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 Middlesex (2002)

  Did they display mechanical ingenuity?Ora commitmentto the Protestantwork ethic? In a word:no. Thereisnoevidence against genetic determinism more persuasivethanthechildren ofthe rich. The Charm Braceletsdidn't study. Theyneverraisedtheirhands in class. Theysat intheback, slumping, andwenthomeeachdaycarry- ingthe propofa notebook.(But maybethe CharmBraceletsunder- stood moreabout lifethan Idid.Froman earlyagethey knew what littlevaluethe worldplaced inbooks,andso didn't waste theirtime with them.WhereasI, evennow,persist inbelievingthattheseblack marks onwhite paperbearthegreatest significance,thatifI keep writingImightbe abletocatchtherainbow ofconsciousnessinajar. Theonlytrust fundIhaveisthisstory, andunlikeaprudentWasp, I'mdipping intoprincipal,spendingitall.. .) Passing by theirlockersinseventhgrade,Iwasn't awareofallthis yet. Ilookbacknow(asDr.Luceurgedmetodo)tosee exactiywhat twelve-year-oldCalliopewasfeeling,watchingthe CharmBracelets undressinsteamylight.Wasthereashiverofarousal in her? Did fleshrespondbeneathgoaliepads?Itrytoremember,but what comesbackisonlyabundleofemotions:envy,certainly,butalsodis- dain.Inferiority andsuperiorityatonce.Aboveall,therewaspanic. Infrontofmegirls wereenteringandexitingtheshowers.The flashesofnakedness werelikeshoutsgoingoff.Ayearorsoearlier these samegirlshadbeenporcelain figurines,gingerlydippingtheir toesinto thedisinfectantbasin atthepublicpool. Now theywere magnificent creatures.Movingthrough thehumidair,Ifeltlikea snorkeler. OnI came,kickingmy heavy,paddedlegsandgaping through thegoalie mask at thefantastic underwaterlifeall around me.Sea anemones sproutedfrom betweenmyclassmates'legs. They camein allcolors, black,brown, electric yellow,vividred. Higherup, theirbreasts bobbed likejellyfish, softlypulsing, tipped withstinging pink. Everything waswavingin thecurrent,feedingon microscopic plankton, growing bigger bytheminute. Theshy, plumpgirlswere like sealions, lurking inthe depths. The surface ofthe seais amirror,reflecting divergentevolution- ary paths. Upabove, thecreatures ofair;downbelow,thoseofwater. One planet, containing two worlds.Myclassmateswere as unaston- ished by their extravagant traitsas a blowfishis by its quills.They seemed tobe adifferent species. Itwasasiftheyhadscentglands or 297 marsupial pouches, adaptationsforfecundity,forprocreatingin the wild, whichhad nothingtodowithskinny,hairless,domesticated me. Ihurriedby, desolate,myearsringingwith thenoiseofthe place. BeyondtheCharm Bracelets Ipassednextintotheareaofthe Kilt Pins. Themostpopulousphyluminour lockerroom, the KiltPins tookupthree rows of lockers.There theywere,fatandskinny,pale and freckled,clumsilyputtingonsocksor pullingup unbecoming underwear.Theywerelikethedevices thatheld ourtartanstogether, unremarkable,dull,butnecessaryintheirway. I don'trememberany of theirnames. PasttheCharm Bracelets,through theKiltPins,deeperintothe lockerroom,Calliopelimped.Backtowherethetileswerecracked andtheplaster yellowing, undertheflickeringlightfixtures,bythe drinkingfountainwiththeprehistoricpieceofguminthedrain,I hurried towhere I belonged,tomy niche ofthelocal habitat. Iwasn'talonethatyearinhavingmycircumstancesaltered.The specterofbusing had started other parentslookingintoprivate schools.Baker&Inglis,withanimpressivephysicalplantbutasmall endowment, wasn'taversetoincreasing enrollment.And so,in the autumnof 1972, we hadarrived(thesteamthinsoutthisfarfrom theshowers andIcanseemy old friends clearly):ReetikaChura- swami, withherenormousyelloweyesand sparrow'swaist;and Joanne MariaBarbaraPeracchio, with hercorrectedclubfootand (it must beadmitted) John BirchSociety affiliation;NormaAbdow, whosefather hadgone awayon theHajand nevercomeback;Tina Kubek,who was Czechbyblood;and Linda Ramirez, halfSpanish, half Filipina, who wasstandingstill,waiting forherglassestounfog. "Ethnic"girls we werecalled, but thenwho wasn't,whenyougot rightdown toit? Weren't theCharm Bracelets everybit as ethnic? Weren'tthey as full ofstrangerituals andfood? Oftribalspeech? Theysaid"bogue" for repulsiveand "queer"for weird.Theyatetiny^ crustlesssandwiches on whitebread— cucumber sandwiches,mayon- naise,andsomething called "watercress." Untilwe came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had alwaysfelt completely American.But now the Bracelets' upturned nosessuggested that therewasanother America to whichwe could never gain admittance. Allofa sudden Americawasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock.It wasabout something 298

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Patrick was unbuttoning a shirt-pocket beneath the ski-jacket's whispering cocoon. He fiddled out an envelope, and drew a letter from it, and half unfolded it. "It's very sweet," he said, as I stared away from it and then let my eyes flick back in an involuntary attempt to decipher what was visible of Luc's rapid, clumsy hand. Patrick held the letter close to himself and scanned it in a vain and rather tasteless way—I had the feeling he was teasing me with its private and unguarded contents, that he carried it as a sentimental token and liked to let me glimpse, when he turned it over, the wild and old-fashioned endearment with which it began, and which I might hunger for ever to hear from Luc myself. I thought he was going to read a bit out, and then with a shake of the head and a little smile he decided not to. He snapped the letter away and gave me a quick cold stare as if to repudiate any spurious intimacy. "Anyway, he hasn't written to you since . . . he left." "No." "And