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 Filthy Animals (2021)

  Abe is pumping him harder and faster, rough. It hurts, but it also feels good, and it’s that first time that someone has wanted to touch him, has seemed to need it the way Abe does. His eyes are hungry and wet. “So he’s like, no, I’m gonna finish, and she’s whining and crying, and I’m like, shut that bitch up, I’m losing my hard-on, and her friend is like, no, no please, let us go home, and I’m like, shit, man, it’s not worth it.” Milton pulls away from Abe, but Abe has gripped the back of his neck and kisses him now, hard. He pulls away again, and this time, Abe has had it, pushes him up against the hill, leans in and growls. “What’s your problem, man? You want this or not? They’re gonna be here any minute.” “Want what?” Milton asks, and then, looking down, remembers his cock and how hard it is, and how damp. But there is also the hellish image of those girls in that room, trapped with them, wanting nothing but to go home, to be anywhere but there. “I don’t want anything.” “Then do mine,” he says, pushing his hips forward. “Come on, it’s almost there anyway.” “No,” Milton says. “Come on.” Abe takes Milton’s hand and puts it on his dick, and after a moment, Milton does it, gives in, takes Abe into his hand, and strokes him until he comes quietly, his face nestled in the crook of Milton’s neck. • • • Tate and Nolan slide down the hill and find them sitting on the ground. “Got the shit,” Nolan says. Milton can barely look at him. Nolan sits on a rock next to him, and Milton tries not to breathe because he cannot trust himself not to turn the air into words. Nolan rolls a joint and hands it to Milton. “Your birthday, you start.” Milton lights up first, even though he can still feel the joint from earlier in the day. He takes a long inhale. He hands the joint off to Nolan, holds the smoke inside, lets it build. Then he lets it glide out, slow and easy. “What were you and Edie talking about?” Nolan asks. “She wished me a happy birthday,” he says. “Is that all?” “Yeah—how do you know her?” “I don’t. Not really. I know her sister better,” Nolan says, and there’s a not a crack in his voice or his face, nothing to suggest anything more than a passing acquaintance. Abe chokes on the joint. Nolan shrugs casually. He takes a hit off the joint. The red bead of its lit end is angry with heat, like a sore.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  31I 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. 32She told me the way she had been debauched. We ate flavorless mealy bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable potato chips, and die Kleine told me everything. Her voluble but disjointed account was accompanied by many a droll moue. As I think I have already observed, I especially remember one wry face on an “ugh!” basis: jelly-mouth distended sideways and eyes rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation and tolerance for young frailty. Her astounding tale started with an introductory mention of her tent-mate of the previous summer, at another camp, a “very select” one as she put it. That tent-mate (“quite a derelict character,” “half-crazy,” but a “swell kid”) instructed her in various manipulations. At first, loyal Lo refused to tell me her name. “Was it Grace Angel?” I asked. She shook her head. No, it wasn’t, it was the daughter of a big shot. He— “Was it perhaps Rose Carmine?” “No, of course not. Her father—” “Was it, then, Agnes Sheridan perchance?” She swallowed and shook her head—and then did a double take. “Say, how come you know all those kids?” I explained. “Well,” she said. “They are pretty bad, some of that school bunch, but not that bad. If you have to know, her name was Elizabeth Talbot, she goes now to a swanky private school, her father is an executive.” I recalled with a funny pang the frequency with which poor Charlotte used to introduce into party chat such elegant tidbits as “when my daughter was out hiking last year with the Talbot girl.” I wanted to know if either mother learned of those sapphic diversions?

