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 My Secret Garden (1973)

  Sometimes when my husband is going down on me I imagine that this woman, whom I knew long ago but had no physical relationship with, begs me to let her eat me. I imagine she does it whenever I wish, which is often. This increases my ability to have giant orgasms. Then, after orgasm my fantasy completely dissolves until next time. It’s not that my husband doesn’t perform well—he’s great—but thinking of her makes it even greater. Except later I sometimes feel like I’m cheating him. Now I remember an even earlier fantasy… I’d almost forgotten about it. When I was six or seven I can remember masturbating and imagining my father inserting the handle of a large screwdriver inside me and masturbating me. There never was any other contact but this. It’s strange because I’d never experienced being penetrated yet, and my father and I have never gotten along at all. I had that one for a couple of years. I think you’re going to find that all men are really going to get upset about this book of yours. So many of them still think that women are for their enjoyment only. Some won’t admit that women (if handled properly) have strong sexual desires and feelings, just as they do. Most men that I ran into before marriage didn’t even know what foreplay was. If it becomes more open and publicly known that foreplay is usually necessary to get the ball rolling for the woman, I’ll bet there’ll be a lot more sexually satisfied women than there are right now. I had sex with thirty or so men before my husband and never had an orgasm; I always got the ones who jumped on, then jumped right off and took me home, and of course I told them they were fantastic lovers and all, but I felt nothing but frustration. I told you that my husband has done a great deal to make me feel less guilty about sex, about what we really do, which is anything that gives us pleasure. I don’t know why I feel so hesitant to tell him about my fantasies; I don’t know why I feel so guilty about having them. I don’t always fantasize while we are having sex. Just as often my husband is enough. But other times, even when he has his fingers as well as his penis in me and you’d think there was nothing else he could do to stimulate me, still I fantasize that I am being fucked by many different penises, that I am a nymphomaniac who can’t get enough of different men. I would like to feel easier about my thoughts. I already do just writing them down and hearing that I am not the only one in the world with these ideas. I sometimes think many women would be ashamed to admit they have any sexual feelings.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  PenelopeI wanted to contribute to your work, even though my sexual life is probably lacking and will add very little to your research. But even that fact alone will tell you something, and I do want to feel more in touch with the world, with other women. I say my own sexual life is lacking even though I don’t know what is normal or average. I am sure there is something more to sex than what I’ve felt. We’ve been married seven years, and our sexual life is no different now than it was when we were first married, except that there’s less of it. You would think, or hope, that as people lived together longer they would discover new and interesting things about one another that would help them to give one another more happiness in sex. But it’s only when I imagine that someone is performing cunnilingus on me, which my husband will not do, that sex becomes exciting, and I’ve always felt too guilty to discuss this with anyone. [Letter] MEN’S ANXIETYWomen waste so much time and emotion on guilt, meaningless guilt; fingers of shame imagined in isolation and ignorance. I sometimes think each woman goes through life secretly pursued by her own particular demon, representing her own particular brand of shame; a frenzy after her, not for anything real, but everything imagined. Shame and self-incrimination grow like mad in the dark. If nothing else, I hope this book helps women who fantasize to feel less guilty by letting them know that they aren’t alone… they aren’t the only people in the world with these odd, often unbidden thoughts or ideas; that thinking something “awful” doesn’t mean you are awful or really want something awful; and in the end you shouldn’t be found guilty for what you think. (No Virginia, thought police didn’t go out with the Nazis; they’re very much with us still.) But not all the guilt that surrounds the subject of female fantasy is imagined. The tension and anxiety the topic arouses in men is very real indeed, and a woman can’t help but pick up on it; if he feels the anxiety, she’s guilty. I can understand a man not wanting to hear about other men in his woman’s life—especially hearing that they are in her mind while he’s making love to her. I also understand why some women feel they want to tell their men everything—but can’t understand why they do. Telling all isn’t necessarily the way to overcome guilt feelings; sometimes it only spreads the anxiety. (Though I don’t think one can make a hard-and-fast rule about this; only you yourself, knowing the man, can decide how much you feel he really wants to know.) But more about sharing your fantasies—is it a good idea or not?—in another chapter.