you think he's run away to escape from you, or from his feelings about you?" I pressed this point with something of a policeman's dullness and scepticism. "I don't know," said Patrick crossly. And then, " I don't see how I can be in charge of him. He's done this before." "Yes, I know. But that was only for a night." "Who told you that? He was away for about three days before the police found him." I'd no idea. I said, "Thousands of young people do leave home, and nobody knows why." The bewildered parents were filmed in their well-appointed homes, numbly repeating how happy everything had been. They always seemed to me to offer proof of the stark unknowability of others, of a lurking violence, touched off by some invisible pressure into damage and self-destruction; it was what love sought to tame, and lived in half-excited fear of. "I just wondered", said Patrick, "what happened that night, after we left you in the bar." I saw how subtly and yet unforgivingly he had brought the little interview round. "Well, nothing much that I can remember," I said, almost languidly. "Luc did say how unhappy he was, but never quite told me why. We chatted with other friends of mine." I remembered the little stings of his pillow-talk—the bet the three youngsters had had about me, Sibylle's jealous intuition of my feelings. And yet she had left me with him. But then Luc himself had deplored the strained talk of that evening—the eerie politesse that masked the break-up of the Three, and acknowledged it. I went on carefully: "I said Luc must get home to bed, as we had a lesson first thing in the morning." "Yeah, yeah," Patrick broke in. I wondered what he knew.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Then I noticed indignantly that she was wearing the collar of medals: her dead original's magnificent choker was part of the apparatus of bondage. In the next she lay sprawled on the carpet, fettered to what?, the camera-tripod?, with Andromeda's chain. In another she was bending over and I saw with a little protesting "Oh . . ." the black boss of a turd lodged patiently in the tight opening of her arse. I put them back thinking, "Well, after all, these aren't the worst things"—they wouldn't quite go in, there was something in the envelope that stopped them. I funnelled it and tapped out on to the table a sprig of orange hair tied with a thread, a tiny crinkly switch. Somehow one knew it had not been taken from the head. Cherif was crouching barefoot in the armchair, with his overcoat on, drawn tent-like round his knees. "Baby, you're not even dressed," I said. "I've been waiting for you, so that we can go out and get lunch." "Half past five's a bit late for lunch," I said. "Look, I've got all the washing done, and free! Washed, dried and ironed." I unzipped the bag and tilted it towards him: buttoned shirts, folded pants, rolled socks all neatly compacted. I recalled Lilli Vivier's slightly flushed and compromised look as she gave it back to me. Had there been something shameful? I lifted out a shirt of Cherif’s that had PARIS written all over it, and was presumably not intended for Parisians themselves. Did Lilli think that was mine? I supposed after the Orst tie debacle anything was possible. I handed it to him and he took it with a moment's admiration, then scrumpled it up and hurled it into the corner. "Oh." "Edward . . ." "You prefer them unironed. I'll remember that in future." He looked at me miserably, and I felt my face tighten under his reproach. "Why do you keep going away from your Cherif?" It was a courtly phrase of his—I thought I heard it plaintively rehearsed all afternoon. "I never said I'd be back for lunch," I brought out. "I had a great many things to do." He jumped up and came over to stare at the washing. "I suppose did Luc's mother do this for you." "Is that what it is?" I said, with a little fake anger. "I've already told you Luc's over, I'm over Luc." What was it they said about love being proved by its constant renewal? I swallowed desolately at the sudden thought of him. "No, it was Marcel's father's housekeeper who did it for me—for us. I've been at the Museum. You know I have a lot of work to do there." I knew too that Cherif never asked about that inaccessible realm, which wounded him by absorbing me so much. I reached into his open coat and stroked his stomach.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I was impinging, you see, on the conventional program, the stock pastimes, the “things that are done,” the routine of youth; for there is nothing more conservative than a child, especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet, the most mythopoeic nymphet in October’s orchard-haze. Do not misunderstand me. I cannot be absolutely certain that in the course of the winter she did not manage to have, in a casual way, improper contacts with unknown young fellows; of course, no matter how closely I controlled her leisure, there would constantly occur unaccounted-for time leaks with over-elaborate explanations to stop them up in retrospect; of course, my jealousy would constantly catch its jagged claw in the fine fabrics of nymphet falsity; but I did definitely feel—and can now vouchsafe for the accuracy of my feeling—that there was no reason for serious alarm. I felt that way not because I never once discovered any palpable hard young throat to crush among the masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the background; but because it was to me “overwhelmingly obvious” (a favorite expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boys—from the perspiring nincompoop whom “holding hands” thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up car—equally bored my sophisticated young mistress. “All this noise about boys gags me,” she had scrawled on the inside of a schoolbook, and underneath, in Mona’s hand (Mona is due any minute now), there was the sly quip: “What about Rigger?” (due too). Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her company. There was for instance Red Sweater who one day, the day we had the first snow—saw her home; from the parlor window I observed them talking near our porch. She wore her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favorite hairdo—the fringe in front and the swirl at the sides and the natural curls at the back—and her damp-dark moccasins and white socks were more sloppy than ever.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  When we returned to the research station that evening, having birded the leech-infested forests since well before dawn, we met the French artist boyfriend of a researcher at the camp. He was there to “paint the forest,” he told us. He then casually asked us to identify an unusual bird he had come across while taking a stroll in the late morning near camp. With complete nonchalance, he proceeded to describe a large fowl nearly two yards long that had walked across the dirt access road only three hundred yards from the main compound. After tromping through the forests for days without so much as a glimpse of the bird he had managed to see without even trying—or appreciating—I could barely conceal my envy at his great, unearned fortune. As I scratched my leech bites, I experienced the opposite of Beebe’s feeling of “great superiority” and could only mutter private curses to the Gods of Birding. — If catching even a glimpse of the Great Argus in the wild is a great challenge, to see what the male Argus actually does with his enormous wing and tail feathers during his courting of the female requires elaborate preparations and can turn into quite a protracted ordeal. William Beebe tried watching Great Argus from a pup tent set up by a court and from a blind suspended in a tree above a court, but both efforts were unsuccessful. Finally, he had his assistants dig a large foxhole in the ground behind a buttress root of the tree that was next to a male’s court. Seated in this foxhole and hidden by branches, he waited daily for most of a week until at last he observed the male enact a full-on courtship performance for a visiting female. Little did he know it, but Beebe had it easy! Fifty years later, the ornithologist G. W. H. Davison spent 191 days over a three-year period observing male Argus Pheasants in Malaysia. During his seven hundred hours of observations, Davison saw only one female visit. That is the equivalent of working forty-hour weeks for more than half a year. Needless to say, few people have ever had enough patience to do this, and most observations of Argus behavior come from birds in captivity. — [image "The strutting display of the male Great Argus." file=image_rsrc3MR.jpg] The strutting display of the male Great Argus.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He said, depressingly enough, that he liked "all kinds of music"—with the already admitted exception of the awful rumbling, blaring, warbling automation of the organ (he didn't put it quite like that)—and when pressed came out for Philip Glass (defiantly, as if he knew he wasn't any good) and for Schubert's piano trios (which Arnold was playing with a couple of university friends and insisted on Luc having in his head, in his system, as well). I thought back with a kind of despair to the days when I first got those trios into my head, and how I would never now hear them afresh. But that was half my life ago—when I was just at Luc's discovering age. "And who are your best friends here in town?" He took a moody couple of sips of coffee. "Perhaps my best friend is called Sibylle." "That's a beautiful name," I said airily, as if the ground had not shifted under my feet and there were not an ominous sifting of dust from the jagged crack in the ceiling. And like some creepy old hetero I went on, "And is Sibylle as beautiful as her name?" "Yes, I think I could say that she is very beautiful." "Fair-haired, I imagine?" I ponderously decoyed. "Her hair is actually dark brown." "Tall and forbidding as a Sibyl of Michelangelo?" Luc raised both eyebrows, stumped by that question, which I had indeed run out in a hammy double diapason, as if playing for the relish of some third, invisible, friend. "She is not tall," he said. "The Sibyls were wise women, prophetesses. Michelangelo painted them in the spandrels of the Sistine Chapel, holding their prophetic books." "Yes, I know." So you think you know what spandrels are, do you? But then, what are they exactly . . . ? I hesitated and then pressed the door shut against the image of Luc with his latter-day sibyl, meeting her in the empty afternoons, wandering the streets in a sentimental embrace, tea-time at a cafe, her on the pill, he priggish with first love. "Is she still at school?" "Yes, she is in her last year." "At St Narcissus?" "There are no girls at St Narcissus. She is at St Opportune, near the Cathedral. It is an even older school, founded in fourteen—" "Quite so. And—and do you know other girls there?" "Yes, very many," he said with a little defiant nod. And why shouldn't he know many, even very many, girls? I had known lots of them myself at his age, though fewer, somehow, now, away from the equal opportunities of school and university. And wasn't Edie in many respects my best friend?