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In summary, the motor expression of two intense instinctual responses creates a conflict and results in frozen states, such as the stasis in Vince’s shoulder. Normally, muscles that extend operate reciprocally with those that flex. In the traumatic state, however, agonist and antagonist operate against each other, creating frozen (immobility) states. This may lead to debilitating symptoms in almost any part of the body. The energy bound in inhibited (thwarted) responses is so powerful that it can cause an extreme bracing that often has profound effects. For example, when people jump from burning buildings to a trampoline net far below, the bones in their legs may actually fracture during the fall instead of on impact. This is because both the extensor and flexor muscles contract simultaneously, with inordinate intensity. In times of war or natural disasters, the instinctual impulse for self-preservation often collides with those for the protection of one’s comrades. In World War I the prevalence of shell shock was tremendously high in the trenches. The foot soldiers were literally trapped and barraged with loud explosives for days to weeks on end. Instinctually, they were “urged” to run wildly to escape or to stay under fire and fight for the preservation of the group. In fact many soldiers were killed by unwisely running to escape (or were shot for supposed cowardice). In the few motion pictures taken of shell-shocked soldiers from World War I, one sees the tortured, twisted, convulsive consequences of such chronic thwarting. One wonders how many soldiers developed trauma and enduring guilt symptoms because they chose to protect themselves by leaving the wounded to fend for themselves. In any case, courage is a more complex phenomenon than is generally appreciated. Trauma through a Child’s EyesIn a lifelong career of working with adults, I have occasionally been asked to see the children of my clients. I was frequently astonished by how, with the briefest of interventions, children rebounded from what would otherwise have been a devastating lifelong debilitation. These children, unshackled from the yoke of trauma, were free to develop with confidence, resilience and joy. I have cowritten two books on the prevention and somatic treatment of childhood trauma. One of them is geared to therapists, medical personnel and teachers,105 while the other is geared primarily toward teaching parents effective emotional first-aid tools.106 In this section, I offer the tender stories of three overwhelmed children: Anna, Alex and Sammy. Their vignettes illustrate the principle that less is more and speak to the innate resilience of the human spirit.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman. It is with a great effort of will that in this memoir I have managed to tune my style to the tone of the journal that I kept when Mrs. Haze was to me but an obstacle. That journal of mine is no more; but I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now. Fortunately, my story has reached a point where I can cease insulting poor Charlotte for the sake of retrospective verisimilitude. Wishing to spare poor Charlotte two or three hours of suspense on a winding road (and avoid, perhaps, a head-on collision that would shatter our different dreams), I made a thoughtful but abortive attempt to reach her at the camp by telephone. She had left half an hour before, and getting Lo instead, I told her—trembling and brimming with my mastery over fate—that I was going to marry her mother. I had to repeat it twice because something was preventing her from giving me her attention. “Gee, that’s swell,” she said laughing. “When is the wedding? Hold on a sec, the pup—That pup here has got hold of my sock. Listen—” and she added she guessed she was going to have loads of fun … and I realized as I hung up that a couple of hours at that camp had been sufficient to blot out with new impressions the image of handsome Humbert Humbert from little Lolita’s mind. But what did it matter now? I would get her back as soon as a decent amount of time after the wedding had elapsed. “The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave,” as a poet might have said. But I am no poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder. After Louise had gone, I inspected the icebox, and finding it much too puritanic, walked to town and bought the richest foods available. I also bought some good liquor and two or three kinds of vitamins. I was pretty sure that with the aid of these stimulants and my natural resources, I would avert any embarrassment that my indifference might incur when called upon to display a strong and impatient flame. Again and again resourceful Humbert evoked Charlotte as seen in the raree-show of a manly imagination. She was well groomed and shapely, this I could say for her, and she was my Lolita’s big sister—this notion, perhaps, I could keep up if only I did not visualize too realistically her heavy hips, round knees, ripe bust, the coarse pink skin of her neck (“coarse” by comparison with silk and honey) and all the rest of that sorry and dull thing: a handsome woman.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  As she was in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face. It flitted again, more meaningfully, as she settled down beside me. No doubt, she reproduced it that second time for my benefit. Foolishly, I asked her what was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,” she replied. “You what?” I asked. She was silent. Leaving Briceland. Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning. Whether or not the realization of a lifelong dream had surpassed all expectation, it had, in a sense, overshot its mark—and plunged into a nightmare. I had been careless, stupid, and ignoble. And let me be quite frank: somewhere at the bottom of that dark turmoil I felt the writhing of desire again, so monstrous was my appetite for that miserable nymphet. Mingled with the pangs of guilt was the agonizing thought that her mood might prevent me from making love to her again as soon as I found a nice country road where to park in peace. In other words, poor Humbert Humbert was dreadfully unhappy, and while steadily and inanely driving toward Lepingville, he kept racking his brains for some quip, under the bright wing of which he might dare turn to his seatmate. It was she, however, who broke the silence: “Oh, a squashed squirrel,” she said. “What a shame.” “Yes, isn’t it?” (eager, hopeful Hum). “Let us stop at the next gas station,” Lo continued. “I want to go to the washroom.” “We shall stop wherever you want,” I said. And then as a lovely, lonely, supercilious grove (oaks, I thought; American trees at that stage were beyond me) started to echo greenly the rush of our car, a red and ferny road on our right turned its head before slanting into the woodland, and I suggested we might perhaps— “Drive on,” my Lo cried shrilly. “Righto. Take it easy.” (Down, poor beast, down.) I glanced at her. Thank God, the child was smiling. “You chump,” she said, sweetly smiling at me. “You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Let me explain. I was not unduly disturbed by her self accusatory innuendoes. I was still firmly resolved to pursue my policy of sparing her purity by operating only in the stealth of night, only upon a completely anesthetized little nude. Restraint and reverence were still my motto—even if that “purity” (incidentally, thoroughly debunked by modern science) had been slightly damaged through some juvenile erotic experience, no doubt homosexual, at that accursed camp of hers. Of course, in my old-fashioned, old-world way, I, Jean-Jacques Humbert, had taken for granted, when I first met her, that she was as unravished as the