Humiliation

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 The Folding Star (1994)

  I pictured the goings-on like the fake head-tossings and eye-flashings of a sixties "Latin American Fiesta" LP sleeve. There was a knock at the door. This was something so unusual that it seemed to bring my whole life before my mind's eye. What I dreaded was Cherif’s return, some maudlin rapprochement or pretence that nothing serious had gone wrong. Or it could be poor troubled Paul, I supposed, in search of the solace I alone seemed able to offer him. But what if Luc was standing there, fluffily unshaven, greasy-haired, hungry . . . ? I crossed the room assuring myself it was only Marcel, who had got the time of a lesson wrong, or forgotten it was the holidays. Outside, in a vision of unbruised youth and beauty, were Alejo and Agustín. So I had been forgiven? The former, in one of his bright silk waistcoats, like a wicked prefect, kissed me on both cheeks, while his cousin extended a hand stiffly, but with a slight smile: he gave the impression of having been coaxed round and of relying entirely on Alejo as a chaperon. Still, I felt in some way blessed by them, ridiculously moved to find myself in their thoughts. "Agustin wants to ask you something," said Alejo. I shrugged and spread my hands to say "Anything, anything." "Both my sisters say, would you like to come to their party." "And . . . " prompted Alejo. "And I invite you too." "And so do I." "Oh . . . it's terribly sweet of you." "It is for Christmas, and also for my sister's, um, onomastic . . . holiday," said Agustin, glad of this further rationale for their gesture. "I'm very touched, please thank your sisters, it would have been wonderful to meet them at last, but the truth is I'm tied up with something here." I was aware of their both looking curiously past me into the grim fug of the room. "And then any moment I have to go out to meet a friend on the other side of town. But thank you, thank you, my friends." For a minute I was Scrooge playing Mr Brownlow. "I hope you'll have a very happy time." I caught on Agustin's incomparable face the glow of a double satisfaction. I couldn't have borne the party, simple social sweetness was beyond me these days; yet by the time I skulked out through the yard, aware I was noticed from my neighbours' window, a hunched figure in the dusk, I had begun to feel humiliated by their offer, like some difficult old widower invited to share the family turkey.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He never spoke to me again, just looked at me like that every time we passed each other on the street. I knew he meant it. If I hung around too long, he'd find a way. And so I got some change together, and I hauled ass." I knew a blond girl in the Village a long time ago, and, eventually, we never walked out of the house together. She was far safer walking the streets alone than when walking with me-a brutal and humiliating fact which thoroughly destroyed whatever relationship this girl and I might have been able to achieve. This happens all the time in America, but Americans have yet to realize what a sinister fact this is, and what it says about them. When we walked out in the evening, then, she would leave ahead of me, alone. I would give her about five minutes, and then I would walk out alone, taking another route, and meet her on the subway platform. We would not acknowledge each other. We would get into the same subway car, sitting at opposite ends of it, and walk, separately, through the streets of the fr ee and the brave, to wherever we were TO BE BAPTIZED 4- 1 9 going-a friend's house, or the movies. There was only one restaurant, eventually, in which we ever ate together, and it was run by a black woman. We were fighting for our lives, and we were very young. As for the police, our protectors, we would never have dreamed of calling one. Our connection caused us to be menaced by the police in ways indescribable and nearly inconceivable; and the police egged on the popu lace, stood laughing and talking while we were spit on, and cursed. When with a girl, I never ran, I couldn't: except once, when a girl I had been sleeping with slapped me in the face in the middle of Washington Square Park. She was pulling rank, she was crying Rape!-and then I ran. I still remember the day and the hour, and the sunlight, the faces of the people, and the girl's face-she had short red hair-and I will never forgive that girl. I am astonished until today that I have both my eyes and most of my teeth and functioning kidneys and my sexual equipment: but small black boys have the advantage of being able to curl themselves into knots, and roll with the kicks and the punches. Of course, I was a target for the police. I was black and visible and helpless and the word was out to "get" me, and so, soon, I, too, hauled ass. And the prisons of this country are full of boys like the boy I was. "All right," cried Tony, with tears in his eyes, "I'm twenty eight, and I'm a criminal, right? I've got a record-now they can do anything they want!"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  She got out and hurried over to him, kissed him on both cheeks. "Mm, you need to shave," she said. Marcel giggled and fell silent; they stood blinking at one another, as if each trying to formulate an explanation of how they came to be here. "There's an amazing billiard-table inside," said Marcel. "Is there?" She smiled encouragingly and sauntered towards me, unnervingly calm, like a trained nurse approaching a violent patient. I came down the steps apologetically. Then we too looked at each other. "That's a very nice jacket," she said. I nodded and rubbed the cloth of the lapel between forefinger and thumb. "I hope it kept you warm out in the car all night." "Yes, thank you"—foolish, not wanting to add being cold to my other weaknesses. "Yes, it is a warm one, isn't it? I've worn it myself a few times, when Luc thought I might be getting chilly—it was like an overcoat on me." I saw her shrugging it on, his arm brusquely round her shoulder to shiver her. She looked down, piqued, as if she thought I too might offer it up. His other clothes went without comment, they were perhaps anonymous enough not to speak clearly of their owner. And that of course was all I longed to do, to speak of him but not to give him away, not to seem to share him with her, to be proud in defeat. I started obliquely: "You must have left very early." But she was on her own fuse. She looked at me blankly. "You'll never have him," she