Jealousy

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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  All around me—at the post office where we had a box, in the general store, on docks, sailboats and water skis—young people with iodine-and-baby-oil tans, trim bodies and faultless teeth were having fun. A boat would glide across the setting sun, the shadow of a broad-shouldered teen inhabiting the white sail. At the village dock I’d look up from my outboard to see two young men walking past, just a sliver of untanned skin visible under the hems of their shorts. As I sat high up the hill on our porch swing, reading, I’d hear them joking as they sunned on the white diving raft below. I’d see them up close at the country club suppers—the boy with the strong chin and honey-brown hands, in blazer and white cotton pants, seating his mother, her nose like his but pointier, her hair as blond but fogged with gray. These were the women who wore navy blue and a single piece of woven yellow and pink gold, whose narrow feet were shod in blue and white spectators, who drove jaunty station wagons, who drank martinis on porches with rattan furniture and straw rugs and whose voices were lower than most men’s. Up close they smelled of gin, cocoa butter and lake water; we sometimes sat next to such a woman and her family at a communal table. Or I’d see these women at the little branch of Saks Fifth Avenue in a town not far away. They pretended they were bored or exasperated by their children’s comings and goings: “Don’t even bother to tell me when you’ll be home, Scott, you know you’ve never kept your word yet.” I saw it all and envied those sons their parents and those parents their sons.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She leaned down over it, exposing the tender white nape of her neck. He kissed her there before she knew he was present, and she jumped, screaming. “Shh,” he said as he crouched. His knee crackled like static. “You are a menace,” she hissed, her eyes flashing. “What are you looking at?” He sat down to take the weight off. “Old shit.” She handed him the book, the pages yellowed, little black disks tucked inside plastic wrap, neat type glued next to each one. “God, you stink.” “I had practice.” “That’s not practice smell,” she said. “That’s not practice smell at all.” He squeezed his legs together, thinking that might help, but she just snorted at him. “Where’s your phone?” “I don’t know, dead probably,” he said, looking but not looking at the album. “I called you,” she said. “After you left last night.” “Oh, well, it died, so.” Charles felt her staring at him very intently. There was no anger in the gaze. She knew the truth already, where he’d gone and what he’d done—there had been no mystery to it—but what she wanted was confirmation of the act. Say it: I went home with Lionel. “What?” Sophie leaned back onto her hands. She arched her back and let her head hang. “You’re such a shitty liar,” she said. “Why must you lie?” “I’m not.” “How boring, Charlie.” “I’m sorry for boring you.” “How was it?” “How was what?” “Jesus, Charlie.” Sophie stood up and stretched, at first one way and then another, making her body as long as she possibly could. She was full of lines. Everywhere she turned, a line, a new way forward. The tips of her fingers were on a line from her shoulder: arms straight, legs straight, toes pointed even in the large boots she wore. “It was fine,” Charles said at last. “That’s disappointing, isn’t it?” she said, and she wrapped her arm around herself and rotated her hips. “All that work for ‘fine.’ ” “All what work?” “Well, picking a fight with me. Finding out where he lived. Going there. All that work.” “We didn’t fight.” “Didn’t we?” she asked. She was looking out the window. That hadn’t been a fight. That hadn’t been an argument. They’d just been standing in the corner after Lionel left, talking quietly, and she had said: Go, you obviously want him. Go. And he had said, No, I don’t, stop being ridiculous. We’re here. We’re having a good time. They’d even left together, she and Charles.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  With rising appetite, Lo applied herself to the fruit. All at once I remembered the ingratiating grin of the Johnny nextdoor. I stepped out quickly. All cars had disappeared except his station wagon; his pregnant young wife was now getting into it with her baby and the other, more or less cancelled, child. “What’s the matter, where are you going?” cried Lo from the porch. I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her. I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I travelled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy. 17 Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make presents—presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper case: it had an elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. One glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes called for some reason “luizettas” that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept it—using it for a totally different purpose. In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I had decided—despite Lo’s visible annoyance—to spend another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her) and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the “luizetta” were safe. There, snugly wrapped in a white woollen scarf, lay a pocket automatic: caliber .32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a little under one ninth of Lolita’s length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily said in part: “Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well as on the person.” There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position, thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb. I was now glad I had it with me—and even more glad that I had learned to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte’s glass lake.