stereotypical notion of “normal child” had been since the lamented end of the Ancient World B.C. and its fascinating practices. We are not surrounded in our enlighted era by little slave flowers that can be casually plucked between business and bath as they used to be in the days of the Romans; and we do not, as dignified Orientals did in still more luxurious times, use tiny entertainers fore and aft between the mutton and the rose sherbet. The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws. Despite my having dabbled in psychiatry and social work, I really knew very little about children. After all, Lolita was only twelve, and no matter what concessions I made to time and place—even bearing in mind the crude behavior of American schoolchildren—I still was under the impression that whatever went on among those brash brats, went on at a later age, and in a different environment. Therefore (to retrieve the thread of this explanation) the moralist in me by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what twelve-year-old girls should be. The child therapist in me (a fake, as most of them are—but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the “latency” period of girlhood. Finally, the sensualist in me (a great and insane monster) had no objection to some depravity in his prey. But somewhere behind the raging bliss, bewildered shadows conferred—and not to have heeded them, this is what I regret! Human beings, attend! I should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel, and that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal. I should have known (by the signs made to me by something in Lolita—the real child Lolita or some haggard angel behind her back) that nothing but pain and horror would result from the expected rapture. Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  If the Humbert-Quilty doubling is a conscious parody of “William Wilson” (1839), it is with good reason, for Poe’s story is unusual among Doppelgänger tales in that it presents a reversal of the conventional situation: the weak and evil self is the main character, pursued by the moral self, whom he kills. Nabokov goes further and with one vertiginous sweep stands the convention on its head: in terms of the nineteenth-century Double tale, it should not even be necessary to kill Quilty and what he represents, for Humbert has already declared his love for Lolita before he goes to Quilty’s Pavor Manor, and, in asking the no longer nymphic Lolita to go away with him, he has transcended his obsession. Although Humbert’s unqualified expression of “guilt” comes at the end of the novel, in the chronology of events it too occurs before he kills Quilty. As a “symbolic” act, the killing is gratuitous; the parodic design is complete.

• From Escape (2007)

  “That’s not news,” I said. “Everyone knows about her.” “No, that’s not the adultery he was talking about,” Tammy said. “She committed adultery three times. Twice with her music teacher and then once when she refused to have sex with Uncle Rulon.” In the FLDS, refusing to have sex with one’s husband was considered to be adultery—as was pleasuring oneself. The conversation seemed to be headed in another direction. I looked at her blankly, not sure what she meant. “Uncle Rulon said that if a woman refuses to have sex with her husband she has committed the sin of alienation of affections. This is committing adultery in her heart, which is a sin unto death—as much as having an affair with a man other than her husband.” Now I got it. Tammy knew I wasn’t having sex with Merril. If she knew, all of Merril’s daughters married to Uncle Rulon knew, too. Guilty as charged. I had now committed a sin unto death, according to the FLDS, by refusing to have sex with Merril. Forgiveness was impossible. What wasn’t clear was why Tammy was telling me this. A few weeks later I went by the kitchen when Barbara and Tammy were talking. I heard Barbara say my name and then saw her shaking her head. “A woman who thinks she needs a relationship with her husband is a worldly tradition and it’s something she needs to give up.” I think they assumed the reason I stopped having sex with Merril was because we had no other connectedness. He never acted like a husband to me. They thought actually feeling something for the husband you slept with was one of those “worldly traditions” that needed to be banished. Merril called me from his office a few days later. “Carolee, how are you doing?” I said I was fine. He went on to tell me the school was desperate for teachers and it would be fine with him if I went back. He’d told them I’d go over and meet with them that day. “What do you think of that?” I said no. No, I did not want to teach. No was not a word I had ever said to Merril Jessop before. I had refused to have sex and done things my own way, but I had never uttered that one-syllable word to him. How much rebellion there was in simply one consonant and one vowel? There was silence on the other end of the phone. I thought that if Merril wanted me to teach maybe he should have protected my charter school. “Do you want me to embarrass you by telling Alvin that you are refusing to do what your husband has asked?” I didn’t respond. Alvin was the principal who had worked so hard with me to make the charter school a reality. I didn’t care what Alvin or anyone else thought. I was finished with Merril and his stupid games of intimidation.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I can swear that not even one volt of desire passed through me. I did my job; I simulated excitement. But I was scandalized when Mr. Beattie asked me to lick the bright red head, to roll my tongue around the head of his penis. I’d forgotten that this act was not as purely symbolic for him as it was for me. I remembered that he considered all this to be pleasure, as Herod thought Salome’s dance was fun until he heard what she wanted as a reward. At last it was over. Mr. Beattie told me to go on up to the dining hall for supper. He’d follow me in a few moments. He didn’t think we should be seen together, just in case. Sometimes I think I seduced and betrayed Mr. Beattie because neither one action nor the other alone but the complete cycle allowed me to have sex with a man and then to disown him and it; this sequence was the ideal formulation of my impossible desire to love a man but not to be a homosexual. Sometimes I think I liked bringing pleasure to a heterosexual man (for after all I’d dreamed of being my father’s lover) at the same time I was able to punish him for not loving me. My German teacher and Mr. Pouchet had not loved me. Tommy had not loved me. My dad had not loved me. Beattie was a friend of sorts, or at least an accomplice, but he was also a stand-in for all other adults, those swaggering, lazy, cruel masters of ours (how refreshing it was that at Eton the teachers were actually called masters). I who had so little power—whose triumphs had all been the minor victories of children and women, that is, merely verbal victories of irony and attitude—I had at last drunk deep from the adult fountain of sex. I wiped my mouth with the back of an adult hand, smiled and walked up to the dining hall humming a little tune. AFTERWORD Edmund White When A Boy’s Own Story was published in 1982, the attention it received took me completely by surprise. Though people often refer to it as my “first” novel, it was in fact my third novel and fifth book to come out and I was already forty-two years old. I’d worked in publishing for twenty years and had also written many reviews and been widely reviewed—I thought I was an old hand. But nothing had prepared me for the furor that greeted A Boy’s Own Story in England and America (and later in Holland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Poland, China, Japan, and Israel).

