrive, and Tourvel soon re-weakness, and this is what gretted allowing him this liberty. He ignored her request that he avoid the gives seduction its strength. subject of love—indeed he vowed to love her forever. He rebuked her for • We seduce with our her coldness and insensitivity. He explained his bad path in life—it was not death, our vulnerability, and with the void that his fault, he had had no direction, had been led astray by others. Without haunts us. The secret is to her help he would fall back into that world. Do not be cruel, he said, you know how to play with are the one who seduced me. I am your slave, the victim of your charms death in the absence of a gaze or gesture, in the and goodness; since you are strong, and do not feel as I do, you have noth-absence of knowledge or ing to fear. Indeed the Présidente de Tourvel came to pity Valmont—he meaning. • Psychoanalysis seemed so weak, so out of control. How could she help him? And why was tells us to assume our fragility and passivity, but she even thinking of him, which she now did more and more? She was a in almost religious terms, happily married woman. No, she must at least put an end to this tiresome turns them into a form of correspondence. No more talk of love, she wrote, or she would not reply. resignation and acceptance His letters stopped coming. She felt relief. Finally some peace and quiet. in order to promote a well- tempered psychic One evening, however, as she was seated at the dinner table, she sud-equilibrium. Seduction, by denly heard Valmont's voice from behind her, addressing Madame de Rose-contrast, plays trumph- monde. On the spur of the moment, he said, he had decided to return for antty with weakness, making a game of it, with a short visit. She felt a shiver up and down her spine, her face flushed; he its own rules. approached and sat down beside her. He looked at her, she looked away, — J E A N BAUDRILLARD, and soon made an excuse to leave the table and go up to her room. But she SEDUCTION, TRANSLATED BY

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  They all think their cunts are ugly. They all find fault with their figures. They all think their asses are too big, their breasts too small, their thighs too fat, their ankles too thick. Even models and actresses, even the women you think are so beautiful that they have nothing to worry about do worry all the time. “I love your fat ass,” Adrian said. “All the food you had to gobble to get such a fat ass. Yum!” And he sank his teeth in. The cannibal. “The trouble with your marriage is,” he said to my ass, “that it’s all work. Don’t you ever have fun together?” “Sure we do...hey—that hurts.” “Like when?” He sat up. “Tell me about when it was fun.” I racked my brains. The fight in Paris. The car crash in Sicily. The fight in Paestum. The fight about which apartment to take. The fight about my quitting analysis. The fight about skiing. The fight about fighting. “We’ve had lots of fun. You don’t have to grill me.” “You’re a liar. All your analysis is really a waste if you still go on lying to yourself all the time.” “We have fun in bed.” “Only thanks to my not fucking you properly, I’ll bet.” “Adrian, I think you really want to break up my marriage. That’s your game, isn’t it? That’s your kick, that’s what you’re hooked on. I may be hooked on guilt. Bennett may be hooked on jargon. But you’re hooked on triangles. That’s your speciality. Who was Martine living with that made her so attractive to you? Who was Esther fucking? You’re a marriage ghoul, that’s what you are. You’re a vulture.” “Yes, when I find carrion, I like to clean it up. You said it, not me. The vulture metaphor is yours, ducks. The dead flesh is yours too. And Bennett’s.” “I think you like Bennett more than you admit. I think he turns you on.” “Can’t decide whether I’m queer or not,” he said, grinning. “I’ll bet that’s true.” “Think what you like, ducks. Anything to get out of really enjoying life. Anything to go on suffering. I know your type. Bloody Jewish masochist. Actually, I quite like Bennett, only he’s a bloody Chinese masochist. It would do him some good if you took off without him. It might show him that he can’t go on living this way, suffering all the time and calling in Freud as his witness.” “If I take off, I’ll lose him.” “Only if he’s not worth having.” “Why do you say that?” “It’s so obvious. If he takes off, then he’s not for you. And if he takes you back, it will be on a new footing. No more groveling. No more manipulating each other with guilt all the time. You can’t lose a thing. And meanwhile, we’ll have a great time.” I pretended to Adrian that I wasn’t tempted, but in fact I was.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He never fails to hold her tightly around the waist as they cross the icy streets together. “Take small steps,” he keeps saying. “You’re going to break your neck and take me along with you.” “What would I do without you?” she says. He clears his throat nervously, but says nothing. The film would end there, on the note of his cough, perhaps. But I remember the events that followed: the car breaking down, and having to take the train back to Heidelberg; the four French soldiers who shared our second-class couchette compartment and belched and farted all the way back to Germany, almost as if they were powering the train; the precipitous drop from the highest couchette (which I occupied) to the floor. A sudden bout of diarrhea caused me to negotiate this drop no less than six times that night (and once I stepped right into the groin of the French soldier in the bottom couchette, who was extremely gracious about it, considering). And then the return to Heidelberg with Christmas over and having to face being in the army all over again. (On vacations we tried to pretend we were just an American couple living in Europe for the hell of it.) And then on New Year’s Day, there was the telegram—garbled as such messages often are, and coming on that dismal gray Saturday afternoon when the entire male population of Klein Amerika was engrossed in polishing the family car and the entire female population was walking around in hair rollers and the Germans on the other side of Goethestrasse were already breaking out the first bottle of Schnaps in preparation for the new year.... GRANDPA DIED SIX FIFTEEN TUESDAY STOP REVIVED BY MASSAGE STOP HEART FAILURE STOP RECTAL HEMMORAGE STOP NOTHING COULD BE DONE STOP FUNERAL JANUARY 4 STOP LOVE MOTHER I read the telegram first, then gave it to Bennett. I had that sick feeling I always have when I know something awful is going to be blamed on me. I knew that Bennett would somehow find a way to blame me for his grandfather’s death. My mother’s parents were still alive. I put my arms around Bennett and he drew away. I remember thinking I was not so sad that his grandfather had died, but that I was going to have to die a little bit more for it in penance. Bennett sat on the living-room couch with the telegram in his hands. I sat next to him and reread it over his shoulder. “The moving finger writes and it misspells words,” I thought. I hardly knew Bennett’s grandfather (an ancient Chinese man who was either 99 or 100, looked like a yellowed ivory statue, and spoke barely any English at all).