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Across the room, Charles had put his arms around Sophie. The two of them were looking at Lionel. Charles had leaned down to say something into her ear, and Lionel watched her eyes narrow fractionally. But then Sophie turned her head and whispered something back to Charles, and the two of them seemed to be chuckling. Lionel wished that the food was still on the floor. Then at least he’d have something to do with himself. Instead, he stood up and made his way to the kitchen. Maybe he could make himself useful, get started on the dishes. Charles followed him, and then it was the two of them at the host’s sink. More of the small fried fish lay on a plate nearby. Charles picked one up and chewed on its crispy fins. “You didn’t have to do that,” Lionel said. “I could have cleaned it up.” “Figured it was half my mess, too.” “Sophie seems nice.” Lionel ran water into a plastic cup. The sink was too full for him to want to actually help out. He’d lost his nerve or his charitable impulse or both. “She’s something else,” Charles said. Lionel was about to ask why Charles had followed him into the kitchen and why he was standing so close, when the host rounded the corner. He was a little surprised to see the two of them there, it was obvious, but he recovered like a cat shifting its weight mid-fall, and he reached around Charles to pull the fridge open. “You boys want some wine?” “None for me,” Charles said, drawing his fingers cross his neck in prohibition. “I’ll have some,” Lionel said. The host pulled a bottle of rosé from the fridge, then reached down by Lionel, right in front of his crotch, and pulled a drawer open. He extracted a pair of kitchen shears and winked at Lionel before he pushed the drawer shut, his thumb tracing the outline of Lionel’s dick. Lionel jumped at the contact though it was brief. It felt somehow like a threat. Or a promise. The host snipped the cage over the cork and pulled it free with a pop that made Lionel’s mouth water. He could almost taste the wine in the sound. Charles stood back chewing his fish and watching as the host made a big production of pouring Lionel a glass and handing it to him. “Cheers,” the host said. “Cheers.” “Are you going to congratulate me?” “Sure. Congratulations. On what?” “I’m defending right before break,” he said. “I’m a free man.” “That would explain the potluck,” Lionel said. The host nodded as he poured his wine into a mason jar. They toasted. “Congratulations. You deserve it.” The host smiled. His teeth were very white and straight in a way that suggested that they had also been very expensive. The wine was good, though there was something metallic to it.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Voices in the hall. Alek rolled onto his side, could smell the fresh polish of the floor. He pushed himself up, rolled his shoulders, and spread his legs. He leaned forward. The door slid open—Mats and Octavius came into the room. They were talking loudly about something, about someone, and Alek tried not to listen, but their voices came closer and closer until the two of them were standing over him. Octavius’s purple-black skin almost gleamed. Mats was shorter than Octavius, who was a giant for a dancer, a slash of a man. They wore sweaters from East Coast colleges that neither had attended, hand-me-downs from their parents. Mats in a blue Yale sweater and Octavius in a crimson Harvard sweatshirt. They’d known each other since they were little boys and had attended the same prep schools. Their parents knew one another, belonged to the same African American Ivy League associations. Mats and Octavius were as close as one could come to an arranged marriage in this country. The two of them were in love with each other, but seemed not to know it yet, or so Alek thought. Mainly because they never seemed to be in love with each other at the same time, seemed to always be pointed past one another. In the fall, Mats could think of nothing other than Octavius, his kindness, his body, his winning shyness. But that fall, Octavius was in love with a white boy named James from one of his poetry seminars. And in the spring, Mats had moved on to Charles, and Octavius fell in love with the space left when Mats lost interest. That is, Octavius found Mats to be indifferent to him for the first time in his life, so he reacted by falling deeply in love with him. They each, in different ways and on different days, spoke to Alek about the other. Octavius is so stupid. Why doesn’t he get it? I’m in his room all the time. I’m lying here, half naked, basically wide open to him, and he does nothing, nothing. Why? Or, Mats is so cold to me these days. Why is he like this? He’s always gone now. He’s always out. What’s going on with him and Charles? “Can you believe it?” “Charlie and Sophie, you mean?” Alek asked, leaning back on his palms. He flexed his leg from left to right. Mats sat down next to him and started to stretch, too. Octavius took the spot on the other side of Alek. “They’re back together,” Mats said over Alek’s head to Octavius, who let out a whistle. “I mean, it was pretty obvious, but consider it confirmed.” “I guess some people can’t make up their minds,” Alek said flatly, meaning nothing at all by it, but then Mats turned to look at him with a gleaming hurt in his eyes, and he realized he’d strayed too close to the bone. