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 Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  63 well as that of her sons and her husband, Theseus. Theseus believes Phaedra’s note and curses his son; this leads to Hippolytus’s death. In the last scene of the play, the goddess Artemis tries to “comfort” Hippolytus by saying that the next time Aphrodite loves a human, Artemis will destroy him. The picture of divinity portrayed by Euripides’s late play The Bacchae is equally disturbing. This play focuses on Dionysus, telling the story of his vengeance against members of his family who do not believe in his divinity. Dionysus is unique among the Olympian gods in being the son of a god (Zeus) and a human mother (Semele). Normally, the offspring of a god-human union is a human being. However, Semele died while carrying Dionysus when the jealous Hera tricked her into being incinerated by the sight of Zeus in his full glory. Zeus rescued the unborn infant by implanting it in his own thigh, and Dionysus was born a god, not a human. However, Semele’s sisters did not believe that Zeus had been her lover. Thus, they did not believe that there was any such god as Dionysus. Bacchae depicts Dionysus’s return to his mother’s town, Thebes, and the vengeance he takes on his unbelieving relatives. The king of Thebes, Pentheus, is Dionysus’s cousin. Pentheus is a young king; his grandfather Cadmus (Semele’s father) had abdicated in his favor. Dionysus’s vengeance begins with driving all the women of Thebes mad. Pentheus’s attempt to counteract the women’s madness leads to his own destruction by Dionysus. Dionysus, who speaks the play’s prologue, is disguised as a human priest. He has come to Thebes for two main purposes: to punish his relatives for disbelieving in him and dishonoring his mother’s memory and to establish his worship. He identi fi es himself to the audience but says he is in disguise as a priest of Dionysus. The audience, therefore, knows that this “priest” is the god himself; the other characters in the play do not know that. When the gods are personifi cations of realities of nature, atheism, in the sense of disbelief in such gods, is almost a cognitive impossibility.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Phil asked. ‘I’m into you, darling.’ ‘Yeah, but …’ ‘You know it’s illegal, our affair. Officially, I can’t touch you for another three years.’ ‘Christ,’ he said, as if that altered everything, and paced around the room. ‘No, I think kids can be quite something. After fourteen or so. I mean I wouldn’t touch them when they were really small …’ ‘No—but a little chap who’s already got a big donger on him gets a hard-on all the time, doesn’t know what to do with this thing that’s taking over his life—that’s quite something, as you say.’ Phil grinned and blushed. One of the reasons he loved me was that I put these things into words, legitimised them just as I was most risqué. He was encouraged by this franc-parler to explore the new possibilities of talk, sometimes in so reckless a way that I thought he must be making things up. The men at the Corry came in for particular attention. ‘I really dig that Pete/Alan/Nigel/Guy’, he would quietly celebrate as we dressed after a shower, or emerged onto the evening streets again. The wonderfully handsome, virile and heterosexual Maurice seemed to excite him in particular. ‘What a pity he’s straight , man,’ Phil would say, with charming and earnest shakings of the head. It was a touching advertisement for free speech. But at the same time it caused me a twist of jealousy. If he was getting into this kind of mood about Alan, Nigel and the rest, who knows what might not happen when I wasn’t there to receive his confidences but Pete or Guy in person was, with queeny smile, easy tumescence and buttock-appraising eye? In the pool one evening I’d introduced him to James, who had clearly fallen parasitically for him at once; but I saw no danger there. There were more reckless propositioners, like the laid-back Ecuadorian Carlos with his foot-long Negroni sausage of a dick; his (successful) opener to me had been: ‘Boy, you got the nicest dick I ever see’—a gambit only really useful to those who are pretty well set up themselves. And a few days ago, as we were all drying, I had heard him, forgetful or careless of this, say to Phil: ‘Hey, you got a really hot ass, boy,’ and watched Phil redden and ignore him—and say nothing of it to me. I probably needn’t have worried. We were having such a good time ourselves. Most of the days I spent at the hotel, where I got to know Pino and Benito and Celso and the others. Late evenings and nights were passed in sleep and sex in that transitory little attic room with its picture of Ludlow from the air. Phil would sleep until eleven or so each morning, but the fabulous weather went on and for the heat of the day until we hit the Corry at six, we were up on the roof in the sun.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxviii. 1) What things do the Jews now, and know not what they do; thinking, like men in the dark, that they are going the right road, while they are taking directly the wrong one. Wherefore He adds, While ye have the light, believe in the light. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. lii) i. e. While ye have any truth, believe in the truth, that ye may be born again of the truth: That ye may be the children of the light. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxviii) i. e. My children. In the beginning of the Gospel it is said, Born of God, (c. 1:13) i. e. of the Father. But here He Himself is the Begetter. The same act is the act both of Father and Son. These things spake Jesus, and departed, and did hide Himself from them. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. lii) Not from those which began to believe in and love Him, but from those who saw and envied Him. When He hid Himself, He consulted our weakness, He did not derogate from His own power. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxviii. 1) But why did He hide Himself, when they neither took up stones to cast at Him, nor blasphemed? Because He saw into their hearts, and knew the fury they were in; and therefore did not wait till they broke out into act, but retired to give their envy time to subside. 12:37–4337. But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on him: 38. That the saying of Esaias the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed? 39. Therefore they could not believe, because that Esaias said again, 40. He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them. 41. These things said Esaias, when he saw his glory, and spake of him. 42. Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: 43. For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxviii. 1) And thusb the Evangelist tacitly explains it, when he adds, But though He had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on Him. THEOPHYLACT. He means the miracles related above. It was no small wickedness to disbelieve against such miracles as those. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxviii. 2) But why then did Christ come? Did He not know that they would not believe in Him? Yes: the Prophets had prohibited this very unbelief, and He came that it might be made manifest, to their confusion and condemnation; That the saying of Esaias the prophet might be fulfilled, which He spake, Lord, who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  27. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 48. in Matt.) When our Lord came to Nazareth, He refrains from miracles, lest He should provoke the people to greater malice. But He sets before them His teaching no less wonderful than His miracles. For there was a certain ineffable grace in our Saviour’s words which softened the hearts of the hearers. Hence it is said, And they all bare him witness. BEDE. They bare Him witness that it was truly He, as He had said, of whom the prophet had spoken. CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) But foolish men though wondering at the power of His words little esteemed Him because of His reputed father. Hence it follows, And they said, Is not this the son of Joseph? CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. But what prevents Him from filling men with awe, though He were the Son as was supposed of Joseph? Do you not see the divine miracles, Satan already prostrate, men released from their sickness? CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) For though after a long time and when He had begun to shew forth His miracles, He came to them; they did not receive Him, but again were inflamed with envy. Hence it follows, And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. It was a common proverb among the Hebrews, invented as a reproach, for men used to cry out against infirm physicians, Physician, heal thyself. GLOSS. (ordin.) It was as if they said, We have heard that you performed many cures in Capernaum; cure also thyself, i. e. Do likewise in your own city, where you were nourished and brought up. AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. lib. ii. 42.) But since St. Luke mentions that great things had been already done by Him, which he knows he had not yet related, what is more evident than that he knowingly anticipated the relation of them. For he had not proceeded so far beyond our Lord’s baptism as that he should be supposed to have forgotten that he had not yet related any of those things which were done in Capernaum. AMBROSE. But the Saviour purposely excuses Himself for not working miracles in His own country, that no one might suppose that love of country is a thing to be lightly esteemed by us. For it follows, But he says, Verily I say unto you, that no prophet is accepted in his own country.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I felt inclined to disregard this, or to think that she couldn't really know. I wanted to see it through to the end before I left town, before next year's unimaginable summer. I sensed for a moment the awful opacity of the intervening time, the winter we all had to go through, when things would develop and decay and become my past and Luc's—and Jan and Helene's too. They would be married in St John's in November, beneath its great brick scary tower. Perhaps she would invite me and I would come out dressed as smartly as I could with the bells booming and see with a pang the boys with their push-bikes who had stopped to watch the crowd and the bride and were laughing distantly at her. And Luc . . . we were good friends by then; I had failed to win his passion, it was a rather earnest friendship, full of my morbid suppressions and his apologetic compensations and constructive ideas. "I wonder how long you've known him for," I said. Helene's answer was quietly conclusive. "Oh always. Didn't I tell you that he's my godfather? Well, he is. He and my father grew up together, during the war—they used to be sort of best friends, though I think they stopped being them a long time ago. Paul's still very sweet to Maurice, but Maurice seems to have dried up somehow in recent years and isn't very sweet to anybody. Of course he does speak almost entirely in quotations, which is exhausting and drives poor Mummy mad." "I'm a bit of a quoter myself. I don't suppose he'll forgive