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Locked in guilt even when you had no cause to feel guilty. After confession and fasting, came the Sunday-morning purification. Communion! You knelt to receive the wafer that was the precious body of Christ. It was all over so quickly, especially since there had been so much agony in confession and fasting! And you knew that soon, too soon, you'd be huddled kneeling guiltily in the darkness again before that mysterious little screened window of the confessional and addressing the faceless presence: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Then you'll grow up feeling outraged and betrayed because there's no substitute for salvation. The interviewer asks me about a section in my book The Fourth Angel in which a teenage girl says that “to survive you've got to learn not to feel, even if you have to teach yourself.” “To what extent,” he asks me, “do you feel you have had to do this in your own life to survive?” Yes, on the streets I disguise my feelings, I play distant, tough, a role which attracts and alienates at the same time—as defensive, I suppose, as it is arrogant. I keep my two “selves” apart—the writer and the sexhunter; confusing when the boundaries meld. Like recently in Griffith Park when a man in the arena told me someone had written a book about me—called Numbers. A few days later he brought me a copy of my book, not knowing I had written it. He inscribed it: “To Johnny Rio—…” My character. Unfortunately, when he discovered subsequently who I was, he felt betrayed…. Oh, yes, and bodybuilding, coating myself with muscles, is a similar defense. Now the interviewer evokes the hideous monster: “Do you think this is something you can continue to develop as you grow older, into middle age and old age?” I answer staunchly: “I'll get better.” I say: “I think narcissism can be very healthy. Love of oneself, of one's body, is beautiful.” Yet what a commentary—and hangover from stifling religions—that we consider “humility” a virtue, and “vanity” a sin. With so much constantly putting us down—life by its very niggardly nature feeding us crumbs—why should we additionally put ourselves down, accept crumbs as our due? Why should we be commended for our humility when we uphold we're dreadful and not worthy of praise, and be condemned for our vanity when, we uphold that we are worthy of attention? And why two standards? Why should the intellectual manifestations-books, paintings, the other “art” forms—be acceptably exhibited, put out for display, but not the body? I spend hours, days, months, years on a book. I want it to be accepted, loved, admired, praised, sought. Why is my body different? I spend hours on it too.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  That’s damned good.” … when I stood Adam-naked before a federal law and all its stinging star s “Oh, grand stuff!” … Because you took advantage of a sin when I was helpless moulting moist and tender hoping for the best dreaming of marriage in a mountain state aye of a litter of Lolitas… “Didn’t get that.” Because you took advantage of my inner essential innocence because you cheated me— “A little repetitious, what? Where was I?” Because you cheated me of my redemption because you took her at the age when lads play with erector sets “Getting smutty, eh?” a little downy girl still wearing poppies still eating popcorn in the colored gloam where tawny Indians took paid croppers because you stole her from her wax-browed and dignified protector spitting into his heavy-lidded eye ripping his flavid toga and at dawn leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort the awfulness of love and violets remorse despair while you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away because of all you did because of all I did not you have to die “Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as I am concerned.” He folded and handed it back to me . I asked him if he had anything serious to say before dying. The automatic was again ready for use on the person. He looked at it and heaved a big sigh. “Now look here, Mac,” he said. “You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing farce is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything—sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre , sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere—is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégée to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  As a little boy I’d thought of our house (the old Tudor one, not this new Norman castle) as the place God had meant us to own, but now I knew in a vague way that its seclusion and ease had been artificial and that it had strenuously excluded the city at the same time we depended on the city for food, money, comfort, help, even pleasure. The black maids were the representatives of the city I’d grown up among. I’d never wanted anything from them—nothing except their love. To win it, or at least to ward off their silent, sighing resentment, I’d learned how to make my own bed and cook my own breakfast. But nothing I could do seemed to make up to them for the terrible loss they’d endured. In my father’s office I worked an Addressograph machine (then something of a novelty) with Alice, a woman of forty who, like a restless sleeper tangled in sheets, tossed about all day in her fantasies. She was a chubby but pert woman who wore pearls to cover the pale line across her neck, the scar from some sort of surgical intervention. It was a very thin line, but she could never trust her disguise and ran to the mirror in the ladies’ room six or seven times a day to reevaluate