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In my choice of Beardsley I was guided not only by the fact of there being a comparatively sedate school for girls located there, but also by the presence of the women’s college. In my desire to get myself casé, to attach myself somehow to some patterned surface which my stripes would blend with, I thought of a man I knew in the department of French at Beardsley College; he was good enough to use my textbook in his classes and had attempted to get me over once to deliver a lecture. I had no intention of doing so, since, as I have once remarked in the course of these confessions, there are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe, the coffin of coarse female flesh within which my nymphets are buried alive); but I did crave for a label, a background, and a simulacrum, and, as presently will become clear, there was a reason, a rather zany reason, why old Gaston Godin’s company would be particularly safe. Finally, there was the money question. My income was cracking under the strain of our joy-ride. True, I clung to the cheaper motor courts; but every now and then, there would be a loud hotel de luxe, or a pretentious dude ranch, to mutilate our budget; staggering sums, moreover, were expended on sightseeing and Lo’s clothes, and the old Haze bus, although a still vigorous and very devoted machine, necessitated numerous minor and major repairs. In one of our strip maps that has happened to survive among the papers which the authorities have so kindly allowed me to use for the purpose of writing my statement, I find some jottings that help me compute the following. During that extravagant year 1947–1948, August to August, lodgings and food cost us around 5,500 dollars; gas, oil and repairs, 1,234, and various extras almost as much; so that during about 150 days of actual motion (we covered about 27,000 miles!) plus some 200 days of interpolated standstills, this modest rentier spent around 8,000 dollars, or better say 10,000 because, unpractical as I am, I have surely forgotten a number of items. And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad’s, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour hooks, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.

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

  The story of Thais is dominated by its heroine’s debasement. Though her life is said to have fulfilled the dictum “The prostitutes and publicans will precede you into the kingdom of heaven,” the gospel expression retains none of its original compassion for society’s outcasts. The Life of Thais is valuable because it allows us to watch the translation of a primitive monastic tale into the symbolic world of classical fiction. It already reveals the way that new configurations of religion, society, and the body fueled the literary imagination. Because the Life of Thais is aesthetically clumsy, its author’s handiwork is nakedly obvious. The other three examples of the subgenre are more artful, and they reveal a deeper mastery of the medium and its potential. Among the earliest competitors to the Life of Thais is the story of Pelagia, a prostitute and actress of Antioch. Thanks only to the brief aside in the sermon of Chrysostom do we know that there is a kernel of historicity in the story of a glamorous celebrity who converted to the ascetic life. We cannot say how far legendary material had accreted around her by the time the author of the life, sometime in the fifth century, elaborated the written version that survives. We can only say that the author, who purports to be a deacon named Jacob, was a highly literate spirit, one of those soldiers of Christian culture who remade the ancient tradition in a Christian mold.59 The Life of Pelagia is highly conscious of its status as an antiromance. It counterposes its hero, an ascetic bishop named Nonnos, and its heroine, the redoubtable Pelagia, in the symmetrical fashion of the Greek novel. The story begins as Nonnos and other bishops have gathered at Antioch at the behest of the bishop of the great city. One day the visitors were sitting together outside the shrine of the martyr Julian when Pelagia, “first lady of the Antiochene stage,” rode by with her cortege. No detail of the fantasia is omitted. Pelagia rides on a donkey, head uncovered, attended by a great throng of slaves, all of whom are bedecked with gold, gems, and pearls. The aromatics of her passing entourage could stun the unwary soul. The bishops avert their gaze, except for Nonnos, who holds her in his mind with his eyes. He is struck by her beauty, but his interest is not prurient. He is fired with envy by the care she takes to make herself pleasing to men; he wishes he could take such care to prepare his soul for God. Her glorious physical charms, in good Platonic fashion, remind Nonnos of the “inconceivable beauty” (to amēchanon kallos) at which even the cherubim dare not gaze, which the Christian will find in heaven!60

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Naturally, I had to be always wary, fully realizing, in my lucid jealousy, the danger of those dazzling romps. I had only to turn away for a moment—to walk, say, a few steps in order to see if our cabin was at last ready after the morning change of linen—and Lo and Behold, upon returning, I would find the former, les yeux perdus, dipping and kicking her long-toed feet in the water on the stone edge of which she lolled, while, on either side of her, there crouched a brun adolescent whom her russet beauty and the quicksilver in the baby folds of her stomach were sure to cause to se tordre—oh Baudelaire!—in recurrent dreams for months to come.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The speech of the one and the other’s countenance made me long to know their names, and question I made of them mingled with prayers: wherefore the spirit that first snake to me, began again: “Thou wouldst that I condescen in doing that for thee which thou wilt not do for me; but since God wills that so much of his grace shine forth in thee, I will not be chary with thee; therefore know that I am Guido del Duca. My blood was so inflamed with envy, that if I had seen a man make him glad, thou wouldst have seen me suffused with lividness. Of my sowing such straw I reap. O human folk, why set the heart there where exclusion of partnership is necessary? 5 This is Rinier; this is the glory and the honour of the House of Calboli, where none since hath made himself heir of his worth. 6 And not only his blood between the Po and the mountains, and the seashore and the Reno, is stripped of the good required of truth and chivalry, for inside these boundaries is choked with poisonous growths, so that tardily now would they be rooted out by cultivation. Where is the good Lizio, and Arrigo Mainardi, Pier Traversaro and Guido di Carpigna? O ye Romagnols turned to bastards! When in Bologna shall a Fabbro take root again? when in Faenza a Bernardin di Fosco, noble scion of a lowly plant?