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Rose AnnMy husband has tried to get me to tell him about my sexual fantasies, but so far I have told him that I have none. It’s almost as though he knew there was something or someone, in addition to himself, that was exciting me… perhaps because of the cries and noises I make while he is making love to me. They are not just cries of pleasure, there are also the cries of pain that I feel in my fantasies. In fact, I wouldn’t know where to draw the line between the two. My fantasies occur whenever I am beginning to feel any real sexual arousal, and real pleasure. They don’t distract from the pleasure, but on the contrary, enhance it. I am sure it is very hard for anyone to understand this, and how can I possibly tell my husband, whom I love, that I am dreaming that the most atrocious things are being done to my body while he is being so loving to me? These fantasies or dreams usually begin with my body being stretched, one brutal man on each limb, pulling me in opposite directions, literally spreading me wide open so that some immensely huge penis—there is no one or nothing on the end of it—begins to enter me, stretching me, ripping me, my vagina, wide open as it pushes its way deeper into me. The men twist my arms painfully as well as pull them, and I can hear my bones breaking and cracking, while the sound of my skin, around my vagina, also rips audibly. I cry out in reality even as I cry out in my fantasy. But I love it, even though my intelligence and logic tell me that I am being ghoulish, that this is not a normal way to enjoy sex. And I do enjoy it. I hate what is happening to me in my fantasies, but it is inextricably involved with my very real pleasure. [Letter] AmandaI read your interesting letter and thought that I would like to write to you about my own experiences, which I hope are of assistance to you in your book. I am thirty-six years old, married with two children, and often indulge in fantasies, even during the day, as a relief from the pure boredom of my life. I do not remember when I first started fantasizing, but when I was very young I used to lie stretched out on my bed and dream that I was a princess who had been captured and who was waiting to be tortured, and this made me feel pleasurably aroused. Later, as I became more sophisticated and my thoughts developed, I imagined myself being racked, impaled, flogged, branded, and every other thing that you can think of, ending with vigorous and orgasmic masturbation. I masturbated frequently and, for that matter, still do, because, although my husband is the kindest man, he is the world’s worst lover.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie says to be careful: The Armenian woman’s husband is a soldier like Ba and shies easily, sometimes even eating the mirror when it shows him his face. The husband doesn’t like people watching him, so I always look at his left ear when he pays me in cash. When I mow their lawn, the husband hides under the sofa and says I’ll never find him. One weekend, the Armenian woman tells me not to come back. She says her husband is afraid of the monkey in the tree. He told her about it. He’s seen it many times. I say I’ve never seen any monkey. Describe it to me. Her husband says the monkey had a bald red face and a flat nose, hair thick as needles, a tail made of scissor blades. The monkey could climb high, all the way up to the ceiling of the sky, and sometimes it tried to thieve from the tree, pinching the leaves and pocketing the fruit in its cheek. The monkey had beady eyes and looked to be about breeding age. Her husband says the monkey is frightening him. I say I’m not afraid of any monkey, I’ll come anyway. I’ll help kill it. The Armenian lady says no, the monkey might bring fleas or babies, and that’s when I realize the monkey is me. _ Ma leaves the house early. Sunup: the sky bleeding where it’s given birth. The floor is dappled with blood from the earlier fight, when Jie had thrown a knife. It was aimed at Ma but found its destiny in me. The knife landed in the delta of my inner elbow. My blood was dynamic, leaping out in two directions, avoiding the walls. Earlier we’d been watching a TV broadcast about a serial killer back on the island. The man claimed to be a former emperor reincarnated into a mailman. He’d beheaded two girls with an axe, claiming they were his concubines from another life and were destined to join him in his death-palace. We reached the place in the footage where the bodies had to be blurred out. There was a head on the sidewalk, an adjacent stain or shadow, and a forensic scientist prodding the head with something like a long fork. Ma said that long ago, our tribe had been headhunters, and that maybe this man was mistaken: In his past life he was not an emperor but a man of our tribe, a hunter in the wrong time. Ma said her grandfather once showed her the head he’d stolen off another tribe’s boy, how it was bloodless like a radish. How one eye still blinked, even days after death, and she waved at it in case it was lonely. For weeks, the whole family fed the head, offered it wine. If the skull learned to love the family, the fields would grow. Jie said, Enough, I’m trying to listen, and we watched the beheaded girl’s mother get interviewed.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I wanted Ba to live with me, in a new city with my new husband. Ma said: Either leave him or take us both. I said I’d take them both: I’d let Ma beat your brother out of me if it meant Ba would get to witness the birth, bring the baby its first breath. That’s what I said, but I should have known that when I speak something, it’s no longer mine. It’s the air now, breathed in by everybody, exhaled as nothing. The week I moved out, Ma was in the kitchen rinsing Ba’s pants in the sink. She said if he shit himself again she’d feed him his own stain. I toweled between his butt cheeks. He hadn’t showered in months since Ma stopped helping him. I stood him over the sink, washed him everywhere below the waist. His penis looked like a boiled prawn. Ma took my hands off him. She said, If he can’t do it himself, he doesn’t deserve to be clean, and then she scrubbed my hands so raw they hurt to hold air and your brother inside me asked to leave. Your brother was the one who kicked my skin into a sky, a constellation of bruises on my belly; you were the one who didn’t move, who wanted to stay inside me, who kept your eyes closed for days, not yet committed to your body or this world, still waiting to see if you could be returned. And look now: You want me to go back. Ma said, Take us both or no one, and I chose no one, which means I chose myself. Daily, I see myself like I’m on TV: I leave LA in your father’s car. A rabbit jumps into the starving man’s fire and saves him and becomes the moon. But everyone always forgets the rabbit’s sacrifice means nothing. The starving man was not starving at all: He was not even a man. He was a god. Hunger was the weather he invented. The rabbit died for a fraudulent want. When I left, Ba was still standing over the sink. So still he might have been praying. Or waiting. In another life, another story, a daughter who is not me says: Both. I’ll take you both. She takes her Ma and Ba, replants them in another city, becomes a truce between trees. Memories ago, when you and your brother were asleep and your father was newly home from the mainland, I took the car and drove halfway down to LA before pulling into a motel. I thought I’d finally take Ba home, but then I remembered that my house is not mine, that your father’s money paid the bills and I didn’t even know what my ba could eat anymore, if I still knew how to make sugar-hearted dates the way he liked them, with so much syrup it sealed his jaw. The sign outside the motel said NO VACANCIES, but I asked for a room anyway.