the effect. The rest of her energy went into elaborating her fantasies. There was a man on the bus every morning who always stationed himself opposite her and arrogantly undressed her with his dark eyes. Upstairs from her apartment another man lurked, growling with desire, his ear pressed to the floor as he listened through an inverted glass for the glissando of a silk slip she might be stepping out of. “Should I put another lock on my door?” she’d ask. Later she’d ask with wide-eyed sweetness, “Should I invite him down for a cup of coffee?” I advised her not to; he might be dangerous. The voraciousness of her need for men made me act younger than usual; around her I took refuge in being a boy, not a man. Her speculations would cause her to sigh, drink water and return to the mirror. My stepmother said she considered this woman to be a “ninny.” My family and their friends almost never characterized people we actually knew, certainly not dismissively. I felt a gleeful shame in thinking of my colleague as a “ninny”—sometimes I’d laugh out loud when the word popped into my head. I found it both exciting and alarming to feel superior to a grown-up.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It’s a disservice to let children go on thinking the world can be something it cannot. Her parents hadn’t let her think that sort of thing for long—that life could be what she wanted it to be, that all she needed was to try. “Sylvie,” the boy says with his cheeks between his hands. “Hungry.” “Is that a whole thought?” she asks, and he frowns, folds his arms across his chest. “Hungry.” “Five more minutes.” The boy licks his lips until his whole mouth is wet and bubbly with spit. Booger eater, she thinks. The girl cuts her eyes at him. “Sylvie. Hungry,” the boy says again. The fries crackle and hiss on the sheet pan. Sylvia wedges them free instead of letting them cool and transfers them to a plate that she leaves at the center of the table. They sit in a steaming mound flecked with coarse sea salt and red-pepper flakes. She hoists herself up onto the counter and watches the twins watch the fries. The boy licks his lips again. He is first, of course he is. Boys are greedy, always taking. But the world will make a mess of this boy. He’s all nerve and skin. Nothing between him and the outside. The food burns his fingers, and he drops the fries onto the table. He tries again, blows on one of the fries. Sylvia can see his mouth watering. He makes little chewing motions. Oh, he wants it bad. Like his father. Scratching at her bedroom door these last few nights. She has fewer reasons to say no, and the last time that she let him go down on her, he had seemed so grateful that Sylvia had only felt a little guilty and a little selfish. Impossible not to see the resemblance between their two wants. Sylvia tucks her knees against her chest and watches as he tries and fails, tries and fails, burns his mouth and his tongue. But he keeps trying. Eventually, he gets it in his mouth and keeps it there, chewing it into white mush. He smiles at her broadly, shows his food. “Good!” he says, as if approving of her. “Good! Like!” The girl, because she is smart, stabs a fry through with a crayon and blows on it. Then she shoves the whole thing into her mouth, crayon and all. She gulps it down. Good for you . • • • Their lunch doesn’t take long, and then Sylvia puts them down for a nap. She takes a tall glass of cold water to the back patio, where she sometimes smokes at night and sometimes drinks the father’s beer with the mother while they talk about the twins, about Sylvia’s life, about the easiness of youth and no attachments. It’s not a conversation, not really.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  What’s to say?” “If you have something you want me to say, then I’d like to hear it.” “Forget it.” “No, not forget it. Say it. Say words, Hartjes. Words.” Hartjes leaned back. The fire on the stove spat as moisture from the skin of the pot evaporated or dropped into the flame. The blue veil of night had passed and now it was dim in the kitchen, so that the only light was from the stove. Simon reached for the switch on the other side of the doorway. “No, it’s fine.” “I don’t know what people say in moments like this—you didn’t love her, did you?” “No, I guess not, probably not,” he said. When Hartjes was ten, he’d gotten himself stung by seven wasps at his aunt Lora Anne’s house, and his mother had said, “That’s what faggots get.” It was a story he had learned to tell white people with some degree of exaggerated gravity, and it had paid for his college, because white people had a vast hunger for the calamities of others. When he told the story at parties, he took his time: His mother and the other adults had been reading and rereading with increasing levels of despair and also hysteria a suicide note found in the hand of Lora Anne’s youngest son, an aspiring rapper and barber, who had shot himself once through the temple on the banks of the creek because he had been diagnosed with, among other rumored things, pancreatic cancer. Lora Anne was a preacher and drove miles upon miles to preach in nondenominational churches. Hartjes and his eleven cousins had been running around the rusty swing set, trying to coax it back into life, when out the wasps had come, and Hartjes, being slower and clumsier, had tripped and made himself an easy target. They’d stung him and he’d gone screaming into the house, and his mother had said it. “Then what am I supposed to say? I’m sorry?” Simon asked. “I just didn’t want you thinking I had lied about it, that’s all. I didn’t want you thinking it was a joke or that I’d made it up just to have something to say. I just wanted you to know that. I wasn’t complaining.” Hartjes drank the water he had been nursing, which was lukewarm now and tasted faintly of metal from the pipes. Simon hummed. He stirred the stew, which smelled to Hartjes like tomatoes and pepper, with the musky scent of venison. When Hartjes let his chair rock back and forth, balancing himself with the wide set of his feet, it sounded like a swinging door. His hunger felt distant, like it belonged to someone else. Sweat collected against his forehead, and he wiped at it. The skin at the lower part of his spine was hot and dry. His eyes were stinging. Near the back door, Simon had put three red clay pots on a low bench.