me for correcting his Yeats," I said. "No, he probably won't." I seemed to have finished my beer and wondered if I could actually have been given a full glass. Helene knocked back the rest of her mineral water, but when I offered her something else she said, "Why don't we get out of. . . here, and perhaps have a walk by the canals." I looked at her aghast. "Then I will go home, and you can get back to some serious drinking." The evening was cool and grey and I let Helene steer our course, across the deserted arena of the Grote Markt and into what I had seen described as the ville sainte, the city hidden within the city, the narrow courts and alleys and cloisters around the Cathedral and the Bishop's Palace. I had walked there before and perched on the steep brick bridge that linked two covered walkways across a canal, and felt almost out of breath with sighing; so it had its mood for me, a black under-tow. "No, it will be interesting to see what happens about the catalogue," Helene resumed.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Or was I expecting too much too soon, and ignoring his steady merits, the schoolboy's vacant valuing of knowledge for its own sake? I felt I needed to find out about him, or like some subtle interrogator to beguile him into unnoticed indiscretions; I was slightly miffed when he started to give things away without much bother or self-importance. He was looking sunned and well, so I asked him about his recent spell out at the seaside. He had been to the villa of a former schoolfriend, just over the French border, right on the beach at a village called St Ernest-allx-Sablonnières, to which, he told me confidently, the saint's body had been brought after his fatal crusade. Patrick something was his great friend there, another rich kid I guessed, and they had often been together to this beach-house in the long holidays when the something family went out there. This time the fine weather on the very brink of the new term had tempted the boys to go there for a few days alone; or so I thought, and jealously hoped, until it emerged that there had also been a girl with them. I fell into a rhythm of apparently pointless questions, so as to stretch his vocabulary; and under cover of these I went stalking through that seaside idyll that there had never been the remotest question of my sharing. First, how had they got there? In his friend Patrick's car. Ah, and what was that? A Mini! Oh; and what was the house like? It was white, it had only one floor, and its roof was flat. A verandah with white pillars ran all along the front. To my surprise he called it a stoa. Below the house there was a garden with trees that leant over and a gate with two or three steps going down on to the dunes. The nearest house was a hundred metres off. And what of the inside? There were at least four bedrooms (so perfect chastity could conceivably have been preserved). We itemised the linen, the duvet-covers in red and green, the sheets made from an uncertain fabric. The furniture there was built out of pine and oak; there were many books on wildlife and ornithology. The theme of birds was continued on the cups and plates, and on various other items in the kitchen, which he considered a delightful room. I wanted to get on to the night hours, and ask him what he dreamed about when the noise of the waves had lulled him to sleep; but something held me back. I felt I could pry no further just now, though he rose to all these challenges with only brief hesitations and a certain chilly pride. What had they done? They had walked, read, studied indeed, discussed various matters. Such as? Such as . . . pollution, radio drama, the effect of wage agreements.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was calming my nerves with tricks against stage-fright that my father had taught me. And there was Luc, walking ahead of me, not running but clearly anxious not to be late. I was bucked up when I saw him look at his watch; my authority was manifested in that quick gesture—undiminished, maybe even heightened, by my tolerance in rearranging the lesson. Then wasn't I pained too to know what a distant figure I was to him still, the martinet of dead poetry and strict time? He had turned a corner and when I came round it twenty seconds later I saw him talking to a man who must have stopped him. They were holding on to either side of the unfolded tourist map and Luc, taller by a head, was stooping across it in the search for a street, I assumed, that the man had asked for. I heard him groan with annoyance and giggle with shame at not finding it; while the visitor wore a calm, almost gratified expression, finding himself not so stupid after all. To ask the hard question is simple, I thought. I didn't like the look of this man—fortyish, fit, with curly fair hair receding above a long boring face. I could imagine people saying he was good-looking and he gave the impression of believing this himself. He had a neat little knapsack with a cape packed across the top. I stopped before I got to them, determined to reach the house after Luc, and staggered too, seeing him only feet away, to think where I had been, in mind and body, since we had last met. Only yesterday I'd come twice across his naked legs—or rather, on to a cushioned window-seat and a sprawl of time-crinkled TV magazines in a derelict house—but still it had seemed to me as if we had made love, the intimacy was so prolonged and detailed; I knew his body better than he did himself. I saw now that it wasn't quite fair, incredibly he didn't know, he'd been reading and listening to music at the time. The man was excusing Luc for his failure, his free hand grasped his upper arm consolingly. "Don't worry, it's a very special, odd interest of mine," he was saying in English as I stepped forward and gripped Luc's other elbow in an involuntary challenge to the stranger's claim. How dare he foist his special odd interests on the boy? "He wanted to know where the Fratry of St Caspianus is," Luc said as we walked on the last hundred yards to the house. "I know I ought to know that, I have learnt it once." I could have told him, god knows.