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

  CHRYSOSTOM. As they departed, that He should not seem to speak flattery of the man; and in correcting the error of the multitude, He does not openly expose, their secret suspicions, but by framing his words against what was in their hearts, He shews that He knows hidden things. But He said not as to the Jews, Why think ye evil in your hearts? though indeed it was evil that they had thought; yet it proceeded not from wickedness, but from ignorance; therefore He spake not to them harshly, but answered for John, shewing that he had not fallen from his former opinion. This He teaches them, not by His word only, but by their own witness, the witness of their own actions, as well as their own words. What went ye out into the wilderness to see? As much as to say, Why did ye leave the towns and go out into the wilderness? So great multitudes would not have gone with such haste into the desert, if they had not thought that they should see one great, and wonderful, one more stable than the rock. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. (in loc.) They had not gone out at this time into the desert to see John, for he was not now in the desert, but in prison; but He speaks of the past time while John was yet in the desert, and the people flocked to him. CHRYSOSTOM. And note that making no mention of any other fault, He clears John of fickleness, which the multitude had suspected him of, saying, A reed shaken by the wind? GREGORY. (Hom. in Ev. vi. 2.) This He proposes, not to assert, but to deny. For if but a breath of air touch a reed, it bends it one way or other; a type of the carnal mind, which leans to either side, according as the breath of praise or detraction reaches it. A reed shaken by the wind John was not, for no variety of circumstance bent him from his uprightness. The Lord’s meaning then is, JEROME. Was it for this ye went out into the desert to see a man like unto a reed, and carried about by every wind, so that in lightness of mind he doubts concerning Him whom once he preached? Or it may be he is roused against Me by the sting of envy, and he seeks empty honour by his preaching, that he may thereof make gain. Why should he covet wealth? that he may have dainty fare? But his food is locusts and wild honey. That he may wear soft raiment? But his clothing is camel’s hair. This is that He adds, But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment?

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

  53 . Reforms to adultery law: CT 9.7.2 (326) with Evans Grubbs, Law and Family, 205–216; a woman and her own slave: CT 9.9.1 with Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, 438–441; G. Bassanelli Sommariva, “Brevi considerazioni su CTh. 9, 7, 1,” AARC 14 (2003): 197–239, at 226–269; Beaucamp, Le statut, 1:141–145; Hier. Ep. 79.8; broader anxieties about women and slaves: Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, 335–340. 54 . CT 9.24.1 (326); Judith Evans Grubbs, “Abduction Marriage in Antiquity”; Cam Grey, “Two Young Lovers: An Abduction Marriage and Its Consequences in Fifth-Century Gaul,” CQ 58 (2008): 286–302. 55 . “Comes to reflect”: McGinn, “Social Policy,” 69; Constantine on divorce: CT 3.16.1 with Evans Grubbs, Law and Family, 228–232; Julian: Ambrosiast. Quaest. vet. et nov. test. 115.12, with Antti Arjava, “Divorce in Later Roman Law,” Arctos 22 (1988): 5–21, esp. 9–13. 56 . New limits in the west: CT 3.16.2; in 448, with the adoption of Theodosius II’s novels, the east’s more liberal standard temporarily became law in the west, but in 452 Valentinian III returned again to the restrictive standard, which would remain the last word of Roman law on divorce in the west: Nov. Val. 35.11; Michael Memmer, “Die Ehescheidung im 4. und 5. Jahrhundert n. Chr,” in Iurisprudentia universalis: Festschrift für Theo Mayer-Maly zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. M. Schermaier et al. (Cologne, 2000), 489–510; compromise: CJ 5.17.8. 57 . Harper, “The Family”; Joëlle Beaucamp, “L’Égypte byzantine: Biens des parents, biens du couple?,” in Eherecht und Familiengut in Antike und Mittelalter, ed. D. Simon (Munich, 1989), 61–76; Roger Bagnall, “Church, State, and Divorce in Late Roman Egypt,” in Florilegium Columbianum: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Karl-Ludwig Selig and Robert Somerville (New York, 1987), 41–61. 