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  In 1979, when Judy was still living in Santa Fe, Klein wrote her a long letter in which she confessed, good-naturedly, that she was terribly jealous of Forever because she thought it was terrific, and also because she had wanted to be the first author to write so frankly about teen sex. In the same letter, she admitted that she hadn’t liked Wifey and thought Judy had shortchanged Sandy by having her stay with Norman. Fleissner laughed at this and concurred that yes, her mother could be blunt. “It’s funny, she could be very shy with people that she didn’t know. She was definitely not shy in print. I would say she was not at all shy with people she was close to,” she said. If Klein—who published over thirty novels during the course of her career—felt any friendly competition with Judy, it likely fueled 1977’s It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me , which is her version of Forever. The narrator is Jody Epstein, a rising high school senior who meets green-eyed, unassuming Lyle Alexander over the summer when they’re both working as techs at Sloan Kettering. Unlike Jody, Lyle is new to New York City, having moved from Ohio to live with his sister and brother-in-law after his parents died in a car accident. Where Jody is outgoing, Lyle is quiet and reticent. Their romance blossoms over tennis. Jody, who is Jewish, recognizes herself as a “type” that’s nonetheless exotic to Midwesterner Lyle. “In New York girls like me are a dime a dozen,” she tells him. When he asks her to elaborate, she flippantly describes herself as “sort of aggressive, but insecure. We’ll all end up being doctors and lawyers and being analyzed for nine million years.” Jody is nothing at all like Krii, except that they both come from complicated homes. Jody’s parents are divorced, and her dad lives in Scarsdale with his new wife and their young children. She lives with her brother, her mother, and her mom’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Elliot, who is still technically married to his ex. The closest thing Jody has to a fond father figure is her mother’s second husband, Philip, a physicist who teaches at Columbia. Philip is who she calls when she needs a nonjudgmental ear. Like Forever , It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me hits on a range of taboo topics: premarital sex, contraception, rape, and abortion. But Klein’s most innovative spin on the teen romance novel lies in Jody and Lyle’s dynamic—she’s sexually experienced and he isn’t. Because Lyle is a virgin, he takes sex more seriously than she does, at least initially. As Jody tells us, she’s made out with boys before “out of sheer horniness,” and she lost her virginity with her previous boyfriend. But Lyle wants his first time to be special, for both of them.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The light gave the couple long, important shadows. All around me—at the post office where we had a box, in the general store, on docks, sailboats and water skis—young people with iodine-and-baby-oil tans, trim bodies and faultless teeth were having fun. A boat would glide across the setting sun, the shadow of a broad-shouldered teen inhabiting the white sail. At the village dock I’d look up from my outboard to see two young men walking past, just a sliver of untanned skin visible under the hems of their shorts. As I sat high up the hill on our porch swing, reading, I’d hear them joking as they sunned on the white diving raft below. I’d see them up close at the country club suppers—the boy with the strong chin and honey-brown hands, in blazer and white cotton pants, seating his mother, her nose like his but pointier, her hair as blond but fogged with gray. These were the women who wore navy blue and a single piece of woven yellow and pink gold, whose narrow feet were shod in blue and white spectators, who drove jaunty station wagons, who drank martinis on porches with rattan furniture and straw rugs and whose voices were lower than most men’s. Up close they smelled of gin, cocoa butter and lake water; we sometimes sat next to such a woman and her family at a communal table. Or I’d see these women at the little branch of Saks Fifth Avenue in a town not far away. They pretended they were bored or exasperated by their children’s comings and goings: “Don’t even bother to tell me when you’ll be home, Scott, you know you’ve never kept your word yet.” I saw it all and envied those sons their parents and those parents their sons. My father was never tan. He had a huge belly; his glasses weren’t horn-rim or translucent pink plastic (the two acceptable styles) but black with bronze metallic wings; he seldom drank cocktails; he didn’t act as if he were onstage—he had no attractive affectations. Although my stepmother had risen socially as high as one could rise in that world, she’d done so on her own. My father never took her anywhere; she was as free as a spinster and as respectable as a matron. When she was with us at the cottage during the summer, she forgot about society and helped my father with his steps or his painting, she read as much as I did, arranged for good meals and rusticated.