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The wicket at the side had opened and an incredibly pretty boy with curly dark hair came out, checking his fly and looking pleased with himself. "Oh, that," I said wonderingly. Matt and I watched him go past on the other side of the street apparently quite unaware of our scorching attention. "Another of your cast-offs, don't tell me." He had turned and was craning through the polythene rear window of the hood to catch every last possible second of the sight of the young man. Then he swung back with a grin of lust. "How did you get on the other night?" "Okay, thanks." "You made out?" "Yep. I got lost for a few hours, but I made out in the end." He was nodding and staring: I was clearly meant to ask him the same question. "How about you? Did you find your builder?" "The fucker wasn't there. Or if he was he found someone else first. No, I ended up with your friend, the Frenchman, the Moroccan." Matt looked at me narrowly, like a sadistic child, knowing his words would have some effect but unsure what. "Ed, you ought to look after that man. He told me that he loves you, and he is wild. We fucked each other every which way." "Yes, Cherif’s good," I said, swallowing the passing heartburn of his remark. "But he's not really in love with me. And you forget that I am in love with someone else." He looked at me sceptically, and revved the rough-throated engine a couple of times. "What are you doing this evening?" I thought of one or two lies (going to a dance in a barracks, supper with Luc at a country hotel). "Oh, the usual," I said. "Chasing oblivion at the Cassette." "Have you been to the Town Baths yet?" "Do you mean a swimming-pool or something else?" "Yes, the swimming-baths. The Town Baths. Why don't you come with me for some hard exercise before your drinking begins?" I didn't want to get more involved with Matt; I bridled, as I often did these days with beautiful men ("Don't bother about me")—and I was a clumsy, nervous swimmer. But the thought of a distraction from Luc, an hour or two saved from a night that would otherwise be rushed and lost in drink, made a sudden appeal.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I assumed he was . . . covering up for having been with her." Patrick was slightly impatient of this finical enquiry, I thought, and made no answer for a bit. "My friend Luc is very loyal," he said. "He was covering up, in fact, for Sibylle and me. We were, we were lovers then; as you say, quite recently. Well, the father of Sibylle is the Minister of Culture, and we cannot have any scandals. He thought Sibylle was staying with . . . some other friends." He picked up and set down his coffee-cup. "That was the weekend, in fact, when she suddenly decided she was in love with Luc and not with me. I remember I went out with her in a boat we have and she almost—" he flopped his hand over backwards on the table. "Capsized it." "Capsized. I think she has to fall in love with her boyfriend's best friend. So as to cause the most problems for everybody." He was shadowed by his experience, but proud of it too, and the licence it appeared to give him for scepticism about girls. I felt tensely lightheaded as the twists of this drama, quite separate but bearing so darkly on my own, were recalled. "She certainly seemed very passionate, and possessive, when we met at dawn in the middle of a field the other day. It was almost like a duel. Of course I had no idea why he'd run off again, he's never told me anything personal. She couldn't help giving me the impression that it was her he'd run away from." Patrick gave a nervous flicker of a smile. "Au contraire," he said. "He was running away from me." This had the air of a briskly unwilling confession, and I was generous, welcoming, to the surprise it sprang. We had something in common, I could help him after all. "So you were both after him!" And of course there was nothing surprising in that—it puzzled me that Luc wasn't mobbed through the streets by defenceless admirers. "Au contraire," he said again, with a certain satisfaction at the chime and at the polymorphous stamina of the Three. "He was after me." I felt I'd have had to be Racine to keep abreast of this convulsive trio, their switches of allegiance that seemed compacted in retrospect into little more than a day. My heart quickened, absurdly, at the glimpse of a second chance, the beautiful confirmation of how Luc's thoughts turned, the need to get to him now before anyone else did. My mind roamed the map with a new sense of danger and jealousy.