58 . “Live as chastely”: Iustin. Nov. 14 (535); “marriage is such an honorable”: Iustin. Nov. 22 (536); restriction of divorce: Iustin. Nov. 117.8–10 (542), overturned after his reign by Justin II in Nov. 140 (566); Franco Casavola, “Sessualità e matrimonio nelle Novelle giustinianee,” in Mondo classico e cristianesimo (Rome, 1982), 183–190. 59 . Aug. Civ. 1.16–20, here 1.19; see Dennis Trout, “Re-Textualizing Lucretia: Cultural Subversion in the City of God, ” JECS 2 (1994): 53–70. 60 . Aug. Civ. 1.18–19; see Diana C. Moses, “Livy’s Lucretia and the Validity of Coerced Consent in Roman Law,” in Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies, ed. Angeliki Laiou (Washington, D.C., 1993), 39–81. 61 . Aug. Civ. 1.19. 62 . “Self-initiated”: Eus. Praep. evan. 6.6.47; “free, autonomous”: Eus. Praep. evan. 6.6.48; impious slanderer: Eus. Praep. evan. 6.6.49. 63 . Amphil. Icon. Or. in mul. pecc. 4.10. 64 . Ambrosiast. Quaest. vet. et nov. 115; for Augustine’s relentless attacks on astrology, see F. Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop: The Life and Work of a Father of the Church, trans. B. Battershaw and G. Lamb (London, 1978 [1947]), 60–67; Ioh. Chrys. Hom. hab. Goth. 6 (PG 63:509); Cyr. Hier. Catech. 4.21; Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 198–207.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I felt a mixture of shame and cruel pleasure in this, that my little Philibuster was not giving anyone else a foothold on his hard, soap-slippery self-possession. And the unvoiced envy, vainly denied in the disparagement of Phil’s cock, came through good and clear. I worked back to the evening of Billy Budd with a masochistic sense that I wouldn’t come out of it well, though I was sure there would be very beautiful and insightful stuff about the music. 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 …’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I raised an eyebrow, recognising the boy, Archie, whom I’d taken home a few months before. He had one slightly sleepy eye, which gave him a lewd and experienced air, though he was only a kid, sixteen or seventeen, illicit and the more queenly for it. He had trashed up his appearance since he’d gone with me: hair slick with a jarload of gel, black lips queerly glossed with lilac lipstick. He said something to his companion, then got up and came over to us, surrendering himself confidentially to the seat beside me. ‘Hello, dear!’ ‘Hello, Archie.’ We looked at each other for a moment with that strange disbanded intimacy of people who have once briefly been lovers. ‘This is Phil.’ ‘Mm. I’m with Roger. He says he’s seen you in the gym. He was well jeal when I told him about you and me.’ I glanced over to where Roger was affecting an interest in some men in the other direction. He was someone I was half-aware of, a morose middle-aged fellow who appeared at the Corry in a suit on weekday evenings but on Saturdays and Sundays was transformed by heavy boots, jeans and biking jacket, the ensemble looking just a trifle too much for him. ‘I’m not sure that I’m not jealous of him,’ I said with arch courtesy. ‘Are you seeing a lot of him?’ ‘Yeah, last couple of months I’ve been stopping over at his place, Fulham, quite posh it is. He’s got a video and that.’ ‘I can imagine.’ ‘No, he’s really sweet though.’ ‘I think he’s perfectly hideous, but I suppose it’s nothing to do with me.’ He might have been hurt by this remark, but he seemed to quite admire me for it. ‘Yeah—still it’s nice having someone to look after you, know what I mean?’ He slid his hand between my legs, and I felt Phil go tense on the other side of me. I said nothing, but stared at Archie in an existential sort of way, my cock quickly thickening under the light pressure of his fingers. ‘Not today, dear,’ I murmured, shifting away and slipping my own hand onto Phil’s thigh. ‘P’raps you’re right,’ he said, with his typical experimenté air, and looked round to find out what had happened to Roger. Roger was smoking a cigarette and gazing at the ceiling, a model of tense insouciance. ‘Your mate looking for a friend, is he?’ Archie asked, as if it were the 1930s. ‘Phil you mean? No, no: he has a mate.’ Archie looked at me, expecting me to say something else as it sank in. ‘That’s not like you,’ he said. ‘I thought you only went with black boys. Sorry, love,’ he said to Phil, needlessly enlarging on his error; ‘I thought you must be down here after a bit of beige. That’s what most of the white guys come here for.’ ‘That’s all right,’ said Phil gruffly. ‘D’you hear about Des?’