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It felt like he was racking up a debt he wouldn’t be able to repay. Yes, she’d said she knew about Charles, but about what did she know? Did she know the whole of it? About this morning, too? The more he let her touch him, be kind to him, the worse it would be when she found out everything. The harder it would be to salvage anything like friendship. “I can afford a cup of coffee at least,” she said. Lionel could feel the small mound of his wallet in his pocket. “Next time’s on you.” “Is it always so busy?” Lionel asked. Overhead, Christmas music was playing. It was only November. “Very funny.” Sophie said. “It’s our slow season, I guess. The calm before the storm.” “Finals.” “Bingo. You must get busy, too, around then,” she said. “I don’t really know. It’s my first finals season as a proctor,” Lionel said. The coffee burned his tongue. “You proctored today, right? What kind of test? Can you say?” She leaned forward with her elbows on the table. Her eyes seemed lit with real curiosity. “History,” Lionel said. She had a mole on her neck, black as a pupil. She had bright blue eyes. She had painted her fingernails pale matte pink. The tips of her fingers were cracking and white. She caught him looking at her hands. “If I don’t paint them, I chew,” she said a little self-consciously. She pulled her hands away and put them behind her knees. She’d put her feet up on the chair again. “You were saying . . . the history test?” “Oh, yeah. There was this one kid who was really up my ass about security . He acted like I was spying on his data or something. They all have to write their student ID numbers down to sign in. As protocol, I guess.” Sophie nodded like it made all the sense in the world, and Lionel wasn’t sure if she was nodding because she thought the student had a point or if she agreed he’d made too much of it. “But after that, it was fine. I just had to write the words ‘French Absolutism’ on the board and wait until they were done.” “Wow. What if they have questions?” “I think that’s why they don’t have the history TAs do it? Because they might give them information they’re not supposed to have? They pick a total idiot like me.” She gave him a look. “Weren’t you, like, doing NASA research as a child or something? You’re not an idiot.” “No, that’s not me. I’d make a terrible engineer,” Lionel said too seriously. “I did go to math camp, though. Guilty by association.” “ Math camp? That’s not just a movie trope?” Sophie made a show of leaning forward, putting her chin on her palms. “Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I went for, like, twelve years. The last as a counselor.” “Holy shit.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  But there is also the hellish image of those girls in that room, trapped with them, wanting nothing but to go home, to be anywhere but there. “I don’t want anything.” “Then do mine,” he says, pushing his hips forward. “Come on, it’s almost there anyway.” “No,” Milton says. “Come on.” Abe takes Milton’s hand and puts it on his dick, and after a moment, Milton does it, gives in, takes Abe into his hand, and strokes him until he comes quietly, his face nestled in the crook of Milton’s neck. • • • Tate and Nolan slide down the hill and find them sitting on the ground. “Got the shit,” Nolan says. Milton can barely look at him. Nolan sits on a rock next to him, and Milton tries not to breathe because he cannot trust himself not to turn the air into words. Nolan rolls a joint and hands it to Milton. “Your birthday, you start.” Milton lights up first, even though he can still feel the joint from earlier in the day. He takes a long inhale. He hands the joint off to Nolan, holds the smoke inside, lets it build. Then he lets it glide out, slow and easy. “What were you and Edie talking about?” Nolan asks. “She wished me a happy birthday,” he says. “Is that all?” “Yeah—how do you know her?” “I don’t. Not really. I know her sister better,” Nolan says, and there’s a not a crack in his voice or his face, nothing to suggest anything more than a passing acquaintance. Abe chokes on the joint. Nolan shrugs casually. He takes a hit off the joint. The red bead of its lit end is angry with heat, like a sore. “How do you know her sister?” Milton asks, watching Nolan breathe smoke out into the air through his mouth and nose, his eyes closed, as if in a state of ecstasy. The calm that comes with the edge of pleasure after pain has given way to something sweeter. Abe takes the joint from Nolan, and there’s a pause, a silence rising out of the smoke. “How do you know her sister?” Milton repeats, and this time Nolan opens his eyes and pins Milton with a sharp, direct look. There’s confusion in his gaze, suspicion, annoyance. “Why do you want to know so bad?” “I don’t.” “Is that so?” “It is.” “Ladies,” Abe cuts across them, making a chopping motion with his hand. He’s got the joint pinched to the corner of his mouth. “Let’s not get carried away here.” “Who’s getting carried away?” Nolan says. “Okay, okay,” Tate says, and he makes to snatch the joint from Abe’s mouth, but Abe swats him hard across the face, so hard that there’s no way it’s a joke, there can be no way back from it. Tate puts his palm to his cheek, slides it down to his lip, where there’s already blood.