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  In truth, I stayed on the telephone those nights from an old fear: I didn’t want Mother to kill herself. By the time I’d landed in Boston at twenty-five, that phone line was the only umbilical cord that joined me to Mother. Daddy and I had long since faded from each other. My weird travels had first taken me from him. I’d started leaving home on short jaunts at fifteen—Houston, Dallas, Austin, Mexico—shopping for books mostly, or drugs. Mother puckered her mouth with worry hearing how I’d smoked opium at a surf contest on Padre Island. But I’d first filched Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from her knitting bag. And her curiosity about the drug ultimately leaked through: What was opium like? Together we conspired to lie to Daddy about my whereabouts, lies Daddy helped by not prying overmuch. I’d left his house for good at seventeen. I’d climbed into a camper truck with surfboards strapped on top and driven with a bunch of kids to California, where (before I managed to snag a job in a T-shirt factory) I lived in a car and ate whatever I could steal from local orchards or grocery-store Dumpsters. Such squalid facts never reached Daddy’s ears. When I landed back home, tanned, string-skinny, and eager for the comfort of the Minnesota college I’d talked into taking me, he liked pretending I’d never crossed over the state line. “How was the beach, Pokey?” he wanted to know. He took me to GI Surplus to buy me a winter parka. I hold a distinct picture of him picking through the rack of olive-drab coats with orange liners, each one sloped down on its hanger, as if shouldering in itself a burden. Daddy was a suspicious shopper. He peered extra close at the quilted stitching. He ran a lot of zippers up and down. The college was a private liberal-arts school that had ginned out a few left-wing presidential candidates. The specter of my coed dorm—one of the nation’s first—must have prompted Daddy that day into his one, veiled lecture on sex. Here’s how it went: “I reckon you know by now not to let any a them little boys mess with you, Pokey.” He was squinting down at a parka’s size tag while he spoke. It had Korean ideograms on it. I said I reckoned I did. “They mess with you, you call me.” He turned me around to measure the coat’s shoulders against mine. “I get on them like ugly on ape.” This concern from Daddy for my virtue, however casual, just added to the vague backwater of guilt I carried about him. I’d long since left the world where my virtue warranted defense, which is to say, Daddy’s world. So at the cash register in GI Surplus where Daddy shelled out $19.95 for the parka, I felt a flush of guilt. I said no to the suede mittens he wanted to throw in.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Longer next time, my father said. The longer you can hold it, the farther you’ll go. He twisted a kitchen towel into a rope, wet it in the sink, whipped us until it was dry. _ The night bruised its kneecap moon. My brother woke up and saw a white kite leaning on the wall beside the bed. My father had left it there for me, so that I’d wake and see it before light: the kite he’d packed and brought all the way from California. Maybe he thought it would remind me of when we flew together, or maybe he thought I’d mistake the wingspan of white paper for a ghost and leave sooner. When my brother saw the kite there, he tore it apart. He snapped the frame made of disposable chopsticks. Stop, please stop, I said, and ran forward to save what I could, which was nothing. I crouched on the carpeted floor and brushed the kite-confetti into a neat pile at my knees. Above me, my brother’s breath was backfiring, unable to leave his lungs. I asked my brother why, looking up at his shadow-battered face. My brother didn’t answer. He just said, Why did he bring that here? I wanted to tell him, Because he missed me and not you. Because he knows that I can fly, too. But instead, I bent and plucked paper from between the floorboards. I didn’t want my father to find the pieces and think it was me. Go back to bed, I said, but my brother just looked at me. The apartment was still black, but the sky outside was beginning to dull into a dime-colored day. Our father now stood in the bedroom doorway. He was relaxed, his hands loose at his sides, and I wanted to tell him we could go to the roof. We could saddle the sky with our kites. His eyes focused on the wall behind us. The bald spot where the kite had been. My father looked at me first, then at my brother. My brother, trembling now, backed into his own shadow. I spoke to wedge my words between them: I broke the kite. It was me. I reached into my pockets and made a fist around the pieces, brought them out into the light. The paper scattered from my hands, snowing between my fingers. I told my father I tore the kite up, that I was still upset that he wasn’t coming home and couldn’t bear to see anything his hands had made. My mother woke, stirring the sheets on the bed. She saw all three of us in the far corner of the room, my father putting his hands on my brother’s shoulders, telling him to kneel. Pick it up, he said, pointing to the pieces. My brother bent his knees halfway but stopped.