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  A part of Jane was still drawn to Mary; over the years they had shared much. But the more time she spent around her, the more she had to see Mary’s growing fame, her circle of illustrious friends, her generous nature toward other women who had been mistreated, her total devotion to her son and to the memory of her husband. None of this jibed with the narrative, and so Jane had to take yet another step in her mind: “Mary is false, still living off the legacy of her husband and others, motivated by her neediness, not by her generosity. If only other people could see this.” So she stole Mary’s friend Hogg, a weaker imitation of the original sin of stealing her husband. And she continued to spread stories about Mary, but this time with the added vicious twist that Jane was the last great love of Shelley’s life, that he had never loved his wife, and that Mary had driven him to suicide. Telling such lurid stories in London would do maximum damage to Mary’s reputation. It is hard to calculate the pain she inflicted over the years on Mary —the quarrels with Mary’s husband exacerbated by Jane, the sudden mysterious coldness of Mary’s closest friends, the push and pull Jane played on Mary, always stepping back when Mary wanted more closeness, and finally the revelation of the ultimate betrayal, and the thought, which would haunt Mary for years, that so many had believed Jane’s story. Such can be the hidden pain inflicted by one great envier. Understand: Envy occurs most commonly and painfully among friends. We assume that something in the course of the relationship caused the friend to turn against us. Sometimes all we experience is the betrayal, the sabotage, the ugly criticisms they throw at us, and we never understand the underlying envy that inspired these actions. What we need to grasp is something paradoxical: people who feel envy in the first place are often motivated to become our friends. Like Jane, they feel a mix of genuine interest, attraction, and envy, if we have some qualities that make them feel inferior. Becoming our friend, they can disguise the envy to themselves. They will often go even further, becoming extra attentive and impatient to secure our friendship. But as they draw closer, the problem gets worse. The underlying envy is continually stirred. The very traits that might have stimulated feelings of inferiority—the good position, the solid work ethic, the likability—are now being witnessed on a daily basis. And so as with Jane, a narrative is gradually constructed: the envied person is lucky, overly ambitious, not nearly so great.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Our group was more like two of us since the other participant did not join in readily, apparently uncomfortable with the topic at hand. The curly-haired woman and I decided to forge ahead as our “Third”—I couldn’t help thinking of her as that and chortled to myself—hung fire. We decided that if we watched our partner having sex with someone else and really enjoying it, we might feel jealous, turned on, hurt, angry, curious, excited, gutted, and more. We might derive meanings from it, including: I am not good enough; he/she is bored with me; something is wrong with me or our relationship; being with someone new is exciting and that’s no reflection on me. If our partner fell in love with this other person, we might feel confused, sad, threatened, and devastated. I added that I might also feel homicidal. (“You should have an affair if you need to, for research for your book,” my husband had offered nonchalantly when I first set out on my project. He is steadier and more self-confident than most people I know, certainly more so than I am. “If you’re fishing for permission yourself, you can’t have it,” I had snapped at him in response.) When Kaupp asked each of our groups what we had discussed, I ended up going first. Kaupp listened attentively, seizing on what I shared about feeling murderous and turned on. He explained that the opposite of the jealousy that feels like a stab to your heart and a stone in your gut is “compersion”—a sensation of excitement in witnessing your partner enjoy himself or herself while having sex with someone other than you. In the beginning stages with this new person, you might experience “NRE,” or new relationship energy—that rush of feelings and hormones and neurochemical changes that comes when you are connecting with a person sexually and emotionally and it’s all giddy and hopeful and passionate. This might also be called “limerence,” which sounded delightfully like “limerick” to me but refers to wanting, sometimes almost desperately, to be in the presence of the new person and to have your feelings reciprocated. Then there is “CNM”—because saying “consensual non-monogamy” over and over gets to be a mouthful. Others in the room had insights and observations and questions. “The gender of the person—” one man said, “I’m interested in how this would affect things.” I presumed he was straight—I don’t know why—and guessed he meant that for him it would be different to see his wife have sex with another man than it would be to see her with a woman. But it seemed rude to ask. “People might reenact issues from their family of origin in a triad like this,” another therapist ventured. “Does fairness come up?” a man with a European accent wanted to know.