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  I was curious to know what it would feel like to do some thing so weird, but I wouldn’t do anything with Dick Sargent. I didn’t like him; he had an ugly tattoo of a skull on his arm that said Killer, and he left his wife, Connie, and their baby son, Alex, home all the time while he hung out in the bars. I said no to him, and then he started chasing Judy Starkie and they became lovers. I’m sure he did it with her because when ever I ran into them at the Tip-Toe Inn, he always went out of his way to come over and say hello to me, wearing this shit eating grin. He would leave her sitting at the bar, chewing on the straw in her rum and Coke. Maybe he imagined my ass hole when he was poking hers. After that I started up with Sam, the Quaalude man. He liked to put raspberry jam on his finger and stick it in my ass while we were fucking; he would sniff it after because he liked the combo smell of raspberry jam and bunghole. He taught me to stick my finger up his ass while I blew him (raspberry jam optional). I was trying to get up the courage to ask him to do Greek sex when he got busted selling ’Ludes in the junior high school yard, wearing a nurse’s uniform. They sent him away for five years. Then I met this Greek guy, Tony Vargas from Bath Beach, in a pizza parlor. He liked me to sit on him on a chair and I liked it too. He used to suck at my tits for hours and drive me wild. Once, while he was doing that, I said to him, “Do me the Greek sex way.” He jumped up, pulling his thick lips off my nipples. “That’s for whores,” he said, “you’re a nice girl.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Oh yes, I have . . . " and then I watched it dawn on him with a lovely blush and a kind of setting of the face against his mistake. He took a long draught of beer, and with the oddly magnified attention I was paying him I saw his open lips very clearly through the glass and his teeth refracted through the pale beer, which slid into his mouth in three deep swallows. "I often am very drunk," I admitted, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder and shaking him matily. I glanced aside to Edie, who was sculpting around herself for Alejo's benefit some imaginary bustier, and who topped it off with a sceptical coup d' il in my direction. "And to be absolutely honest, your sisters can make quite a lot of noise themselves." Oh, the ghastly give-and-take of life. One or two others were hovering, as if hopeful of an introduction to Agustin, whom Alejo had never before been able to persuade to come to this place: they were raising their eyebrows at him over Alejo's head while I clumsily tried to keep him with me. But I had had my turn. Alejo was kissing one of the newcomers and tugging his cousin away to meet him. After a blurred further hour of drinking and more than my ration of cigarettes, Edie and I found ourselves outside again with the two Spaniards. It was refreshingly cool, though they were wearing less and were less numbed by drink and paced about as we said goodbye. Alejo was going on to the Bar Biff with five or six others. He kissed Agustin with sensible fervour on both cheeks, which seemed to give his friends a licence to do the same; the boy stood there like a reluctant bride as his new acquaintance filed towards him. Then we three were alone—of course it was a night for him to be away from Alejo's. I was their escort . . . We rambled home under brilliant stars. I dimly recall one or two diversions to show them historic things, my voice echoing off the darkened houses, Agustin standing in a street-lamp's soft gleam, shivering and expressionless.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It began: ‘ Billy Budd —box—Beckwiths—bloody! Not the music, but W. impossible. What poor Ld B thought I don’t know—he, of course, urbane & charming, tho’ at moments somehow steely & abstracted: one wdn’t want to be on the wrong side of him, & so one becomes faintly sycophantic (but that I’m not sure he likes either). W. has taken up with some boy at the Corry—it sounds to me as if it’s that gorgeous little tough with red trunks I’m half-crazy about. He told me as soon as we met & so ensured an evening of tortuous envy, regret & failure for me, which the music both soothed & inflamed à la fois. There was something rather infuriatingly consoling about the opera—struck by the mystery that comes from its not being about love but about goodness, and the way Britten channelled what he felt about love away into some obscurer, less appealing theatre of debate. We kind of mentioned this in the interval—Ld B it turns out knew EMF—perhaps quite well. For the first time ever I got the sense that he might like to talk about these things which are so difficult for people of his age and standing. As usual one was all discipline & good manners— unlike Miss W., who smirked & simmered & did her “Great Lover” number. Home. Miserable supper of old tofu-burgers; listened op. 117 & felt much worse. And then, what are these affairs? I thought of W. doubtless already back with his boy & made myself madly rational about it all, how it wdn’t last, how it was just sex, how yet again he had picked on someone vastly poorer & dimmer than himself—younger, too. I don’t think he’s ever made it with anyone with a degree. It’s forever these raids on the inarticulate. Appallingly tired, but cdn’t sleep. Lay there longing for someone poor, young and dim to hold me tight …’ I think I preferred the envy unvoiced. I sidled into the entry across the page. ‘… Surgery. Then to swim—40 lengths, exhausted but good. Hung around in the showers—full of mutants & geriatrics. About to go when that heavenly Maurice came in & took the shower next to mine. His skin, close to, exquisitely fine & silky—& his great lazy cock, half-erect, with that thick vein meandering down it, the dull purple head when he pulled back the skin … Extase! Then on call. Out at once to a basement flat that time forgot, the stinking dereliction most people know nothing about. Miserable, thousand-year-old husband & wife—she senile, he incontinent. She had slipped on the stairs, he cdn’t lift her, pissing himself. A great fat dog that kept getting in the way.