• From The Art of Memoir

  its most violent and grotesque and to tall tales from around the campfire, such as Mark Twain’s celebrated jumping-frog story where in order to win a bet the gambler Jim Smiley did “foller a straddle bug to Mexico.” Hyperbole often reflects a culture’s excesses in savagery and appetite, and at one point, Crews quips, “Anything worth doing is worth over-doing.” (The unspoken battle cry of many an alcoholic such as myself.) Since anybody’s handling of the truth derives from her nature, and I know nobody’s nature so well as my own, I feel obliged to detail my own practice, though I do so with no more authority than any other memoirist. Though, like Crews, I quote wild tales and rumors from my cracker past, I just have zero talent for making stuff up. While I adore the short story form, any time I tried penning one myself, everybody was either dead by page two, or morphed back into the person they’d actually evolved from in memory. Stuck in an airport with an uncharged reading device, I’ll pop for crap nonfiction before a crap novel. Early on, I was lied to—often and with conviction—kicked off by two phrases: “I’m not drunk” (most always a lie) and “Oh, don’t worry; everything’s fine,” which was true just often enough to mess with my head. In high school, both the fake notes my sister forged to skip school and her excuses for breaking dates with boys held the seeds of unwritten novels, and one of the sayings that still graces her holiday table would make a worthy family crest: “A good lie well told and stuck to is often better than the truth.” All this quite literally made me crazy. I grew up not trusting my perceptions, and buying Freud’s theory that the truth would free me, I set out on a lifelong quest to figure out what the hell happened in my childhood. While my mother threatened suicide when I initially tried to probe her past, by my mid-twenties, she gave in. Unearthing the truth led to radical healing in my otherwise fractured clan, and she died sober and much loved. For me, making stuff up—as I first did in trying to tell my story in novel form five years before I embraced memoir—put me off the

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Calvin had defects which were partly the shadow of his virtues. He was passionate, prone to anger, censorious, impatient of contradiction, intolerant towards Romanists and heretics, somewhat austere and morose, and not without a trace of vindictiveness. He confessed in a letter to Bucer, and on his death-bed, that he found it difficult to tame "the wild beast of his wrath," and he humbly asked forgiveness for his weakness. He thanked the senators for their patience with his often "excessive vehemence." His intolerance sprang from the intensity of his convictions and his zeal for the truth. It unfortunately culminated in the tragedy of Servetus, which must be deplored and condemned, although justified by the laws and the public opinion in his age. Tolerance is a modern virtue. Calvin used frequently contemptuous and uncharitable language against his opponents in his polemical writings, which cannot be defended, but he never condescended to coarse and vulgar abuse, like so many of his contemporaries.1271 He has often been charged with coldness and want of domestic and social affection, but very unjustly. The chapter on his marriage and home life, and his letters on the death of his wife and only child show the contrary.1272 The charge is a mistaken inference from his gloomy doctrine of eternal reprobation; but this was repulsive to his own feelings, else he would not have called it "a horrible decree." Experience teaches that even at this day the severest Calvinism is not seldom found connected with a sweet and amiable Christian temper. He was grave, dignified, and reserved, and kept strangers at a respectful distance; but he was, as Beza observes, cheerful in society and tolerant of those vices which spring from the natural infirmity of men. He treated his friends as his equals, with courtesy and manly frankness, but also with affectionate kindness. And they all bear testimony to this fact, and were as true and devoted to him as he was to them. The French martyrs wrote to him letters of gratitude for having fortified them to endure prison and torture with patience and resignation.1273 "He obtained," says Guizot, "the devoted affection of the best men and the esteem of all, without ever seeking to please them." "He possessed," says Tweedie, "the secret and inexplicable power of binding men to him by ties that nothing but sin or death could sever. They treasured up every word that dropped from his lips."

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  See D’artigny in Nouveaux Memoires d’histoire, etc.; Mosheim’s Neue Nachrichten, etc.; and Calvin’s Opera, VIII. 833–856. Shortly after the publication of the "Restitution," the fact was made known to the Roman Catholic authorities at Lyons through Guillaume Trie, a native of Lyons and a convert from Romanism, residing at that time in Geneva. He corresponded with a cousin at Lyons, by the name of Arneys, a zealous Romanist, who tried to reconvert him to his religion, and reproached the Church of Geneva with the want of discipline. On the 26th of February, 1553, he wrote to Arneys that in Geneva vice and blasphemy were punished, while in France a dangerous heretic was tolerated, who deserved to be burned by Roman Catholics as well as Protestants, who blasphemed the holy Trinity, called Jesus Christ an idol, and the baptism of infants a diabolic invention. He gave his name as Michael Servetus, who called himself at present Villeneuve, a practising physician at Vienne. In confirmation he sent the first leaf of the "Restitution," and named the printer Balthasar Arnoullet at Vienne.1152 This letter, and two others of Trie which followed, look very much as if they had been dictated or inspired by Calvin. Servetus held him responsible.1153 But Calvin denied the imputation as a calumny.1154 At the same time he speaks rather lightly of it, and thinks that it would not have