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When the god of Shepherds had spoken these words, she gave no answer, but made reverence to him as to a god, and so departed. After that Psyches had gone a little way, she fortuned unawares to come to a city where the husband of one of her Sisters did dwell. Which when Psyches did understand, shee caused that her sister had knowledge of her comming, and so they met together, and after great embracing and salutation, the sister of Psyches demaunded the cause of her travell thither. Marry (quoth she) doe you not remember the counsell you gave me, whereby you would that I should kill the beast which under colour of my husband did lie with mee every night? You shall understand, that as soone as I brought forth the lampe to see and behold his shape, I perceived that he was the sonne of Venus, even Cupid himselfe that lay with mee. Then I being stricken with great pleasure, and desirous to embrace him, could not thoroughly asswage my delight, but alas by evill ill chance the oyle of the lampe fortuned to fall on his shoulder which caused him to awake, and seeing me armed with fire and weapons, gan say, How darest thou be so bold to doe so great a mischiefe? Depart from me and take such things as thou didst bring: for I will have thy sister (and named you) to my wife, and she shall be placed in thy felicity, and by and by hee commaunded Zephyrus to carry me away from the bounds of his house. Psyches had scantly finished her tale but her sister pierced with the pricke of carnall desire and wicked envy ran home, and feigning to her husband that she had heard word of the death of her parents tooke shipping and came to the mountaine. And although there blew a contrary winde, yet being brought in a vaine hope shee cried O Cupid take me a more worthy wife, and thou Zephyrus beare downe thy mistresse, and so she cast her selfe headlong from the mountaine: but shee fell not into the valley neither alive nor dead, for all the members and parts of her body were torne amongst the rockes, wherby she was made prey unto the birds and wild beasts, as she worthily deserved. Neither was the vengeance of the other delayed, for Psyches travelling in that country, fortuned to come to another city where her other sister did dwel; to whom when shee had declared all such things as she told to her other sister shee ran likewise unto the rock and was slaine in like sort. Then Psyches travelled about in the countrey to seeke her husband Cupid, but he was gotten into his mothers chamber and there bewailed the sorrowful wound which he caught by the oyle of a burning lamp.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  All around me—at the post office where we had a box, in the general store, on docks, sailboats and water skis—young people with iodine-and-baby-oil tans, trim bodies and faultless teeth were having fun. A boat would glide across the setting sun, the shadow of a broad-shouldered teen inhabiting the white sail. At the village dock I’d look up from my outboard to see two young men walking past, just a sliver of untanned skin visible under the hems of their shorts. As I sat high up the hill on our porch swing, reading, I’d hear them joking as they sunned on the white diving raft below. I’d see them up close at the country club suppers—the boy with the strong chin and honey-brown hands, in blazer and white cotton pants, seating his mother, her nose like his but pointier, her hair as blond but fogged with gray. These were the women who wore navy blue and a single piece of woven yellow and pink gold, whose narrow feet were shod in blue and white spectators, who drove jaunty station wagons, who drank martinis on porches with rattan furniture and straw rugs and whose voices were lower than most men’s. Up close they smelled of gin, cocoa butter and lake water; we sometimes sat next to such a woman and her family at a communal table. Or I’d see these women at the little branch of Saks Fifth Avenue in a town not far away. They pretended they were bored or exasperated by their children’s comings and goings: “Don’t even bother to tell me when you’ll be home, Scott, you know you’ve never kept your word yet.” I saw it all and envied those sons their parents and those parents their sons.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Thrasyllus, an unsuccessful suitor for the hand of Charite, 345 ; accompanies Tlepolemus to the chase, 349; treacherously kills him, 353; declares his unholy love to Charite, 357 ; beguiled by her, 365 ; blinded, kills himself, 369 Tlepolemus, espoused to Charite, 183 ; disguised as a robber (tak- ing the name of Haemus), comes to rescue her from the robber- camp, 305; is accepted as the robbers’ captain, 311; drugs their wine, 319; destroys the entire band and regains his wife, 321; treacherously killed by Thrasyllus while hunting, 353 ; appears to Charite in a dream and tells her of his murder, 359 ; is fully avenged, 367 Tombs, used by robbers to hide stolen treasure, 171 Tortoise, man under bed compared to, 21 Torture, use of to discover the truth in criminal cases, 113, 301, 491, A0 0 (Of 528; among robbers, 295; in- flieted by master on slave, 381 Tower, helps Psyche in her difficult task of fetching some of Proser- pine's beauty from Hell, 273 Tricks taught to a performing ass, 503 Tristities, Sadness, one of Venus’ servants, 261 Tritons, attend Venus, 193 Tub, the smith’s story of a, 409 seq. ULYSSES, 71, 421; forsakes Calyp- 80, 