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "They are the best," she said, with a shy chuckle. There was something so sensible and tender about her that I began to feel quite jealous of her husband after all, her husband to be. I thought of asking her about him, although I tended to mistrust the accounts young women gave of their intendeds, their wonderful jobs and looks. But in rushed Mrs Vivier with the claret-cup and glasses on a tray. At which Maurice looked up and said, "I've just noticed your Orst tie." "Oh yes," I said, smoothing it over the largely imaginary stomach that it caparisoned. "So Paul's selling these now, is he?"—at which Echevin merely hummed. "It's the Athena, isn't it? Not here, though, not next door. It's in the Town Museum, surely?" He stood up and peered at the tie—on which Orst's Athena was indeed reproduced with a certain additional gold and glitter and with the illusory depth of a hologram. "What is it William Butler Yeats says? 'Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting for a train, Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head' . . . " He looked up, stirred by his own brief delivery. "Waiting a train," I said. "Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting for a train." "Yes, it's waiting a train—no for." He looked uncertain, not altogether pleased. "It's an aphetic form of awaiting; or perhaps more strictly an aphaeretic one," I went on like a complete arsehole. "You know, deliberate docking of the first syllable." "I can see you're going to have to watch yourself with your quotations, dear," said Inge, with a mild air of vindication. I glanced self-deprecatingly around the room, actually quite shocked myself to have brought this blare of kitsch into a place where real Orsts, of incomparable delicacy, were hung. We sat down to dinner without Marcel. "Gone to the pictures with a friend," Echevin said. "Bloodbath 4, I think it's called. Will it be all right? It's so many years since I saw a film . . . I have an idea perhaps I should be protecting him from something." "I'm sure it will be fine," I said. It wasn't my kind of thing, but I had a proper reverence for the ripped pecs of Kurt Burns, the subhuman star of the whole successful series, who had reared up all over town in the past few days with oiled bust and machine-gun aflame. "How's the little fellow getting on?" Maurice asked robustly, across the table. "He's fine. He's a lot happier," his father said, which gave me a keener sense of just how unhappy he must have been before. "He's still a bit wheezy. But if you think what he was like a year ago . . . " "Is he showing any inclination to read books?" said Maurice, not quite gently enough.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He had turned a corner and when I came round it twenty seconds later I saw him talking to a man who must have stopped him. They were holding on to either side of the unfolded tourist map and Luc, taller by a head, was stooping across it in the search for a street, I assumed, that the man had asked for. I heard him groan with annoyance and giggle with shame at not finding it; while the visitor wore a calm, almost gratified expression, finding himself not so stupid after all. To ask the hard question is simple, I thought. I didn't like the look of this man—fortyish, fit, with curly fair hair receding above a long boring face. I could imagine people saying he was good-looking and he gave the impression of believing this himself. He had a neat little knapsack with a cape packed across the top. I stopped before I got to them, determined to reach the house after Luc, and staggered too, seeing him only feet away, to think where I had been, in mind and body, since we had last met. Only yesterday I'd come twice across his naked legs—or rather, on to a cushioned window-seat and a sprawl of time-crinkled TV magazines in a derelict house—but still it had seemed to me as if we had made love, the intimacy was so prolonged and detailed; I knew his body better than he did himself. I saw now that it wasn't quite fair, incredibly he didn't know, he'd been reading and listening to music at the time. The man was excusing Luc for his failure, his free hand grasped his upper arm consolingly. "Don't worry, it's a very special, odd interest of mine," he was saying in English as I stepped forward and gripped Luc's other elbow in an involuntary challenge to the stranger's claim. How dare he foist his special odd interests on the boy? "He wanted to know where the Fratry of St Caspianus is," Luc said as we walked on the last hundred yards to the house. "I know I ought to know that, I have learnt it once."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A man who is always smiling prompts a kind of mistrust. I wished Ty (as he absurdly claimed to be called) would allow himself more of the expressionlessness to which his features were suited, of which they were in fact the ideal expression. But he was orthodontically perfect as well, and perhaps he had calculated that that mattered more. Just how fastidious can you get? I asked myself and we danced together for a bit, though I broke off for a drink when a slow number was gloatingly announced by the DJ. I asked him what Ty was short for, and he looked at me as if I was being very silly, and said, "Just Ty!" We hung about together: though Ty was game for running through our earlier conversation a second time, and I pretended I couldn't hear him through the noise of the music. He was obsessed by his career and seemed to feel destined for success in London, and that I would somehow be able to bring this about. It was all arranged that I was going to look at his portfolio and let him know what I thought. We seemed to