been dishonorable to denounce so dangerous a heretic to the proper authorities. He also frankly acknowledges that he caused his arrest at Geneva.1155 He could see no material difference in principle between doing the same thing, indirectly, at Vienne and, directly, at Geneva. He simply denies that he was the originator of the papal trial and of the letter of Trie; but he does not deny that he furnished material for evidence, which was quite well known and publicly made use of in the trial where Servetus’s letters to Calvin are mentioned as pieces justificatives. There can be no doubt that Trie, who describes himself as a comparatively unlettered man, got his information about Servetus and his book from Calvin, or his colleagues, either directly from conversation, or from pulpit denunciations. We must acquit Calvin of direct agency, but we cannot free him of indirect agency in this denunciation.1156 Calvin’s indirect agency, in the first, and his direct agency in the second arrest of Servetus admit of no proper justification, and are due to an excess of zeal for orthodoxy. Arneys conveyed this information to the Roman Catholic authorities. The matter was brought to the knowledge of Cardinal Tournon, at that time archbishop of Lyons, a cruel persecutor of the Protestants, and Matthias Ory, a regularly trained inquisitor of the Roman see for the kingdom of France. They at once instituted judicial proceedings.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I have spoken to my lover about my lesbian fantasies. He knows I feel guilty about them. He has tried to enter into them by talking to me during sex, telling me that he is a woman, and so on. This does excite me to an extent, but I’m not sure if he does it for me or for homosexual feelings of his own, although he says he has none. He does like me to lie on top of him (my back to his chest) so that he can feel my breasts. From things he says, I think he wishes they were his. It’s an exciting thought to me and I don’t understand why he won’t admit to the slightest interest in homosexuality—after all, I have. As he sees no shame in my lesbian fantasies, why should he feel shame at his homosexual fantasies? Not all my fantasies are in the lesbian category. The man I live with has a good-looking cousin, a man; I used to fantasize that he would come to the house and find me naked, and I would make love to him, or sometimes he would arrive with friends and they would all touch me, trying to arouse me; I would then make love with the one I fancied most. I rarely have this fantasy now. The men in my fantasies nowadays always take me by force and are older than I am (usually about thirty-five). Sometimes my lover will encourage me to think that lots of men are making love to me; he will paw me, touching me all over very quickly, as though his hands were many hands. This excites me very much at the time, but later I can’t help feeling ashamed. I sometimes think he enjoys my fantasies, that they excite him when we are making love, but that later he looks down on me because of them, that he blames me for them. Am I a suppressed lesbian? I just don’t know. Perhaps I could be less two-faced about my fantasies if my lover were. [Letter] ClareI am trying very hard to free myself of sexual guilts and frustrations. Thanks to my husband, I’m hoping to soon be totally sexually free—but I must admit I’m afraid to take the chance of telling him about my fantasies. When we first met, he was jealous of other men. (I never flirted, I just liked to look at men, just as men like to look over a woman.) However, we are now more broadminded, and he may not be jealous at all of my fantasies. I suppose it’s not really that I want to tell him, I would just like to feel that it’s all right that I think these things, that he thinks it’s all right.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  ROOM NUMBER SEVEN: THE THRILL OF THE FORBIDDEN, OR, “NO, YOU MUST NOT!… HERE, LET ME HELP YOU.”At full strength, the sensation of guilt contains an element of discovery, the possibility of being discovered… by someone. You could say, therefore, that fantasies wherein guilt is the motivating emotion belong in the Audience Room (I even think I have one there), where the desired fuel comes from the presence, or imminent presence, of other people. But guilt is too prevalent and powerful an emotion to be carried as an addendum to another idea. It can bring, all of its own, such vitality to sexual fantasy that I give it a room of its own. My own fantasies often ride high on the risk of doing the forbidden. I am by nature, like a lot of other women, what could be called “the faithful type,” and for this type, men other than our husbands or current lovers are taboo. (This is simplistic language for defining both myself and the idea of fidelity, but I choose to be clear rather than analytically thorough.) For us, fantasies which involve us with this or that sexually attractive man in some compromising situation give us the desired sexual kick without the real guilt; in fact, guilt, the deterrent in reality, has been transformed by harmless fantasy into guilt the exciter. We win both ways. Some people rob banks for the sheer thrill of getting away with it. Or, to put it another way, for the excitement of maybe being caught. In every suspense-thriller the clock ticks ominously… it is only a matter of time. This idea of time running out on the guilty act heightens everything. It’s especially so when the guilty act is sex. Whether it’s the illicit affair in reality (the only sort some women enjoy) or the forbidden sex in fantasy, with both it’s only a matter of time before that time runs out, before the whistle blows, the footsteps come closer, the bedroom door is opened and the discovery made. In fantasy, time is on guilt’s (sex’s) side, in that it adds to the thrill by threatening to run out. You only have to think of the added charge in a shipboard romance, summer love, sex in another town. To really appreciate the thrill of guilt, add the element of “stolen” love to “September Song.”