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  He could have had a terrible temper or criticized everything she did. Or maybe she loved to dance and he wouldn’t even try. Maybe he drank. Maybe she was in love with someone else. Miri wished she could talk to Kathleen and find out the truth. —SHE TRIED to convince Irene to invite Mason to dinner on Valentine’s Day. “He’s a hero. Everybody says so. Just ask Uncle Henry.” “He was very brave,” Rusty said, backing up Miri, “rushing into a burning plane and saving the stewardess.” Miri said, “She’s not the only one he saved.” “A hero is always welcome at my table,” Irene said. Miri threw her arms around Irene. “What?” Irene asked. “Thank you,” Miri said. “I’m not inviting him as your boyfriend,” Irene told her. “So don’t go getting any ideas. I’m saying it would be a shonda not to include him.” “Relax, Mama,” Rusty said. “They’re just kids.” “I remember when I thought you were just a kid, Naomi.” Irene used Rusty’s real name only when she was dead serious. And it always shut Rusty up. She turned and walked out of the kitchen. Miri felt bad for Rusty that night and went to her room, where she sat on the edge of the bed and held Rusty’s hand. No words were necessary. They both knew what Irene meant even if she hadn’t spelled it out, as if what happened with Mike Monsky was Rusty’s fault. Well, in a way Miri supposed it was. She’d let Mike Monsky trick her into going all the way, hadn’t she? Getting into that Nash with him, a car where the seat actually turned into a bed. She would never go out with a boy who drove a Nash. No boy was going to trick her into doing anything she didn’t want to do. Which made her think, maybe Rusty wanted to do it. Maybe he didn’t have to trick her at all. She’d learned about the Nash a few years ago when Rusty was teasing Henry about his car. They thought she was asleep. “It’s so old,” Rusty had said. “And that rumble seat! You can’t make love in a rumble seat.” “I suppose you think I should get a Nash,” Henry said. “One with a seat that turns into a bed.” At which point Rusty threw her shoe at Henry. But Henry ducked and laughed. “I will never get into another Nash as long as I live,” Rusty said. “And neither will my daughter.” Miri kissed Rusty goodnight, something she didn’t automatically do these days. Rusty gave her such an appreciative look she vowed to be kinder to her mother. On her way out of Rusty’s room, Miri spied part of a white box tied with a red ribbon, sticking out from under Rusty’s bed. Could it be a gift from Longy? That would be disgusting! Or from Natalie’s cousin Tewky? Even worse. Or wait, maybe it was for her.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He shrugged uneasily at her, signed the form saying that he’d done what he’d been asked, and left. The look, he suspected, was because he’d had to cancel the last several proctoring appointments with the history department when he had been in the hospital. He could still hear her voice, scratchy on the phone, when he called to say he wouldn’t be able to make it. “Your generation is killing this nation with your carelessness,” she’d said, and hung up on him before he could respond. He’d stood in the reception area of the psychiatric care facility, staring at his reflection in his phone screen, thinking, well, maybe that was true, maybe they were killing the country and killing the world, but they were also killing themselves, and what would it list on his death certificate as cause of death, if not carelessness, misadventure. It was a serious thing to kill a world. He’d stood there with the clipboard of paperwork in his hand, had only called her because the act of lifting the clipboard to sign his name had brought to mind the fact that at that moment he was supposed to be somewhere else, on campus, giving an exam instead of admitting himself. But she didn’t care about that, and he didn’t blame her. He’d caused a mess. She was entitled to her feelings. Lionel knew the café where Sophie worked—he avoided it because it was popular with undergraduates. It was crowded, noisy, the last place you could get any work done or be alone with your thoughts. But when he arrived via the seldom-used entrance from the adjoining library, he was surprised to find it empty except for Sophie and another barista. Sophie sat at a table near the window, looking out. Lionel wondered if she was looking for him—the window faced onto the quad and the usual entrance—and the thought touched him. But when the door shut behind him, she looked up and frowned in mock surprise. “You have your tricks,” she said. “Some.” At her table, he unwound his scarf and unzipped his jacket. She reached out and stuck her finger through a hole in the collar of his shirt. “What happened there?” she said. Lionel pulled his chin back and looked down as she traced the hole, then flattened the collar with a little pat. “There we go.” “Oh, thanks.” “Do you want something? To eat, to drink?” She had gotten up, rested her knuckles against her hip. She was wearing black tights and a sweater the color of weak tea. Lionel found it a little hard to make eye contact with her. He pressed his hands to his cheeks. “Oh, I’m fine. Well. Yes. A coffee,” Lionel said, and when she returned a few minutes later with the coffee in a small carafe, he asked, “How much do I owe you?” She slapped his arm. She had already touched him twice.