23; preferred to Ajax, 535 Usury, evil reputation of, 37 ' VENISON, substitute for, 397 Venus, 63, 541, 547 ; at judgement of Paris, 529 seq. ; assea goddess, 75,191, 529; worship neglected for Psyche, 187 ; she decides on vengeance, 189; her jealousy to beavoided,197; hearsthat Cupid, to whom she had entrusted the punishment of Psyche, has fallen in love with her, 241 ; bids Mer- cury proclaim a reward for the discovery of the runaway, 259; finds Psyche, beats her, and sets her various seemingly impossible tasks, 262; persuaded by Jupiter to consent to marriage of Cupid and Psyche, 283 Vestius (al. Dositheus, Clytius), one of Lucius' old masters at the University of Athens, 43 Victory, statue of, 53 Virgil quoted, 475 Vulean, 63, 257, 283 WATER a test for madness in animals, 405 Weasel, a form assumed by witches, 87 Whibley, Charles, criticism of Apuleius and Adlington, ix Whistling by the master of the house to announce his return, 407 607 THEC ^Y LIBRARY CLAREMONT, CALIF. IN DEX Wine: “sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus,” 64, 73 Wine-drinking a vice of women, 409, 423 ; especially old women, 155 , Wine-skins, Lucius' the, 99, 105 Wolves, travellers' fear of, 371 fipht with Wounds, how to relieve and cure, 377 ZACYNTHUS, 309 Zatchlas, an Egyptian soothsayer, 91 Zephyrus, 199, 209 seq., 239 Zygia, an epithet of Juno, 255 THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY. VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED Latin Authors. AENEAS TACTICUS, ASCLEPIODOTUS AND ONASANDER, Trans. by the Illinois Club. ; APULEIUS. The Colden Ass (Metamorphoses), Trans. by W. Adlington (1566). Revised by S, Gaselee. (2nd Impression), AUSONIUS. Trans. by H. G. Evelyn White. 2 Vols, BOETHIUS: TRACTS AND DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSO-

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  19A few words more about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a bad accident is to happen quite soon). I had been always aware of the possessive streak in her, but I never thought she would be so crazily jealous of anything in my life that had not been she. She showed a fierce insatiable curiosity for my past. She desired me to resuscitate all my loves so that she might make me insult them, and trample upon them, and revoke them apostately and totally, thus destroying my past. She made me tell her about my marriage to Valeria, who was of course a scream; but I also had to invent, or to pad atrociously, a long series of mistresses for Charlotte’s morbid delectation. To keep her happy, I had to present her with an illustrated catalogue of them, all nicely differentiated, according to the rules of those American ads where schoolchildren are pictured in a subtle ratio of races, with one—only one, but as cute as they make them—chocolate-colored round-eyed little lad, almost in the very middle of the front row. So I presented my women, and had them smile and sway—the languorous blond, the fiery brunette, the sensual copperhead—as if on parade in a bordello. The more popular and platitudinous I made them, the more Mrs. Humbert was pleased with the show. Never in my life had I confessed so much or received so many confessions. The sincerity and artlessness with which she discussed what she called her “love-life,” from first necking to connubial catch-as-catch-can, were, ethically, in striking contrast with my glib compositions, but technically the two sets were congeneric since both were affected by the same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression. I was considerably amused by certain remarkable sexual habits that the good Harold Haze had had according to Charlotte who thought my mirth improper; but otherwise her autobiography was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would have been. I never saw a healthier woman than she, despite thinning diets. Of my Lolita she seldom spoke—more seldom, in fact, than she did of the blurred, blond male baby whose photograph to the exclusion of all others adorned our bleak bedroom. In one of her tasteless reveries, she predicted that the dead infant’s soul would return to earth in the form of the child she would bear in her present wedlock. And although I felt no special urge to supply the Humbert line with a replica of Harold’s production (Lolita, with an incestuous thrill, I had grown to regard as my child), it occurred to me that a prolonged confinement, with a nice Caesarean operation and other complications in a safe maternity ward sometime next spring, would give me a chance to be alone with my Lolita for weeks, perhaps—and gorge the limp nymphet with sleeping pills.