said. "Then you don't know . . . " I didn't say that, but a kind of stifled smugness like heartburn must have crossed my features and shielded me from her brutality. "All I want to have", I said, "is the chance to talk to him and help him if I can. His mother's dreadfully worried, she wants—well, she wants to do what's best for him." She gaped at me as if I were a total idiot: I had never imagined such disrespect, but I was too raw for the usual prickle and bluster at the outrages of the young. "His mother." "So why don't you just tell me where he is? No one's trying to come between you. He thinks of me as a friend." "How on earth would you know what he thinks. You haven't got a clue what goes on inside his head. He thinks of me as his best friend." "Yes," I said disarmingly, "he told me he did." She wandered off in a circle, hands in pockets, pink-cheeked with anger and cold. Marcel leant against the Renault and scuffed the ground—he hadn't known what a terror she was. "So where is he?" I said. "He's not in the house," she replied, slyly neutral. "I know that." She paused and scanned the decrepit elevation. "I'd wondered too."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A moment after the door had closed I felt quite humiliated to be acting the role of the buffoon, agonised into farce. I went to the front window and watched Marcel emerge into the yard below and break into a heavy run as if, sedentary and breathless though the boy was, he could hardly wait to reach the gate and be free of me. I knew instinctively the freedom that he wanted—not freedom to do some challenging thing, but to do almost nothing, to wander homewards through the mild afternoon . . . I stayed with my forehead to the windowpane and within ten seconds there was the slap of the wicket again, and back came the curly-haired boy Matt and I had seen earlier. He had been to the big supermarket and swung a carrier with a loaf and a bunch of flowers sticking out of it. He disappeared into the Spanish girls' staircase and something told me that in the bulky lower part of the bag were cheesy nibbles, Cokes and Sprites and a beer or two for the boys. The girls were out now, as far as I could tell, but when they got back they were going to have a party! For a moment my gloom swallowed up my envy. I opened the hanging cupboard and got into it, tussling lightly with my raincoat and leather jacket and jangling the unused hangers on the rail. I had a fatalistic need to know what I was in for, what crass intrusions of noise I was going to tolerate; as well as a complete curiosity about the boy, who seemed to me unswervingly beautiful and sexy just then in contrast to the shrouded and ambiguous merits of Luc, who was never interested in girls. But after ten minutes with my ear pressed receptively to the wooden partition, I had picked up nothing beyond the snap of a ring-top can, a few words, half-said, half-sung, and a smug reverberant burp. At last I thought I heard a gently rhythmic noise, and had him frowningly exploring himself, until I realised it was the shushing of the pulse in my ear. I edged back into the room and shut the door.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It should not have surprised me that there was a market for such things here. He may only have been taking an inspired commercial guess in showing them to me. But I was keenly dismayed, humiliated, feeling that he had read me like a book & I, in the glimpse I caught of naked poses—all male, young boys, fantastically proportioned adults, sepia faces smiling, winking—had confusedly admitted as much. I declined him sternly, & with an amiable, philosophical bow he withdrew to pester the newly arrived party. Tonight we travel south along the Canal. I have just walked on deck under stars; it was quite bracingly cold. Beyond the sheer canal walls there are occasional lights & fires: otherwise featurelessness & a distant horizon of hills to the east, and plain to the west, just perceptible as darker than the sky. Like a child I feel far too excited to sleep through my first night in Africa. A couple of weeks later Charles rang me. As usual he was already talking when I raised the apparatus to my ear: ‘… my dear, and too appalled to hear that you’ve been vandalised.’ ‘Charles! I’m much better now. I’ve got a false tooth very cleverly sort of welded on at the front …’ ‘I’ve only just heard about it from our friend Bill.’ ‘I didn’t know he knew.’ ‘I was most dismayed. I went for a swim, you see. I hoped I might find you there. But I suppose …’ ‘I haven’t been going in while I’ve been looking so hideous, but I hope to make an appearance in the next few days.’ ‘Were you badly hurt?’ ‘Well, I’ve got some cracked ribs, and there’s not much you can do about them, you just have to let them mend. The only permanent defect is a broken nose.’ ‘Oh dear …’ ‘It gives me a sort of pugilistic look—quite like one of Bill’s boys.’ ‘Even so … Who’s been looking after you? Can I send you bouquets?’ ‘I have a wonderful doctor, and a very sweet friend. I’m fine.’ There followed a typical Nantwich pause, which, heard over the telephone, was more disconcerting than when one was with him. I stood expectantly by. Suddenly he was on the air again. ‘Come over to Staines’s tomorrow, if you want to see something really extraordinary.’ ‘I had a fairly extraordinary time there a few weeks ago.’ ‘It may be a bit vulgar. About seven o’clock.’ There were a few seconds of reedy respiration, and then he hung up. I remembered from something he had said before—about Otto Henderson’s cartoons being ‘vulgar’—that this was a word Charles used, as I had used it when a little boy, to mean indecent, in the manner of, say, a rude joke.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He had this tight, mean, logical talk, highly defensive and dull. I followed him, feeling more and more at a disadvantage—old, too, as people over twenty are to their juniors. He reached the low wall by the road, and turned round, stroking the outline of his quite big dick. Just along the street people were waiting at a bus-stop. It was no place for a scene. I came up close to him and put my hand on his shoulder, and he smiled in a way that for the first time revealed his nervousness. ‘Come on,’ I said, seizing this advantage. But immediately he closed down again; it was with studied shrewdness that he said: ‘How much money ’ave you got, then?’ I nodded my head and chuckled ironically—the only way was to behave like him. ‘Just enough for myself,’ I said. ‘ ’sthat so? Well you’ll need a lot more than that if you want a nice bit of bum round ’ere’—almost in a whisper, as if trying to keep the great bargain he was offering me a secret from the group at the bus-stop. I’d had enough. I dropped my hand, half-turned and jumped over the wall. ‘Bye-bye,’ he called cheerily as I waited to cross the road—and chose a bad moment that meant I had to run; a van honked at me. I felt the boy’s absolutely unfriendly eyes on me, and annoyance and humiliation, and, as I turned up the road to the Club, conflicting urges to dismiss him as rubbish and to run back and pay whatever he wanted. I saw myself pissing over him, jamming my cock down his throat, forcing my fingers up his ass—disturbing images with which to enter a Boy’s Club. I resented his ability to resist me, and that I had no power over someone so young. The Club building must formerly have been a Nonconformist chapel. The bulk of it was built of a rebarbative grey stone, with mean pointed windows; tacked on in front and at the side were modern extensions in red brick, with metal-framed windows (the frosted glass spoke of changing-rooms) and peeling white trim.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Is most instructive & also relaxing. Also is only ten piastres.’ I bought one of these &, since we wd not go there, one of the Pharos & one of Pompey’s Pillar. Encouraged, he rummaged inside a cloth bag, & produced a small brown bottle, taking the opportunity too to pull a chair up beside me & sit down. He had a strong, not particularly pleasant smell. ‘Here is very special drink, m’sieu. Very good for you & for your lady.’ He looked at me keenly & I felt myself colour. ‘Is the cocktail of love, m’sieu. Is the wine of Cleopatra.’ ‘No, no, no,’ I said, flustered. To my surprise he was sensitive to this & put the bottle away. He seemed prepared already to give me up, afraid to overstep the mark, & packed up his case again; some other Europeans approached an adjacent table, & I was glad to be seen successfully repulsing this mountebank, fascinating & confidential though he was. Leaning forwards as though to rise, & so hiding what he did from our neighbours, he produced, almost prestidigitated, from inside his robe, from somewhere mysterious about his person, a hand of postcards which he quickly fanned & as quickly swept together again & covered. It should not have surprised me that there was a market for such things here. He may only have been taking an inspired commercial guess in showing them to me. But I was keenly dismayed, humiliated, feeling that he had read me like a book & I, in the glimpse I caught of naked poses—all male, young boys, fantastically proportioned adults, sepia faces smiling, winking—had confusedly admitted as much. I declined him sternly, & with an amiable, philosophical bow he withdrew to pester the newly arrived party. Tonight we travel south along the Canal. I have just walked on deck under stars; it was quite bracingly cold. Beyond the sheer canal walls there are occasional lights & fires: otherwise featurelessness & a distant horizon of hills to the east, and plain to the west, just perceptible as darker than the sky. Like a child I feel far too excited to sleep through my first night in Africa. A couple of weeks later Charles rang me. As usual he was already talking when I raised the apparatus to my ear: ‘… my dear, and too appalled to hear that you’ve been vandalised.’ ‘Charles! I’m much better now. I’ve got a false tooth very cleverly sort of welded on at the front …’ ‘I’ve only just heard about it from our friend Bill.’ ‘I didn’t know he knew.’ ‘I was most dismayed. I went for a swim, you see.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  None of this was quite innocent. Like all diaries it envisaged a reader. The odious Robert Smith-Carson had read long sections of it about himself when James was so infatuated with him, and was both pleased and alarmed by the Wagnerian pitch of the entries (whole paragraphs delirious with exclamations: ‘Weh! Weh! Schmach! Sehnsucht!’ and so on). Other passages had an obscure biblical fervour: one which began ‘His thighs are like bronze doors’ I had subsequently annotated with exclamation marks of my own. My readings were also somehow allowed for, and the baroque candour of the diaries enabled James (who could never bear an argument or cross words) to tell me what he thought of me, without ever letting on in so many words that he was doing so. Between us we enacted a secret charade, a charade whose very subject was ‘secrecy’. The sober, maroon-spined notebooks, drink-stained, rubbed and buckled, took up part of the very special shelf where the Firbank books were, those pocket-sized first editions with their gilt lettering or torn wrappers wrapped again in cellophane. Now that I was reading them myself I looked at them with more interest—Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations, though not, alas, The Flower Beneath the Foot—and patted their backs encouragingly. Along from them the current volume of the diary was neatly in place, history already although only half-filled. Fairly a professional now at reading other people’s private bits and pieces, I settled down with my mug of coffee to find out what had been going on. Reading Charles’s journal I could be confident that nothing in it, however boring on the one hand or touching on the other, could ever implicate me; whereas in James’s there was the uneasy excitement of some certain entanglement and my eye would skip down the page in search of myself. He had that elegant, artnouveau kind of writing which many architects still use on plans, and the Ws were very strong and conspicuous, like a pair of brick-hods side by side. How annoying it was when he was going on about Rheingold or Parsifal: Wagner and I shared an abbreviation, which cropped up pretty often—though in general it was possible to tell which of us he meant. I discovered that he was hopelessly behind, and realised that I would find no clues here to last night’s events. The latest entry was from several weeks before: ‘To Corry 6.30. The boy Phil, W’s new thing, was in the showers. Fantastic body, disappointing little dick. Still, felt quite a pang for it—smiled at him, but he looked straight through me. Humiliation! I had made such an effort when we met to be charming, but now I wish I hadn’t bothered. Perhaps all lovers resent such old friends, who know things that they don’t? Either that, or they really court them. But again it was that terrible feeling that no one ever notices me or remembers me.’