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Lionel knew the café where Sophie worked—he avoided it because it was popular with undergraduates. It was crowded, noisy, the last place you could get any work done or be alone with your thoughts. But when he arrived via the seldom-used entrance from the adjoining library, he was surprised to find it empty except for Sophie and another barista. Sophie sat at a table near the window, looking out. Lionel wondered if she was looking for him—the window faced onto the quad and the usual entrance—and the thought touched him. But when the door shut behind him, she looked up and frowned in mock surprise. “You have your tricks,” she said. “Some.” At her table, he unwound his scarf and unzipped his jacket. She reached out and stuck her finger through a hole in the collar of his shirt. “What happened there?” she said. Lionel pulled his chin back and looked down as she traced the hole, then flattened the collar with a little pat. “There we go.” “Oh, thanks.” “Do you want something? To eat, to drink?” She had gotten up, rested her knuckles against her hip. She was wearing black tights and a sweater the color of weak tea. Lionel found it a little hard to make eye contact with her. He pressed his hands to his cheeks. “Oh, I’m fine. Well. Yes. A coffee,” Lionel said, and when she returned a few minutes later with the coffee in a small carafe, he asked, “How much do I owe you?” She slapped his arm. She had already touched him twice. It felt like he was racking up a debt he wouldn’t be able to repay. Yes, she’d said she knew about Charles, but about what did she know? Did she know the whole of it? About this morning, too? The more he let her touch him, be kind to him, the worse it would be when she found out everything. The harder it would be to salvage anything like friendship. “I can afford a cup of coffee at least,” she said. Lionel could feel the small mound of his wallet in his pocket. “Next time’s on you.” “Is it always so busy?” Lionel asked. Overhead, Christmas music was playing. It was only November. “Very funny.” Sophie said. “It’s our slow season, I guess. The calm before the storm.” “Finals.” “Bingo. You must get busy, too, around then,” she said. “I don’t really know. It’s my first finals season as a proctor,” Lionel said. The coffee burned his tongue. “You proctored today, right? What kind of test? Can you say?” She leaned forward with her elbows on the table. Her eyes seemed lit with real curiosity. “History,” Lionel said. She had a mole on her neck, black as a pupil. She had bright blue eyes. She had painted her fingernails pale matte pink. The tips of her fingers were cracking and white. She caught him looking at her hands.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  They had a dog, Goldie, but she died.” “Does that make Mrs. Stein a better mother than me?” “What? No.” This wasn’t going well. “Mrs. Stein probably doesn’t go to business,” Rusty said. “She doesn’t.” “You see?” Sometimes no matter what Miri said or didn’t say, Rusty acted as if it reflected on her as a mother. She should have told Rusty that Mrs. Stein would like to work. That she’d like to be a librarian or a clerk at a bookstore. Instead she wound up saying what she thought Rusty wanted to hear. “You’re the best mother.” “You’re just saying that so you can keep an expensive bracelet she had no right to give you.” “I don’t care about the bracelet.” “Good. Then give it back. It’s inappropriate for a stranger to give you such an extravagant gift.” “She’s not exactly a stranger,” Miri muttered under her breath as Rusty walked away with the bracelet. Miri chased her down the hall. “Mom…” “What?” “You took the bracelet.” Rusty handed it to Miri. The next day after school she returned the bracelet. She didn’t want to offend Mrs. Stein. But as soon as she began, “My mother doesn’t think…” Mrs. Stein gave her a kind smile, a knowing smile, and took the box. “Maybe I will give it to my daughter, after all.” “I’m sure she’d like it.” “She’s hard to please.” “Even so.” “Thank you, Miri.” There. She’d done what she had to do. She would tell Rusty she’d returned the bracelet and she hoped that would satisfy her. Rusty could be moody but her bad moods rarely lasted. —BEFORE THE FAMILY sat down to Miri’s birthday dinner, Rusty gave her a small box wrapped in blue paper and tied with a white ribbon. “Happy birthday, honey.” Inside was a gold and garnet bracelet, not exactly the same as Mrs. Stein’s, but close enough. “It’s beautiful,” Miri said, slipping it onto her wrist. “Now you see why…” Rusty began. Miri hugged her mother. “I’m sorry.” “There’s no need to be sorry,” Rusty told her, smoothing her hair. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” Miri would never know if Rusty had already bought her the bracelet when she showed her the one from Mrs. Stein, or if she went out and bought it that day. “It looks really pretty, doesn’t it?” She held up her arm for Rusty to admire. Rusty smiled at her. “It does. It’s delicate enough to go with anything.” Miri resisted the urge to laugh. At least Rusty hadn’t called her delicate. —LATER THAT NIGHT, Mason stopped by with a birthday present for Miri. After Rusty greeted him, she went into her room, closing the door behind her, so the two of them could have the living room to themselves. “Fifteen minutes,” Rusty called. “Four feet on the floor at all times.” They couldn’t help laughing over that rule, and when they did, Rusty laughed, too.