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  We had rows, minor and major. The biggest ones we had took place: at Lace work Cabins, Virginia; on Park Avenue, Little Rock, near a school; on Milner Pass, 10,759 feet high, in Colorado; at the corner of Seventh Street and Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona; on Third Street, Los Angeles, because the tickets to some studio or other were sold out; at a motel called Poplar Shade in Utah, where six pubescent trees were scarcely taller than my Lolita, and where she asked, à propos de rien, how long did I think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together and never behaving like ordinary people? On N. Broadway, Burns, Oregon, corner of W. Washington, facing Safeway, a grocery. In some little town in the Sun Valley of Idaho, before a brick hotel, pale and flushed bricks nicely mixed, with, opposite, a poplar playing its liquid shadows all over the local Honor Roll. In a sage brush wilderness, between Pinedale and Farson. Somewhere in Nebraska, on Main Street, near the First National Bank, established 1889, with a view of a railway crossing in the vista of the street, and beyond that the white organ pipes of a multiple silo. And on McEwen St., corner of Wheaton Ave., in a Michigan town bearing his first name. We came to know the curious roadside species, Hitchhiking Man, Homo pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and forms: the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki’s viatic appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly as the name of the famous college arching across the front of his sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings. “Let’s take him,” Lo would often plead, rubbing her knees together in a way she had, as some particularly disgusting pollex, some man of my age and shoulder breadth, with the face à claques of an unemployed actor, walked backwards, practically in the path of our car.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Oh, I had to keep a very sharp eye on Lo, little limp Lo! Owing perhaps to constant amorous exercise, she radiated, despite her very childish appearance, some special languorous glow which threw garage fellows, hotel pages, vacationists, goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools, into fits of concupiscence which might have tickled my pride, had it not incensed my jealousy. For little Lo was aware of that glow of hers, and I would often catch her coulant un regard in the direction of some amiable male, some grease monkey, with a sinewy golden-brown forearm and watch-braceleted wrist, and hardly had I turned my back to go and buy this very Lo a lollipop, than I would hear her and the fair mechanic burst into a perfect love song of wisecracks. When, during our longer stops, I would relax after a particularly violent morning in bed, and out of the goodness of my lulled heart allow her—indulgent Hum!—to visit the rose garden or children’s library across the street with a motor court neighbor’s plain little Mary and Mary’s eight-year-old brother, Lo would come back an hour late, with barefoot Mary trailing far behind, and the little boy metamorphosed into two gangling, golden-haired high school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhea. The reader may well imagine what I answered my pet when—rather uncertainly, I admit—she would ask me if she could go with Carl and Al here to the roller-skating rink. I remember the first time, a dusty windy afternoon, I did let her go to one such rink. Cruelly she said it would be no fun if I accompanied her, since that time of day was reserved for teenagers. We wrangled out a compromise: I remained in the car, among other (empty) cars with their noses to the canvas-topped open-air rink, where some fifty young people, many in pairs, were endlessly rolling round and round to mechanical music, and the wind silvered the trees. Dolly wore blue jeans and white high shoes, as most of the other girls did. I kept counting the revolutions of the rolling crowd—and suddenly she was missing. When she rolled past again, she was together with three hoodlums whom I had heard analyze a moment before the girl skaters from the outside—and jeer at a lovely leggy young thing who had arrived clad in red shorts instead of those jeans or slacks.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When I got back to our Passage, the celebrations had already begun. I was disappointed, though my pockets were stuffed with money. Our apartment, emptied of its furniture, was full of guests who were calling on my mother before going on to the party on the terrace. Whatever compliments were made had to be very carefully worded, and many guests said outright that the twins were a pain in the eye. But they winked toward my mother while making such statements for they were merely a trick to fool the Evil Eye. To have two children at one and the same time might easily arouse murderous envies and the ill will of the demons who had thereby been defied. The women spat on the floor, assured everyone loudly that nobody on earth would want to have such little runts; after which they laughed silently among themselves, the only human witnesses. As for me, I felt that the babies really didn’t deserve so much attention. They were still as ugly, red, and round as blood sausages, with mouths that took up all their gnomelike faces. My mother, unable to control her expressions, didn’t seem happy. My father had refused to ask Uncle Aroun to be the godfather. Uncle Aroun had already enjoyed the honor of being my own godfather, but he had failed after that to show any generosity. What is the use of such a godfather? Offended and especially disappointed at having failed to obtain a blessing that always brings children to the one who accepts it, my uncle had then decided not to attend the ceremony. He had gone away, his head thrust forward, far ahead of him like that of a hasty giraffe. My mother wept bitter tears as a result of this, and my father lost his temper once more over his wife’s partiality for her own family. I could feel jealousy tearing at my heart as I sat and waited for my share of the congratulations, my hair glued flat with brilliantine, swarthy and thin and goatlike in my dark suit. But most of our guests seemed to forget that our party was in my honor too. Twins are indeed an unusual event. I made fun of their absurd play in front of the babies as they tried to make them laugh, rolling their eyes like clowns and grunting. A few guests remembered me too and uttered some kind remarks, but I felt, quite unjustly, that they were being hypocritical or condescending.