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  What happens, instead, is that the guilt we feel in advance at what we might have done—in our wildest fantasies—doesn’t merely restrain us from doing it, it suppresses the fantasy as well. That is guilt in its most repressive sense. You’ve seen what the end result is: Women walking past shop windows of clothes (“Oh, that’s just not me”) with the kind of indulgent smiles that convince you they haven’t even seen the clothes, any more than they really sexually look at “other” men. Having turned off their fantasy like a light, they become blind to reality as well; it’s safer that way. Repression is a defense line that is ever moving forward, ever seeing threats further and further afield, and in the end, even the fantasy itself, no matter how far removed it is from being acted out, has become so sexually loaded that most women who would not dream of “experimenting” in reality, won’t experiment in their conscious dreams either. To be fair, women have had little training for thinking about sex (except in their almost unconscious reveries). Doing it maybe, but not thinking about it. It’s why men’s burning bedroom question, “Tell me what you are thinking about,” usually goes unanswered, or he gets an honest, but right off the top of the head “I wasn’t thinking about anything.” Women’s conscious minds, like the bodies of virgins, just don’t spontaneously progress from the most obvious sexual possibility to the next. It’s a matter of exercise, or lack of it, like learning the scales. When the occasional sexual reverie does occur, it’s generally on a straight line and short-lived. It’s like thinking in a foreign language. It has nothing to do with intelligence or even “liberation.” Interested and unabashed as we all are getting to be in this age where one can no longer be shocked, when it’s all been written and filmed and become so socially accepted that the only rule left is “let the sun shine in,” women I know still grow tongue-tied when the topic of sexual fantasy comes up. While I was putting this book together, I met women who were instantly in tune to what I was doing, who so intuitively knew what it was all about that they were saying my words before I could get them out of my mouth. They were encouraging and enthusiastic and fantasizers, too—except suddenly, as they were talking all over the subject, they couldn’t remember the heart of it, their own specific fantasies. “But that’s ridiculous,” one would say, perplexed. “I know I fantasize, I just can’t remember…” Then, as often as not, after a lapse of days—during which they would adjust to the idea, or perhaps have the fantasy again but this time remember it—they would triumphantly tell it to me.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I expect most women to say they don’t have sexual fantasies. (Contributors to this book, aware of their fantasies, are the exception, not the rule.) I even expect the same women who say they don’t fantasize to be the ones who most want to discuss the topic, to be interested and eager to pursue the idea. But what I’m not prepared for (or at least wasn’t when I began) is the inarticulate stumbling for words, the sometimes near-hysterical half giggle, half groping for sentences, and the almost universal disclaimer which tries to deny everything by admitting all: “There must be something wrong with me; I never have fantasies at all.” Listening to an intelligent woman trying to put one word in front of another in an effort to describe what sexual fantasy means to her is like watching a healthy normal child who has suddenly developed dystrophy trying to put one large block on top of another. I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I think a woman’s divorce from sex begins with her childhood exclusion from adventure and exploration, both physical and mental, and those limited, limiting toys and games allowed her. It’s as if it were a crime for a young female body to get knocked about and bruised in play, as if the crime were in the contact of anyone or anything with her body. And the feeling that it’s a crime to be touched, even by herself, increases in her teens, so that if she stumbles upon it by accident, the ground for guilt has already been prepared. If her own hands are hesitant to touch what’s obviously and tangibly hers, how much chance does her mind have of exploring the possibilities of that body? And where would she get the rudimentary material her imagination needs to build with? What books or magazines offer any more than her childhood toys, incentive or ideas for sexual fantasy concerning this body that’s so out of bounds? By the time she’s twelve they’ve got her senses all tied up: Nice Little Girls don’t do “those things”; Nice Little Girls also don’t look—thus the fig leaf, just in case they do. And as Nice Little Girls don’t even think about “those things,” even the fig leaf becomes a mystery. Later, when the mystery is solved and the fig leaf removed, women look (at least some do), but they still don’t speak. The conspiracy of silence that began with her mother, and which makes each woman her own jailer, keeps women verbally tongue-tied and as securely blocked off from their minds as their minds are from their bodies. To me, the saddest part of this is not that a woman feels guilty in her fantasy about what she’s doing (that guilt is usually as buried and unconscious as the fantasy itself), but the guilt a woman feels for having a fantasy at all. To feel guilt, not for something you’ve done, but for something you’ve only been thinking about—that is sad.

• From The Art of Memoir

  for the ovens under naked corpses, he feels two disembodied hands appear, rescuing him from the incinerator in the last second. All of this he bounces up from, charging at the next Nazi he sees like a rabid Chihuahua. Some part of me I stifled knew it was false, but I still got behind the book. Why? Was I just cowed by its resounding international endorsement? More driving, I think now, was the guilt I’d suffer if it were true, and I denied a camp survivor his witnessing. I just didn’t let myself trust my instincts. I was in good company. Wilkomirski would go on to win the Prix de Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris and a National Jewish Book Award in NYC, where he beat out Elie Wiesel and Alfred Kazin. Also blurbing the book alongside me was biographer and investigative journalist Gitta Sereny, who attended the Nuremberg trials and wrote perhaps the definitive bio of Albert Speer. Today, Wilkomirski cleaves unswerving to his story, unbudged by physical evidence. If the guy was attempting to defraud us, Gourevitch claimed, he did the worst job in history, for clues abounded. Wilkomirski sounds more deranged than like a conscious fake. In one of my most depressing exercises in public naïveté, I’ve handed out to classes two unidentified chapters from two Holocaust memoirs—one Primo Levi’s agonizingly true Survival at Auschwitz, one Wilkomirski’s. The proven fabricator gets the vast majority of votes for veracity every time. Here are the reasons my very smart (some Ivy-educated) grad students give for taking all this in as true. 1.He’s not trying to make himself seem like a hero. (I’d disagree: he’s making himself seem like a victim, which translates into survivor, which translates into hero.) 2.Why would he lie about this? (He seems to believe his lies, according to his shrink and Gourevitch, who interviewed him.) 3.The writing has an immediacy; its first-person present tense makes it seem as if he’s reliving it, more than Levi’s more formally written piece with its emotional circumspection. 