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Soon after the kids started school, Tim noticed a change in his wife. Lily grew increasingly distant and preoccupied. It seemed to Tim they were talking less—Lily would come home from work, work some more, put the kids to sleep, and collapse into bed herself. Eventually some of Lily’s girlfriends, concerned, came to Tim. They really cared about him and Lily and the marriage, they explained, and were concerned that she was very much in love with a man she was seeing. “You need to tell her she needs to end this! You need to kick her out!” one insisted to Tim. Another friend told Tim she blamed him for “letting Lily have too long a leash.” He told me, “I found the way they talked about it mind-boggling. Like Lily was my property and I had to control her. Like she was my horse!” Lily had apparently fallen hard for someone else, and while Tim had no intention of trying to “rein her in,” he knew he had to speak to his wife. So one night, after they had put the kids to bed, Tim asked her what was going on. Lily admitted that, yes, she was involved with someone. She told Tim that things had become serious and intense, and that this man made her happy in ways she hadn’t felt before. Did this mean there was something wrong with her, and with their marriage? She didn’t think so. She sobbed and apologized and said she loved both this man and Tim, in different ways, and that she didn’t know what to do. “What should I do now?” she asked Tim over and over, crying. Tim recalled, “She was in pain. She was being so raw and honest with me and saying, ‘Now what?’” Tim wasn’t sure either. He fought back his jealousy and a feeling of panic. He tried to be reasonable and thoughtful and considerate, something he and Lily had promised one another to strive for always. “I figured, ‘My job as your husband is to be empathic, to say, “Okay, you are going through a painful thing. It’s painful for both of us. What’s next?”’ And I just realized, Okay, this is probably one of the most important decisions I’m ever going to make. I thought, I trust her, I do. And if I try to shut this down, she’ll just want to be with him more. I knew if I told her she had to cut him off—that’s it. She’d be more in love with him than ever. I would make her long and pine for him if I forbade her to see him, and besides, that wasn’t in our vocabulary.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I raised an eyebrow, recognising the boy, Archie, whom I’d taken home a few months before. He had one slightly sleepy eye, which gave him a lewd and experienced air, though he was only a kid, sixteen or seventeen, illicit and the more queenly for it. He had trashed up his appearance since he’d gone with me: hair slick with a jarload of gel, black lips queerly glossed with lilac lipstick. He said something to his companion, then got up and came over to us, surrendering himself confidentially to the seat beside me. ‘Hello, dear!’ ‘Hello, Archie.’ We looked at each other for a moment with that strange disbanded intimacy of people who have once briefly been lovers. ‘This is Phil.’ ‘Mm. I’m with Roger. He says he’s seen you in the gym. He was well jeal when I told him about you and me.’ I glanced over to where Roger was affecting an interest in some men in the other direction. He was someone I was half-aware of, a morose middle-aged fellow who appeared at the Corry in a suit on weekday evenings but on Saturdays and Sundays was transformed by heavy boots, jeans and biking jacket, the ensemble looking just a trifle too much for him. ‘I’m not sure that I’m not jealous of him,’ I said with arch courtesy. ‘Are you seeing a lot of him?’ ‘Yeah, last couple of months I’ve been stopping over at his place, Fulham, quite posh it is. He’s got a video and that.’ ‘I can imagine.’ ‘No, he’s really sweet though.’ ‘I think he’s perfectly hideous, but I suppose it’s nothing to do with me.’ He might have been hurt by this remark, but he seemed to quite admire me for it. ‘Yeah—still it’s nice having someone to look after you, know what I mean?’ He slid his hand between my legs, and I felt Phil go tense on the other side of me. I said nothing, but stared at Archie in an existential sort of way, my cock quickly thickening under the light pressure of his fingers. ‘Not today, dear,’ I murmured, shifting away and slipping my own hand onto Phil’s thigh. ‘P’raps you’re right,’ he said, with his typical experimenté air, and looked round to find out what had happened to Roger. Roger was smoking a cigarette and gazing at the ceiling, a model of tense insouciance. ‘Your mate looking for a friend, is he?’ Archie asked, as if it were the 1930s. ‘Phil you mean? No, no: he has a mate.’ Archie looked at me, expecting me to say something else as it sank in. ‘That’s not like you,’ he said. ‘I thought you only went with black boys. Sorry, love,’ he said to Phil, needlessly enlarging on his error; ‘I thought you must be down here after a bit of beige. That’s what most of the white guys come here for.’ ‘That’s all right,’ said Phil gruffly. ‘D’you hear about Des?’

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

  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, “fi rst 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. Th e aro-matics of her passing entourage could stun the unwary soul. Th e 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 fi red 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 fi nd in heaven! Th is fi rst encounter between Nonnos and Pelagia is layered with meaning. As has been noticed, it mimics the scenes of love at fi rst sight between the heroes and heroines of romance. Carnal eros has been displaced by spiritual yearning. Nonnos’s anguish and weeping are drawn directly from R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  the stock of romantic tropes. By the time the Life was written, stylized encounters between holy men and prostitutes had become a regular part of the fi ctional repertoire. Th e true holy man— monks like John the Dwarf or Serapion, even rabbis like Hanina and Meir— could stand face- to- face with the prostitute, unfazed by her charm. Th ese scenes assume, and defy, the serious physics of the gaze that are essential to romance. In Leucippe and Clitophon, beauty comes in at the eye; its ray of particulates enters and enervates the soul. An even richer comparandum is the scene in Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Tale in which the priest Kalasiris fl ed his native town because a courtesan of unparalleled beauty appeared in his city; there was no escape from the “dragnet of erotic charm” that emanated from her eyes. So Kalasiris fl ed to Greece! Kalasiris, a richly characterized holy man who plays a central role in the narrative, is closer to late antique fi ction than to erotic romance, but because Th e Ethiopian Tale is still a romance, it obeys the erotics of the gaze. Simple indiff erence or moral superiority to the power of beauty would off end the conventions of the genre, so to preserve his purity Kalasiris must emigrate. Th e Christian ascetic, by contrast, has attained a