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  To my surprise I found her dressed. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in slacks and T-shirt, and was looking at me as if she could not quite place me. The frank soft shape of her small breasts was brought out rather than blurred by the limpness of her thin shirt, and this frankness irritated me. She had not washed; yet her mouth was freshly though smudgily painted, and her broad teeth glistened like wine-tinged ivory, or pinkish poker chips. And there she sat, hands clasped in her lap, and dreamily brimmed with a diabolical glow that had no relation to me whatever. I plumped down my heavy paper bag and stood staring at the bare ankles of her sandaled feet, then at her silly face, then again at her sinful feet. “You’ve been out,” I said (the sandals were filthy with gravel). “I just got up,” she replied, and added upon intercepting my downward glance: “Went out for a sec. Wanted to see if you were coming back.” She became aware of the bananas and uncoiled herself table-ward. What special suspicion could I have? None indeed—but those muddy, moony eyes of hers, that singular warmth emanating from her! I said nothing. I looked at the road meandering so distinctly within the frame of the window … Anybody wishing to betray my trust would have found it a splendid lookout. With rising appetite, Lo applied herself to the fruit. All at once I remembered the ingratiating grin of the Johnny nextdoor. I stepped out quickly. All cars had disappeared except his station wagon; his pregnant young wife was now getting into it with her baby and the other, more or less cancelled, child. “What’s the matter, where are you going?” cried Lo from the porch. I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her. I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I travelled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy. 17Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make presents—presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper case: it had an elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. One glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes called for some reason “luizettas” that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere, and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept it—using it for a totally different purpose.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "Two brothers who love each other so much that they look alike . . . there's one of those veils. There it is. It's moving, gently, unfurled by two naked arms with closed fists, clenched tight inside me. And now it is like a coil. It is sliding. Another one comes to meet it, and it is black too, but of a different texture. And this new veil means : two brothers who look so alike that they love each other . . . And it, too, slides down into the vat, covers the other one . . . No, it is the same one, only turned over . . . Another pjece of material, of another shade of black. And it means : I love one of the brothers, only one . . . Another veil : If I love one of the brothers, I love the other one, too· . . . I have to go into all this, I have to put my finger on it. But it's impossible to get them out. Do I love Robert? I certainly do, or we wouldn't have stayed together these six months. But that, evidently, doesn't mean a thing. I love Robert. I don't love Jo. Why not? Perhaps I do. They adore each other. Nothing I can do about that. They adore each other: does that mean they make love, as well? But where? Where? They're never together. But that's just it, they take care not to be seen. Where then? In other regions . . . And they've both had that boy . . . That kid, he's their love-boy . . . I'm an idiot, what does one of those dresses matter compared to my veils-but I better give Germaine a piece of my mind for sweeping the floor with her dress. It is a matter of principle. How is it that a woman like me never gets to experience a little · peace and quiet?" Madame Lysiane had waited for love a long time. Males had never excited her a great deal. Only after she had turned fortv 217 I QUERELLE she developed an appetite for muscular young men . But exactly at a time when she could have achieved happiness, she began to be consumed by a jealousy she was unable to demonstrate to anyone. No 9ne would have understood her. She loved Robert. \Vhen she thought of his hair, the nape of his neck, his thighs, her nipples hardened as they were moving forward to their reunion with the evoked image, and all day long, in the feverish joy of an only barely restrained desire, Madame Lysiane prepared herself for nights of love. Her man! Robert was her man.