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Confronted with a real incident in their own lives, they couldn’t even discuss it. It was fine to be an analytic voyeur and dissect someone else’s homosexual longings, someone else’s Oedipal triangle, someone else’s adultery, but face to face with their own, they were speechless. They both faced straight ahead like Siamese twins joined at a crucial but invisible spot on the side of the neck. Blood brothers. And I the sister who had loused them up. The woman who had brought about their fall. Pandora and her evil box. O NINE Pandora’s Box or My Two Mothers A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing. —Anne Sexton f course it all began with my mother. My mother: Judith Stoloff White, also known as Jude. Not obscure. But hard to get down on paper. My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly see her. I never know who is who. She is me and I am she and we are all together. The umbilical cord which connects us has never been cut so it has sickened and rotted and turned black. The very intensity of our need has made us denounce each other. We want to eat each other up. We want to strangle each other with love. We want to run screaming from each other in panic before either of these things can happen. When I think of my mother I envy Alexander Portnoy. If only I had a real Jewish mother—easily pigeonholed and filed away—a real literary property. (I am always envying writers their relatives: Nabokov and Lowell and Tucci with their closets full of elegant aristocratic skeletons, Roth and Bellow and Friedman with their pop parents, sticky as Passover wine, greasy as matzoh-ball soup.) My mother smelled of Joy or Diorissimo, and she didn’t cook much. When I try to distill down to basics what she taught me about life, I am left with this: 1. Above all, never be ordinary. 2. The world is a predatory place: Eat faster! “Ordinary” was the worst insult she could find for anything. I remember her taking me shopping and the look of disdain with which she would freeze the salesladies in Saks when they suggested that some dress or pair of shoes was “very popular—we’ve sold fifty already this week.” That was all she needed to hear. “No,” she would say, “we’re not interested in that. Haven’t you got something a little more unusual?” And then the saleslady would bring out all the weird colors no one else would buy—stuff which would have gone on sale but for my mother. And later she and I would have an enormous fight because I yearned to be ordinary as fiercely as my mother yearned to be unusual. “I can’t stand that hairdo” (she said when I went to the hairdresser with Pia and came back with a pageboy straight out of Seventeen Magazine), “it’s so ordinary.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Didn’t I know that I would go to the Seventh Circle—the circle of the traitors? Didn’t I know that mine was the lowest crime in Dante’s book? Didn’t I know I was already in hell? Hell couldn’t have been much worse than that summer anyway. The Diem regime had just fallen and Buddhists kept immolating themselves in a funny little country whose name was growing more and more familiar—Vietnam. Barry Goldwater was running for President on the platform of sawing off the entire Eastern seaboard and floating it out to sea. John F. Kennedy was not yet one year dead. Lyndon Johnson was the nation’s one hope for defeating Goldwater and preserving peace. Two young white men named Goodman and Schwerner went south to Mississippi to work for voter registration, teamed up with a young black man named Chaney, and all three of them ended up in a ghastly common grave. Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant erupted in the first of many long, hot summers. Brian, meanwhile, was in the hospital raving about how he was going to save mankind. Certainly mankind had never needed it more. We drifted apart. Not all at once, and not through my meeting someone else. I didn’t go out at all while Brian was in the hospital. I was shellshocked and needed time to recover. But gradually I began to realize how much happier I was without him, how his frantic energy had sapped my life, how his wild fantasies had deprived me of any fantasy life of my own. Slowly I began to prize hearing my own thoughts. I began to listen to my own dreams. It was as if I had been living in an echo chamber for five years and then suddenly someone let me out. The rest of the story is mostly denouement. I loved Brian and it made me feel terribly guilty to realize that I liked living without him better than living with him. Also, I think that I never quite trusted him again after the attempt he made to strangle me. I said I forgave him, but something inside me never did. I was afraid of him and that was what killed our marriage in the end. The end dragged on. Money, as usual, was a precipitating factor. After three months at Mount Sinai, the Blue Cross coverage ran out and Brian had to be transferred. Either he had to go to a state hospital (something which terrified us both) or to a private hospital (where fees were about $2,000 a month). We were up against a money-green wall. His parents stepped in then, not to help but to harass. If I’d let him go to California, they’d pay the cost of private treatment. Otherwise, not a penny. I lived with this ultimatum for a while and then finally decided I had no choice. In September we made the pilgrimage to California.