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My senator opposed the bill (one of the few senators to do so), and though he never explained why, I liked to think that maybe he and I had something in common. The senators and policy staff debating the bill had little appreciation for the role of payday lenders in the shadow economy that people like me occupied. To them, payday lenders were predatory sharks, charging high interest rates on loans and exorbitant fees for cashed checks. The sooner they were snuffed out, the better. To me, payday lenders could solve important financial problems. My credit was awful, thanks to a host of terrible financial decisions (some of which weren’t my fault, many of which were), so credit cards weren’t a possibility. If I wanted to take a girl out to dinner or needed a book for school and didn’t have money in the bank, I didn’t have many options. (I probably could have asked my aunt or uncle, but I desperately wanted to do things on my own.) One Friday morning I dropped off my rent check, knowing that if I waited another day, the fifty-dollar late fee would kick in. I didn’t have enough money to cover the check, but I’d get paid that day and would be able to deposit the money after work. However, after a long day at the senate, I forgot to grab my paycheck before I left. By the time I realized the mistake, I was already home, and the Statehouse staff had left for the weekend. On that day, a three-day payday loan, with a few dollars of interest, enabled me to avoid a significant overdraft fee. The legislators debating the merits of payday lending didn’t mention situations like that. The lesson? Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me. My second year of college started pretty much as my first year had, with a beautiful day and a lot of excitement. With the new job, I was a bit busier, but I didn’t mind the work. What I did mind was the gnawing feeling that, at twenty-four, I was a little too old to be a second-year college student. But with four years in the Marine Corps behind me, more separated me from the other students than age. During an undergraduate seminar in foreign policy, I listened as a nineteen-year-old classmate with a hideous beard spouted off about the Iraq war. He explained that those fighting the war were typically less intelligent than those (like him) who immediately went to college. It showed, he argued, in the wanton way soldiers butchered and disrespected Iraqi civilians. It was an objectively terrible opinion—my friends from the Marine Corps spanned the political spectrum and held nearly every conceivable opinion about the war. Many of my Marine Corps friends were staunch liberals who had no love for our commander in chief—then George W. Bush—and felt that we had sacrificed too much for too little gain.

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

  I’ve seen many marriages come apart with the kind of severe reactions Billy described. (Often this kind of terrible trauma is what sparks a custody fight that never ends.) Still hurting from the unexpected and long-remembered loss of their intact family during childhood, they go on to lose the central relationship of their own adulthood without any warning. This confirms their view that they’re doomed, that everything they need dies. The suffering is exactly as Billy described. They can’t stand it. To come home to an empty house and be greeted by a note tacked to the door is a dreadful humiliation. The reaction—depression or explosive rage—can last for years. People blame the partner, the real or imaginary lover, the partner’s family, the world. The trauma of the breakup can dominate their lives and lead to savage fighting over children or property. But why didn’t Billy have a clue about what was coming? For a woman to empty the household takes not only careful planning but a towering rage that builds over time until it explodes in an extraordinary act of hatred and revenge. Yet Billy was taken by surprise. He was looking miserable. I touched his arm and said, “Billy, I can’t think of anything worse that could happen. What she did was awful. Thank God you didn’t kill yourself. What led to her anger? Do you understand that?” “If you mean did I hit her, I never laid a hand on her.” “Perhaps she felt trapped.” “I never thought of that.” “Do you think she was frustrated by having nothing to do except wait for an exhausted man to return home in time for sleep?” “I never thought of that, either. She complained, but look, I’m used to women complaining.” The men in this study who divorced had experiences much like Billy’s, although not as savage in their impact. In every case except one, the woman left in anger and the man was stunned. These young men genuinely liked their wives and wanted the marriage to continue. They later tried to explain what happened with platitudes—“she was too young,” “she wanted somebody else”—but basically they had no idea why their wives had deserted them. Billy was one of the very few who honestly said, “I didn’t hear her.” None of these men had been violent in their marriages nor was infidelity a big issue, although it happened occasionally. They knew their wives had complaints but did nothing to deal with the problems. One man told me that he didn’t notice that his wife had left a week earlier because he was working on a big computer assignment. When he realized she was gone, he went into an acute depression. Most recovered slowly. Several did not have any contact with another woman for years after. One man whose wife left when he was twenty-four was still not dating ten years later. He’d decided to remain alone rather than take another chance. “Once is enough,” he stated.