roam back and forth over a boundary between the functional nonsense of pick-up talk and some other elaborate fantasy of his own in which he was obliviously involved, and which turned around extended fashion shoots in tropical countries, rewarded by enormous fees. I took notice, though, when he started talking about the boys in the shadowy table-booth across the floor. I had deliberately kept my back to them but turned with false casualness, ashamed to feel ashamed: I knew it would be the kid I'd fallen for that Ty was pointing out. And there he was, curled up with a skinnier, long-haired friend and eating his face in the laborious public way that adolescents have . . . leaving me eaten up too with envy and irritation. I swung back and muttered to Ty (I saw him uncertain if I was angry or joking); then kissed him, briefly, and got some consolation from that: he smiled, as if to say that his charm had now been acknowledged and succumbed to. We got another drink, and I was feeling quite drunk and had reached the stage of deciding to go with this guy, the all-too-common pragmatic decision. I was trying to see all that was best in him: the teeth, the skin, probably a good body worked on in gym and sunbed, which was more than I could offer, as was what he showed in his pants, and yet I felt entirely superior to him, with a kind of superiority I was too superior even to have given him a glimpse of. Then Cherif was standing in front of us grinning and leaned close to embrace us both at the same time. His breath smelt of dope.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Come with me," he said, and led me through a door into the shop's back room—bare bulbs, a sink, a white work-table, clothes pinned and chalked for alteration. I wondered if I was about to go down on him. "Look at this," he said. Mounted on a ledge at the side was a small black-and-white TV set, a security monitor for the shop. It showed the central area in an odd convex perspective, a customer passing beneath looming with enormous cranium and dwindling curved body ending in tiny shoes. It made me instantly suspicious, the distortion seemed to challenge you to notice the thief s shifty recce or his smooth concealment of some small pricey item. The lack of sound enhanced the sense of stealth. Alejo turned a knob and the scene changed to the front vestibule, if anything even more sinister for its emptiness. In the bottom corner little Rudi was lolling at the desk, staring at nothing, unaware he was being spied on. He looked at his watch. "Now let's see what's up in number three," said Alejo and switched again. We had a steep-down view on to the row of changing-cubicles. "It's amazing what you catch on this camera—I don't mean sex, just the things people do." I knew uneasily that he must be right—those crises of contemplation, envisaging the changed future some garment seems for a moment to guarantee. Over to the left the naked upper part of my rival could be seen, pale and powerful, clouding his underarms with talc. "What the hell's he doing?" I demanded. "You have to do that for the rubber vests, you know, or you never get them off." Alejo kept watching professionally, like a policeman waiting for a hesitation to turn into a crime. "We've had a lot of trouble with him." "I'm not surprised." "He's weird, he keeps trying things on but he never buys." "Why don't you ban him?" I said, though my indignation was sapped by the view of the cubicle immediately below. It was clear that Cherif could not be less interested in the chi-chi underwear he was being tricked into trying; he hadn't even opened the packets. I was pleased and somewhat possessive. My friend was simply sitting on the narrow bench and turning a piece of paper over in his hands. Then I knew, despite the plunging perspective, that the paper was a letter I had written to him, in our very first week, full of unguarded declarations, and marked by me in various shamefully personal ways. The two of us frowned into the little screen as he tilted his head back and ran the letter contentedly under his nose. Chapter 16

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  That Thursday, after my lesson with Marcel, who was making progress and described the plot of Bloodbath 4 with a new determination, I went out, drifted round the shopping-streets, spent a while in the photography section of a bookshop browsing the fashionably retro albums of athletes and swimmers, and then guiltily slipped into the Golden Calf for a bottle of Silence. I felt fizzy and reckless when later on I turned into Long Street just as the lamps twinked on above, pink and mauve and flickering like a favourite vice. I was still some way from the house, but I had it casually in my sights and knew just how it fitted in the rhythm of frontages opposite, glassier and posher than its immediate neighbours, the house before it having an illuminated cross in an upper window. Luc's front door opened and two figures came out sideways on to the top of the steps and then Luc himself, taller and protective, emerged between them: the Three! I knew Sibylle's smart look at once, and the boy too, of course, snug and strong. She reached up and kissed Luc on the cheek. I saw as if an inch away his flared lips kiss the air beside her as she did so, and he and the boy slid an arm round each other and left them burningly there through a last brief reprise of their talk. I faltered. could I be seen in the uncertain light? I should go on with a quick wave and greeting, even, ideally, stop and be drawn into a loose embrace of conversation—introductions could be made, fast friendships charmingly inaugurated. But I stopped where I