4.Lack of exposition or rhetoric shows lack of thoughtfulness and, therefore, a lack of artificiality or deceit.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Gossamer folds of flesh. The obscure darkness of her organs. White static snow intruding at the margins and along the inner curves of Sophie’s cunt. Slowly, carefully, Indi slid the hollow point of the syringe through the vaginal wall and up toward the gelid shadow of the girl’s left ovary. She’d thought Sophie might whimper, given that she was on a cocktail of expired Vicodin and benzos rather than real anesthesia, but the girl didn’t make a sound. Her whole focus was on the screen, the reflection of which squirmed and quivered in the depths of her blue eyes. In the corner stood a woman in riot gear, one hand resting on the butt of a Taser. If you weren’t a coward, you’d poison her. Slit your wrists tonight. The needle pierced the ovary. A whisper of resistance as it slid into one of the fluid-filled sacs inside the delicate organ. Indi drew back the syringe’s plunger, sucking the eggs within up into the suspension fluid in the canister. “Almost done,” she said. “Just focus on your breathing if you start to feel nauseous or light-headed.” “It’s incredible,” Sophie whispered. The entire length of the appointment she’d acted as though the maternity ward had never happened, as though the scabbed-over cut on her lip had come from nowhere at all. Indi had slept in a little room off her apartments the past night, armed guards at the door. “We all look like that inside, now. Everyone in the world.” Indi ejected the full canister of cloudy follicular fluid, capping it with rubber and setting it carefully in the sample wheel she’d set on her instrument table. “Well, almost.” She depressed the plunger and thumbed a fresh glass tube into place, screwing it in tightly. It began to fill as she set her thumb against the plunger’s base and eased it back. A hungry vacuum drawing the motes of a score of little future Sophies out into the light. Don’t think about that. From sedation to retraction and the swabbing away of the thin trickle of blood which welled up from the wall of Sophie’s vaginal canal, the entire extraction took less than fifteen minutes. Every day I am making a choice, thought Indi as she set the sample wheel onto its shelf in the freezer. Every day I decide I matter more than the people outside this place. More than the girls she killed because she got impatient waiting for her little dream family.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Robbie looked horrified and furious, his mouth twitching. “Go ahead,” she said numbly. “Tell me it’s my fault.” “It’s your fault.” “Well, what about you? What happens to the other people in the bunker now?” “They got shares from the storerooms. Medicine. Herbs and hormones for the people who needed it.” “There were kids living there.” She couldn’t seem to shut up, though digging at him only made her feel worse. “Babies.” He wouldn’t look at her. Leaves and needles slapped the windscreen as they plowed through an especially thick brake of vegetation, roots knotting the track with twisted ribs. “That place was sick, Fran. They’re better off in a normal town.” “It was safe .” “You know Beth wasn’t working in the kitchens, right?” Yes. She was always crying, and I knew. “No. What?” “She was a daddy. They took her off farm detail because a cis girl hooked up with her, then got cold feet about it. So they put her on a rotation where she’d dress up in boy drag and fuck middle-aged women.” Fran started to cry. “I mean, if she’d said something, if she’d told us maybe I could have—” “You’re being hateful.” She punched her own thigh, wishing for the first time since her early twenties for the gentle endorphin wash of dragging a safety pin’s sterilized point down her inner forearm. Flare of pale, sickly pain. Release. “Why are you so mad at me?” “I’m not—” Robbie gripped the steering wheel hard enough that his knuckles went white. He took a deep breath as they toiled up a muddy slope onto the highway, skirting a derelict army troop carrier, its canvas slashed and sun-faded, its tires flat and skewing to the sides as time and weather bowed it. “I am mad at you,” he said at last. “A couple cis women smile at you and suddenly Beth’s shit on your shoe? I tell you Beth’s headed for a chain gang and you won’t even fucking admit something might be going on?” She said nothing. A hundred rejoinders flashed through her mind, but she discarded each in turn. You don’t know me, what I’ve been through. How dare you fucking judge me? You have no idea what it’s like to be a trans woman here, to be hunted and hated and played with like a sex doll. Some of it was true, maybe, but none of it really mattered. He was right. A pretty girl had given her a card with “YOU’RE CIS” printed on it and promised her a boutique pussy and that was that. She’d closed her eyes and plugged her ears. “I’m sorry,” she said at last, her voice small. He was silent. The trees on the sides of the highway were turning, leaves tumbling through the early morning sunlight. The ones in town were still mostly green. She rested her cheek against the window and watched the signs on the side of the road blur past.