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The sober, maroon-spined notebooks, drink-stained, rubbed and buckled, took up part of the very special shelf where the Firbank books were, those pocket-sized first editions with their gilt lettering or torn wrappers wrapped again in cellophane. Now that I was reading them myself I looked at them with more interest— Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations , though not, alas, The Flower Beneath the Foot —and patted their backs encouragingly. Along from them the current volume of the diary was neatly in place, history already although only half-filled. Fairly a professional now at reading other people’s private bits and pieces, I settled down with my mug of coffee to find out what had been going on. Reading Charles’s journal I could be confident that nothing in it, however boring on the one hand or touching on the other, could ever implicate me; whereas in James’s there was the uneasy excitement of some certain entanglement and my eye would skip down the page in search of myself. He had that elegant, artnouveau kind of writing which many architects still use on plans, and the Ws were very strong and conspicuous, like a pair of brick-hods side by side. How annoying it was when he was going on about Rheingold or Parsifal: Wagner and I shared an abbreviation, which cropped up pretty often—though in general it was possible to tell which of us he meant. I discovered that he was hopelessly behind, and realised that I would find no clues here to last night’s events. The latest entry was from several weeks before: ‘To Corry 6.30. The boy Phil, W’s new thing, was in the showers. Fantastic body, disappointing little dick. Still, felt quite a pang for it—smiled at him, but he looked straight through me. Humiliation! I had made such an effort when we met to be charming, but now I wish I hadn’t bothered. Perhaps all lovers resent such old friends, who know things that they don’t? Either that, or they really court them. But again it was that terrible feeling that no one ever notices me or remembers me.’ I felt a mixture of shame and cruel pleasure in this, that my little Philibuster was not giving anyone else a foothold on his hard, soap-slippery self-possession. And the unvoiced envy, vainly denied in the disparagement of Phil’s cock, came through good and clear. I worked back to the evening of Billy Budd with a masochistic sense that I wouldn’t come out of it well, though I was sure there would be very beautiful and insightful stuff about the music.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Edie, slightly oppressed by this male challenge, had done her best to keep up. She thought they were doing about 85 when the spin happened. Dawn's real name—unreal, it seemed to me, when I read the newspaper report—was Ralph, which was romantic and adventurous and didn't suit him, but which he managed to accommodate by the age of fifteen to his strain of boisterous schoolboy shyness. Then he took part in the school reading competition, judged as a rule by a stone-deaf old actor, a pupil of the school during the Great War, well-known for his portrayals of clergymen. Each aspirant would take the rostrum, like a witness, announce his name and his selected extract, and then deliver it in a sufficiently loud and commanding manner to get through to the judge. Ralph, flushed and nervous, appeared at the lectern and immediately began a rather sensitive account of the Gordon Bottomley passage he had chosen from Poets of our Time; it was not until he had confided three or four lines of it that the old actor cheerily called out "Name?" and Ralph, humiliated, bellowed "Dawn . . . " adding a "by Bottomley" that was lost under a roar of laughter. The first day people tried out Bottomley, which seemed apt, as Ralph was a sturdily bottomry boy; but it was Dawn that stuck. After initial petulance he let it happen and blossomed into it, like a drag-name, much as he came to understand that his bottom wasn't a laughable encumbrance but a majestic asset. He never used the name himself, and up to the end would say on the phone "Oh, it's . . . er . . . Ralph here", with a hesitation like someone you might not remember, someone you had swopped numbers with in a club. And his dim manly father, though he accepted its currency, only ever said it by accident, choosing generally to speak of Ralph-ie, as a kind of token cissification. But his mother, a cheery, cynical woman who had worked at the BBC, took to it straight away, as if it explained things. I went up over the common with my mother next morning. It was grey and blowy and our macs were stippled once or twice with flung raindrops, threats of a storm we saw stagger aside and discharge in a slanting fume a mile away. She had the disconcerting habit of talking indignantly about something other than the obvious subject of concern: in this case my elder brother and whether she could afford to visit him in Melbourne.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I’d had enough. I dropped my hand, half-turned and jumped over the wall. ‘Bye-bye,’ he called cheerily as I waited to cross the road—and chose a bad moment that meant I had to run; a van honked at me. I felt the boy’s absolutely unfriendly eyes on me, and annoyance and humiliation, and, as I turned up the road to the Club, conflicting urges to dismiss him as rubbish and to run back and pay whatever he wanted. I saw myself pissing over him, jamming my cock down his throat, forcing my fingers up his ass—disturbing images with which to enter a Boy’s Club. I resented his ability to resist me, and that I had no power over someone so young. The Club building must formerly have been a Nonconformist chapel. The bulk of it was built of a rebarbative grey stone, with mean pointed windows; tacked on in front and at the side were modern extensions in red brick, with metal-framed windows (the frosted glass spoke of changing-rooms) and peeling white trim. It was, as Charles had said, a big night, and the lino-tiled hallway was full of family people—rather got up, I suspected: mothers with arms crossed anxiously under their bosoms, and fathers showing the suppressed pride of parents at a speech-day. Many youngsters were rushing about, and the sense of private occasion made me feel more than ever out of place. I went over to the glass-fronted NoBos and communed for a second with my reflection before scanning the lists of activities, notices about excursions, and team photographs, routinely seeking out the faces of pretty boys (of which there were several) and those inevitable glimpses of underwear up the rucked short-legs of seated footballers. Then, in the next frame, there was a larger notice, printed in an old-fashioned and distinguished way, announcing that on this very day, in contests of three rounds each, the London and Home Counties Boys’ Club Boxing Championship would be decided, and the winning team presented with ‘the Nantwich Cup’. I felt how slow and incurious I had been now that I saw this evidence of Charles’s further influence and philanthropy. Of course he hadn’t sent me all this way merely to speak to the mysterious Shillibeer; I was amused and impressed that there was more to it, as well as getting the uneasy feeling that Charles was orchestrating his revelations with some expertise. I became convinced that when the line had gone dead two nights before it was a deliberate foreclosure on his part, and that back in the City he would now be nodding expectantly. Coming hard upon the grotesque and momentary episode in the churchyard it made me feel just a little out of control. I heard applause and a voice raised beyond the swinging green doors into the hall. I went in, trying to look as if I knew what to expect.