was, twenty yards off, pressed against the wall, watching their joking and agreements in the doorway with the hunger of a ghost: I felt like a nothing, a mere emanation of weathered bricks and mortar. Fatuously, I crouched to re-tie a lace, but looked up helplessly in the youngsters' direction, and saw the guests disengage themselves, come down the steps and turn away with a further sung-out goodbye. They strolled off for a few seconds and Luc called, "Hey, Patrick", and when the boy looked round made a nodding jump, like heading a ball, and they both grinned. Then the boy, Patrick, went out into the road and bent to unlock a car: the Mini, the mauve Mini. I wandered dimly after them as the car pulled out; the engine wasn't firing properly. I tried to remember the number plate: KYF, KYF . . . a Cherif-like syllable. The door had closed behind Luc by the time I came by, and I didn't even glance in at the window, swamped in my renewed sense of failure and imbecility. There were running footsteps behind me and Luc touched me on the shoulder. He was ravishingly flushed and pushed his hair back and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. "Hello, Luc! I was just . . ."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Perhaps you snore a lot?" suggested Patrick. I thought hollowly of the other losses, and how stupid Matt was to rely this much on his glamour and his lies. The boys seemed so innocent in his company, unsuspecting, flattered by the attention of this lean swimmer ten years older than them with his casual sharp knowledge of what was what. That was how con-men worked. The boys didn't see the stiff-up hard-on he flashed at me as he turned and pulled his jeans over his naked arse—how he was turned on by danger and deceit. I watched Luc absorbing the fact that a man might not wear underpants, and thought aloofly of the things I'd eased up that same backside. Patrick pursued Matt with a few more questions, slipping out of his towel and drying his arse so that his cock swung back and forth. It was a sumptuous monster, with a lazy confidence of mastery about it, a veined softness and sheeny bloom that suggested astounding powers of extension and engorgement: in fact the whole genital ensemble was just about the most breath-taking I had ever seen. But it wasn't the right moment for me. I was utterly on edge for Luc (I spotted his smiling glance at it). He was taking an age piling his folded clothes on the bench in front of his locker, which was just too far off for me to keep up easy chat from in front of mine. I was spinning the thing out in the most dreamy way, whilst vainly trying to hold my stomach in—I only had my glasses, watch and socks left to take off. I affected a concern with the state of my toes, and peered between them as though for signs of athlete's foot. I made a clumsily cheery interruption to what seemed to have become an absorbing conversation between Matt and Patrick about football, I hadn't been able to pay attention. I remembered Edie, several determined laps into her routine. And would Luc never drop his towel? What was he so shy of? I thought of perhaps setting fire to it, or asking to borrow it. The moment came when I had to take off my glasses, the last thing I put into my locker. Now I would need to get really close to him if the vision when it came was not to be a mere blur of pink and gold. Then: "Hi!" It was a voice I knew, and I prickled with displeasure even before I figured who it was: the pushy little Englishman who had detained Luc in the street on the very morning after the St Ernest escapade. I reached for my glasses again. Yes, it was him, fit and compact, dripping from the pool. "Oh, hi!"—Luc's indiscriminate pleasantness, like a dog; it seemed to rob our lovely earlier greeting of half its value.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “You inch it in slowly,” he said. “If you inch it in slowly, a little bit at a time, it will hardly hurt at all. It’s a special way of getting close to someone, and I want to get close to you like that.” I was curious to know what it would feel like to do some thing so weird, but I wouldn’t do anything with Dick Sargent. I didn’t like him; he had an ugly tattoo of a skull on his arm that said Killer, and he left his wife, Connie, and their baby son, Alex, home all the time while he hung out in the bars. I said no to him, and then he started chasing Judy Starkie and they became lovers. I’m sure he did it with her because when ever I ran into them at the Tip-Toe Inn, he always went out of his way to come over and say hello to me, wearing this shit eating grin. He would leave her sitting at the bar, chewing on the straw in her rum and Coke. Maybe he imagined my ass hole when he was poking hers. After that I started up with Sam, the Quaalude man. He liked to put raspberry jam on his finger and stick it in my ass while we were fucking; he would sniff it after because he liked the combo smell of raspberry jam and bunghole. He taught me to stick my finger up his ass while I blew him (raspberry jam optional). I was trying to get up the courage to ask him to do Greek sex when he got busted selling ’Ludes in the junior high school yard, wearing a nurse’s uniform. They sent him away for five years. Then I met this Greek guy, Tony Vargas from Bath Beach, in a pizza parlor. He liked me to sit on him on a chair and I liked it too. He used to suck at my tits for hours and drive me wild. Once, while he was doing that, I said to him, “Do me the Greek sex way.” He jumped up, pulling his thick lips off my nipples. “That’s for whores,” he said, “you’re a nice girl.”

• 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.