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The van lurched as she climbed awkwardly up into it. Her breathing sounded like someone inflating a wet burlap sack and then squeezing it flat, but the click of her .38’s hammer echoed hard and flat and definite from the blank white panels. “Thought you might … have the brains … to run.” He threw himself at her without a word, his hand flying to the hilt of his knife, and the shot, when it came, was as loud as thunder. X. Neutered and Exempted X NEUTERED AND EXEMPTED Beth woke to the smell of her own vomit. She didn’t open her eyes at first, reflecting instead on the virtues of plausible deniability. I am not lying in my own puke, she thought calmly. I did not murder Sylvia. I am not in line waiting for the gas chamber. Except that thought made her think of Steve, her mother’s second husband, who everyone had said was so handsome, such a good guy, what a catch. She remembered his shit-eating grin. He’d loved a good Holocaust joke. What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? She hadn’t answered him then, as he leaned over her with a hand on her eleven-year-old thigh. She remembered that. He just liked to hear himself talk; it was better if you let him. A pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven. Between the stale, boring trauma of having been molested by a dollar-store white supremacist and the exciting new life-ruining possibilities of whatever was happening to her now, she chose novelty and opened her eyes. Her half-congealed upchuck greeted her. Her cheek rested in the puddle. It was in her hair. She spat, levering herself up on one elbow. She was at the back end of the aisle running down the center of a bus, her wrists zip-tied together. Women filled the worn bench seats, some looking back curiously at her, others carrying on with idle talk. “You’re awake.” She almost wept at just the sound of Dani’s voice. The tall, wiry woman sat on the outer edge of the rearmost seat beside Sharice, a big, quiet woman who worked as one of the Screw’s other daddies. Beth coughed, worming backward from the stinking puddle. “What’s going on?” she wheezed. “I dreamed someone was screaming.” Dani had a black eye, her left. “They brought you in and dumped you on the floor. You killed Sylvia Slate?” “Stupid fucking name.” Beth spat to clear her mouth. She ran her tongue over her teeth. Her head hurt. Her back hurt. Her stomach felt like a lead brick. “What is she, a porn star? I mean what’s going on here? Why are we on a bus? I’m guessing they’re not driving us to a production of Jersey Boys .” Dani let out a mirthless laugh. “We got traded. Sold. Whatever.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  At dinner on their second night, served early and dispersed over the sprawling, ramshackle bulk of the custodian’s house, he sat alone at the foot of the narrow steps leading up from the kitchen to the second floor and stirred his fish chowder without enthusiasm, wondering about taking bricks from the old fort’s sea-facing wall to repair the barricade around Fort Dyke. Snatches of conversation drifted in from the living room, where Beth was rubbing Indi’s feet and a few of the older women were knitting, wooden needles click-click-clicking in a peaceful rhythm. Someone was talking about Grace, the girl who’d died beside him in the Screw. The gray tomcat who’d stowed away in the bunker’s van lay dozing on the back of the couch. He saw Fran come in through the front, talking with a short, chubby cis girl with a shock of violently purple hair, and drained the rest of his bowl, leaving it in the sink on his way to the back door. The sun was sinking over the tidal river to the west of the spit, bloody orange light rippling over the water. The wind had picked up, bringing spray from the breakers with it, and the bullet wound in his shoulder was aching miserably in the cold and damp. That morning, it had been so stiff he’d had to dig the pommel of his knife into it just to unwork the knots. Indi had told him he was lucky, that if it hadn’t been a through-and-through it could’ve made a mess out of his whole arm, but that didn’t make it feel any better. He went quickly down the rickety back steps and started toward the laundry lines. He could start bringing things in before the wind got worse. He was carrying an armful of moth-eaten linens back to the fort when Zia stepped out from the shadow of the tumbledown maintenance shed and fell into step beside him. “Lotta sheets,” said the tall, angular woman, flicking open her lighter and touching flame to the end of a hand-rolled cigarette clamped in her teeth. “When we vote tomorrow I’ll be sure to bring that up. ‘Boy can lug a sheet.’” “Whatever you all decide, it’s nice of you to let us stay this long. I just want to pitch in.” She blew smoke out her nostrils. “Bullshit. You feel bad about the bunker. It’s eating you.” His shoulder throbbed. “I’ve killed people before.” “Oh, was it super great for you then, too? Just BLAM”—she mimed shooting a kneeling figure—“and then afterward you were really well-adjusted?” Robbie’s ears burned. Part of him wanted to slug this near-stranger, another spur-of-the-moment decision he’d made to throw his lot in with people he didn’t know, chasing a sense of belonging he didn’t deserve.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Oh fuck you. “Corinne,” Sylvia warned, not looking up from her notebook. “Mariana’s very capable,” said Indi, glancing sidelong at the older woman, who, with her upper body buried in the maw of the industrial freezer, showed no sign of having heard. “But she’s not specialized. I need a chemist. Experienced. Right now, without a microarray, I can’t be sure whether or not the”—muzzle on his face, skin scabby and peeling, black tongue wrapped tight around Sophie’s little wrist—“donor can even contribute an X chromosome.” In some ways it made it easier, focusing solely on the technical problem at hand. She didn’t have to think about the snotty little child empress she was doing it for, or the people starving in the camp outside the blast gate. There are people starving everywhere, she told herself sometimes, when guilt crept close as she lay on her memory-foam mattress, cool filtered air blowing over her, the taste of butter lingering on her tongue. There always were, and always will be. Being here, making a place for Fran and Beth and Robbie … a place for me. Is it really so bad? Corinne made a face and snapped her compact shut. “So what’s the time frame, then?” Are you really going to do this? Give this woman a child so that one day she can reprogram all the palm and ocular locks in this place to accept it, so that she can pass a thousand people down like a locket or an antique rocking chair? “Give me a month,” said Indi. “And get me what I need.” Fran watched the coast roll by through the truck’s passenger window. Most of Seabrook’s beachfront houses were already gone. The ocean had swallowed them, though their collapsed hulks still dotted the beach, siding eaten through by salt, frames broken, roofs spilling into the water in ragged slopes of shingle and splintered beams. Seagulls and cormorants nested in the ruins. The city council was putting in levies; lines of pour frames interspersed with concrete monoliths. I guess society didn’t collapse fast enough, she thought. Or maybe some Ukrainian nuclear plant went critical halfway across the world and we just don’t know it yet. Maybe we’re all going to get cancer, if we don’t have it already. If we don’t drown or get malaria or get eaten by our men. They pulled up to the checkpoint at the border between the town’s burn zone and the downtown drag, the truck’s brakes groaning as Nam-joo, the haggard bunkerite who’d walked her through what Sophie expected from the council, brought it to a shuddering halt. A broad, solid woman somewhere in her late forties or early fifties sauntered toward them and leaned into the cab, elbows on the rim of the driver-side window.