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Please, to hear this woman, she’s totally insane!” Ms. Harvey refuses. “Your siblings are in the hands of another state now, Regina. For the last time, I’ll tell you: There is nothing we can do.” “Ms. Harvey, you promised me you all would protect my brother and sister if I signed that report telling everything my mother has done.” I slam down the phone so hard, I see Pete rise from his recliner as I run down the hall to my room. In trying to help the kids, I’ve made it worse for them. Without me there to take Cookie’s abuse, Rosie bears the brunt of my attempts to save them. I’ve failed to protect her the way Cherie and Camille protected me. I want to tell Rosie that the brutality she’s enduring is torturing me, too. IT’S THE FALL of tenth grade when the new county phone book arrives at Addie’s. I quickly rip it open and thumb my way to A : Accerbi, Paul & Joan I sigh with relief: My father’s still close; and if the phone book’s factual, so are all his relatives. I haven’t worked up the courage to contact him, but for now it’s enough to know that I could. On November 9, 1981—my fifteenth birthday—I begin a countdown for the thirty-six months I have to reach out to him before I might actually need to ask him for some help. I hope he’ll be proud. I’m getting solid grades in all my classes, but history and English are where I’m earning easy A’s. I make sure I tell Mr. Kelly and Mr. Maguire how hard I’m studying, and they both begin to discuss college with me. “I know you’re a foster kid,” Mr. Kelly says after class one day, “but don’t believe what anyone else tells you. There is a way out of your situation: It’s through continuing your education past high school.” Then they both co-opt my guidance counselor to get in on the cause. I feel torn for Camille’s sake. She also wants to go to college, but her senior class guidance counselor told her at the beginning of the year not to bother trying to get into the Fashion Institute of Technology, her dream school. “Concentrate on getting married and having babies,” her counselor told her. Unfortunately, that advice only further confused Camille because Ms. Harvey had recently told her that she was so detrimentally affected by how we grew up that she probably would never have a functional family of her own. Through all of my sophomore year, I watch Camille quietly prepare to move out of the Petermans’. The summer before my junior year, she moves out and lives with friends. She’s begun dating a handsome, gentle-spirited, blue-eyed boy named Frank, whom she met while out dancing, and she tells me that he’s starting to talk about marriage. See? I want to tell the social workers and counselors.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  When his queen visited the sick in the northern colonies every other Thursday, he would whisper to his court, “Find me a new and wonderful Unique for tonight,” and then he would begin washing and singing and braiding his enormous beard. When the candles were lit, he sat on his throne, wearing a tiny toga, and the Unique was brought in, holding a penis sandal made of heavy black ribbon. She had been bathed and scented and told strange stories about mountain zebras mating, and she had been closely instructed in the art of lacing the penis sandal. The king would ask her to kneel before him and he would open his legs, and she would lace the ancestral sandal around his swelling penis, telling him the new jokes that were circulating in his kingdom. He would laugh loudly, and his penis would become as hard as applewood and knotted with veins, whereupon he and the Unique would begin kissing eagerly on his throne. Then he would say, “Untie the sandal,” and with one pull, as she had been trained to do, the girl untied it, so that it hung dangling for a moment from his royal turgidity. “Stuff me full of your hot substance, oh mighty king, for I am Unique,” the girl would say, as she knelt over him on the throne, planting her hands on his enormous chest. And at the moment of their perfect union, King Bohuslav would seize his black braided beard and hold it to her mouth, whereupon she would clamp down on it to stifle her cries. Thus the memory of innumerable couplings entered his beard. This went on for almost ten years. Bohu’s beard by now had a huge double braid and looked like a loaf of pumpernickel challah. It was said by some in the court that if you held your ear to his beard, you could hear the pleasure cries of a thousand women. One night, though, a Unique of uncommon intelligence was lacing up the penis sandal. King Bohuslav groped for her breast and tried to kiss her, but suddenly she pulled out a large pair of shears and lopped off his beard with one powerful snip. King Bohuslav let out an agonized bellow and lost consciousness. The girl ran out the side door and hid carefully for a week in the hills with a friend. Meanwhile the prince had sent guardsmen and black dogs out in search of his braided beard. “How can we hide it?” asked the girl of her friend.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  “Hey.” The jowlboy leaned in, his vinegar mouth on the side of my cheek. “Don’t you ever say nothin’? Don’t you speak English?” He grabbed my shoulder and spun me to face him. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers. The boys crowded around me, sensing entertainment. I could smell their fresh-laundered clothes, the lavender and lilac in the softeners. They waited to see what would happen. When I did nothing but close my eyes, the boy slapped me. “Say something.” He shoved his fleshy nose against my blazed cheek. “Can’t you say even one thing?” The second slap came from above, from another boy. Bowlcut cupped my chin and steered my head toward him. “Say my name then.” He blinked, his eyelashes, long and blond, nearly nothing, quivered. “Like your mom did last night.” Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows. I willed myself into a severe obedience and said his name. I let their laughter enter me. “Again,” he said. “Kyle.” “Louder.” “Kyle.” My eyes still shut. “That’s a good little bitch.” Then, like a break in weather, a song came on the radio. “Hey, my cousin just went to their concert!” And like that it was over. Their shadows cleared above me. I let my nose drip with snot. I stared at my feet, at the shoes you bought me, the ones with red lights that flashed on the soles when I walked. My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere. — That night you were sitting on the couch with a towel wrapped around your head after your shower, a Marlboro Red smoldering in your hand. I stood there, holding myself. “Why?” You stared hard at the TV. You stabbed the cigarette into your teacup and I immediately regretted saying anything. “Why’d you let them do that? Don’t close your eyes. You’re not sleepy.” You put your eyes on me, blue smoke swirling between us. “What kind of boy would let them do that?” Smoke leaked from the corners of your mouth. “You did nothing.” You shrugged. “Just let them.” I thought of the window again, how everything seemed like a window, even the air between us. You grabbed my shoulders, your forehead pressed fast to my own. “Stop crying. You’re always crying!” You were so close I could smell the ash and toothpaste between your teeth. “Nobody touched you yet. Stop crying—I said stop, dammit!” The third slap that day flung my gaze to one side, the TV screen flashed before my head snapped back to face you. Your eyes darted back and forth across my face. Then you pulled me into you, my chin pressed hard to your shoulder.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  other courtiers, and the queen let him get away with it. She drew a line, however, when he asked for high political positions for himself and his friends, and then he would fly into a rage. It was humiliating to depend on the whims of a woman! But days later he would calm down and return to his charm offensive. Kept away from political power, he saw that his only chance for fame and glory was to lead an English army to victory. Elizabeth allowed him to lead some smaller military expeditions on the Continent. His record was mixed—he was brave but not very good at strategy. Then, in 1596, he persuaded her to let him lead a Drake- like raid on the Spanish coast. This time his boldness paid off, and the campaign was a success. To the English people, now somewhat drunk on their new status as a European power, Essex represented their new swagger, and he became their darling. Essex wanted more of this and kept asking the queen for another chance in battle. He attributed her reluctance to the many enemies he had made in the court, men who envied him. In 1598 news reached the court that a band of Irish rebels under Hugh O’Neill, 2nd Earl of Tyrone, was moving through English- controlled territory in Ireland and wreaking havoc. Now Essex offered his services to lead a force to crush Tyrone. He pleaded and persisted, and Elizabeth finally relented. Feeling confident of his powers over the queen, he requested for the campaign the largest army yet assembled by the English. Elizabeth granted his wish. For the first time, he felt truly appreciated by her. She did have a strange ability to make him want to please her. He expressed his gratitude and promised to finish the job quickly. Ireland would be the means for him to rise to the top. Once he was there, however, the troubles mounted. It was the winter of 1599; the weather was awful and the terrain hopelessly boggy. He could not advance his enormous force. The Irish were elusive and masters at guerrilla warfare. While the English remained hobbled in their camps, thousands of soldiers died from disease and just as many began to desert. Essex could only imagine his many enemies at court talking behind his back. He felt certain the queen and several ministers were somehow plotting his downfall. He had to test her again—he asked for reinforcements. The queen agreed, but she ordered him to finally find and fight Tyrone. Suddenly the pressure was too much, and he blamed the queen and her envious courtiers for trying to rush him. He felt humiliated by the position he was in, and by the end of the summer he had decided upon a plan that would put an end once and for all to his misery—he would secretly negotiate a truce with Tyrone, then return to England

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The words devastated Susan. On the spot, she knew she’d never forget them. But something about that incident steeled Susan’s spine. From the day Frank began dating her, he sensed an undergirding of strength in Susan. This girl, he thought, can handle anything. As high school drew to a close, Frank needed to decide on a future. He wanted to be a fighter pilot—a perfect way to combine flying and defense of his country. World War II had ended nearly a year earlier, but already tensions were building with the Soviet Union. No less an expert in looming tyranny than Winston Churchill now warned that “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe. Frank believed him. After scoring high on admissions exams, Frank enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the fall of 1946. Cadet Borman was all baby face and golden hair compared to his classmates. Many had already attended college, and at least half were veterans of World War II. In early fall, Borman tried out for the plebe (first year) football team. He’d been a star high school quarterback, but at this level he didn’t have the necessary arm strength. He joined anyway, as the varsity team’s assistant manager, in charge of gathering dirty socks and sweaty jockstraps. It was thrilling for Borman, who got to observe head coach Earl Blaik’s legendary intensity and to watch one of the young assistant coaches, Vince Lombardi, develop his own military coaching style. Borman fell in love with West Point. The rules, the order, the discipline—it all seemed designed to tune out distraction and allow a man to get on with what really mattered. As a kid, he’d already been different from his peers—he went after the things that were important to him, as if he were on a mission. At West Point, nothing mattered but the mission. He pledged himself to the academy’s motto—Duty, Honor, Country. It seemed to Borman that a person who believed in anything less wouldn’t get where he needed to go. All the while, Borman and Susan continued dating, if only by U.S. mail. She was still in Tucson, and they were separated by more than two thousand miles. West Point did not allow furloughs for plebes, even for holidays. Fearing he’d receive a breakup letter from Susan, Borman struck first, sending a letter to Susan saying they needed to cool their relationship. It only made sense, in light of their distance, his commitment to West Point, and the focus he’d need to make his new

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  “a male prostitute came around and told the most shameful stories about you, showing the bite marks to prove it.” When another enemy criticized Lucian’s misuse of a Greek word, his reply included a full- scale assault on this pseudosophist’s manliness. He accused his adversary of being penetrated, and nothing was left to innuendo in Lucian’s account of a revel in Italy, where his adversary had staged an obscene interpretation of the blinding of Polyphemus with a hired prostitute. While it is startling that cultivated men traffi cked in such scabrous diatribes, these were products of an agonistic intellectual culture and a public sexual ideology in which codes of masculinity were paramount. Th e charges diff er in eloquence, but not in substance, from many a graffi to scrawled by the less genteel inhabitants of Pompeii. Whereas pederasty was a type of passion, in the Roman world the man who wished to be loved by men was a type of person. Nothing brings this out quite so clearly as the astrological literature of the high empire. Th e Roman era was the fi rst great age of pop u lar astrology in the west. Study of the stars was a serious science; Ptolemy was, after Galen, the greatest scientist of his century. His handbook of astrology was meant for learned practitioners of the craft. Astrology was a predictive science not because it provided a  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N mystical insight into the future but rather because it could account for the individual’s physical and mental constitution. Sexual traits were determined by the composition of the soul. Ptolemy imagines an extraordinary array of sexual phenotypes; the stars could make people erotic, frigid, passionate for women, passionate for boys, aggressive, pathic, impotent, incestuous, adulterous, and so on. Desire for boys was an expression of the same underlying passion for girls, and it could exist in normal or excessive quantities. Th e bewildering logic of Ptolemy’s sexual schema becomes a little clearer in a chapter on “diseases of the soul.” Most affl ictions were said to be matters of excess or defi ciency in ordinary qualities. Sometimes, however, the imbalances were of such extreme degree that the person’s “whole nature” was “diseased.” Deformations in the passive part of the soul were manifested in abnormal sexual morphologies. Two commonplaces of ancient thought underlie Ptolemy’s doctrine. First, men are naturally active, women naturally passive. Second, the diff erence between men and women is one of degree rather than kind; masculinity and femininity stood on a single sliding scale. Th us, the pull of planetary forces might draw men and women alike toward either the masculine or the feminine end of the spectrum.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Actually in the bed, its wide featureless face absurdly crowned by a panama hat, lay a full-sized human effigy. It was only the rudimentary dummy that schoolboys make to suggest their sleeping forms in the near-darkness of an abandoned dorm, but in the light of a summer afternoon the bunched-up bedding and clothes of which it consisted were revealed as glaringly offensive. Its lolling pillow of a head was meant not to deceive but to warn. Looped around it, and displayed over the bedcover, was an Old Wykehamist tie, ineptly knotted, which made me remember, for a second, how my mother used to stand behind me at the mirror each morning to knot my tie when I was a little boy. Red rose petals were scattered artistically around, and where the heart of the effigy might have been there was a rust-red stain on the white bedspread that did resemble the colour of long-dried blood. I reached for a little bottle on the bedside table: it was vanilla essence. After we’d looked at it for a bit, I let Charles turn, and sit down on the edge of the bed, and then yanked the doll apart, casting its hat on to an armchair and rolling up the tie. ‘You recognise that tie,’ said Charles, with surprising detachment. I smiled. ‘What a pickle, eh?’ And indeed it was the general state of the room, in which a fight had clearly taken place, that had shocked me when I first entered it. The composition on the bed had been in bizarre, attentive contrast to the slewed pictures, toppled knick-knacks and pillaged drawers of the rest of the room. ‘I can’t take another of these melodramas,’ Charles said. Though I was deeply curious, I felt a strong reluctance to ask Charles what had taken place, or to probe the humiliation he had undergone. I helped him to take off his jacket and shoes, and laid him down on the pillow that had recently imitated his head. As if entranced, he was asleep within seconds. 5The first instalment of Charles’s papers was crammed into an old briefcase. Carrying it on the Underground, I felt like a young schoolmaster, taking home a bag bulging with books and essays. It was heavy, as I lolled in the crowded train, holding it by its charred leather handle, which had been strengthened with black insulating tape and was slightly sticky to the touch.