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  At the boundary of every couple lives the third. He’s the high school sweetheart whose hands you still remember, the pretty cashier, the handsome fourth-grade teacher you flirt with when you pick your son up at school. The smiling stranger on the subway is the third. So, too, are the stripper, the porn star, and the sex worker, whether touched or untouched. He is the one a woman fantasizes about when she makes love to her husband. Increasingly, she can be found on the Internet. Real or imagined, embodied or not, the third is the fulcrum on which a couple balances. The third is the manifestation of our desire for what lies outside the fence. It is the forbidden. The affair is the third, but so, too, is the wife at home. Naomi is the hidden shadow in Doug’s marriage, but Zoë lives at the center of the affair. The lovers’ jealousy depends on the presence of the spouse. Without the betrothed, all the possessiveness, passion, and insanity of fevered lovers will simply go limp. Perhaps this is why so few affairs last after the marriage that inspired them dissolves. The true test of love in an affair begins only when the obstacle is removed. All relationships live in the shadow of the third, for it is the other that solders our dyad. In his book Monogamy, Adam Phillips writes, “The couple is a resistance to the intrusion of the third, but in order for it to last it is indispensable to have enemies. That is why the monogamous can’t live without them. When we are two, we are together. In order to form a couple, we need to be three.” What then is a couple to do? Many of the patients I meet simply refuse to acknowledge the third. They’re drawn by the lure of oneness, which insists that there is no need for others. Perfect love is sufficient unto itself. So fragile is this fusion that the presence of another, even in fantasy, is powerful enough to shatter it.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  That night Sandra called her. Stephanie was sitting on her bed eating orange sorbet from a pint box and trying to view her life in a positive way, and she welcomed the interruption. “Hi,” said Sandra. “You’re not writing, are you?” “No, in fact, I was avoiding it.” “Again?” “I’m afraid so.” Sandra sighed. “Maybe you’re trying to write at the wrong time of day. Most people have times of day when they’re more productive than others. Have you considered that?” “No, I haven’t. Anyway, I have a job, you know.” “That’s right, I forgot. You don’t have as much leeway as I do.” Sandra was supported by her husband, a painter whose father had given him a building. Stephanie had told Sandra that she was working as a maid for an agency that had several apartments on the Upper West Side. In her mind, this was grubbily close to the truth, and it rendered her conveniently unreachable by phone. She felt that Sandra viewed her fictional job with a mixture of secret repugnance and respect, astounded that a person she knew could do such a job without any apparent loss of self-esteem. Sandra began to talk about the opening. After Stephanie had left, an important East Village art critic had arrived, and Sandra had hoped he would pay attention to her. But he ignored her completely and openly admired the work done by her friend Yolanda. “I know it’s petty, but by the end of the night, I could hardly speak to her. It’s not just this one incident either; she’s always getting attention—ever since she started putting those little beads in her hair and going out with that guy Serge. And I know what this sounds like, but sometimes I think people respond to her just because she’s black and they want to prove they’re not racist. I mean, I know she’s good, but I work all the time, and she only does one painting every few months. And her stuff is derivative as hell. I mean, I know everybody’s derivative in a way, but you know what I mean. It makes me feel like a piece of shit. Am I being awful?” “Well…sort of,” said Stephanie, who thought Yolanda’s work was clearly better than Sandra’s. “But I understand how you feel.” She told Sandra how annoyed she was when the name of a writer she didn’t think much of began appearing in bold print in gossip columns everywhere. “When I saw that picture of him in Vanity Fair at the Palladium with China Smith, I almost threw up,” she said. They talked about how shallow and fake it all was, and once again Stephanie told the story of the twenty-three-year-old clerk who had driven her to despair with stories of his impending publication in Esquire and his subsequent book contract, until she found out that he was certifiably nuts and on lithium, and couldn’t possibly be telling the truth.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  He hadn’t intended to do anything with her because, as he said, she was a repulsive little Lesbian, but one day he happened to walk in on her as she was taking a bath, and that started things off. It was getting to be too much for him, he confessed, because the three of them were hot on his trail. He liked the cousin best because she had some dough and she wasn’t reluctant to part with it. Valeska was too cagey, and besides she smelled a little too strong. In fact, he was getting sick of women. He said it was his Aunt Sophie’s fault. She gave him a bad start. While relating this he busies himself going through the bureau drawers. The father is a mean son of a bitch who ought to be hanged, he says, not finding anything immediately. He shows me a revolver with a pearl handle . . . what would it fetch? A gun was too good to use on the old man . . . he’d like to dynamite him. Trying to find out why he hated the old man so, it developed that the kid was really stuck on his mother. He couldn’t bear the thought of the old man going to bed with her. You don’t mean to say that you’re jealous of your old man, I ask. Yes, he’s jealous. If I wanted to know the truth it’s that he wouldn’t mind sleeping with his mother. Why not? That’s why he had permitted his Aunt Sophie to seduce him . . . he was thinking of his mother all the time. But don’t you feel bad when you go through her pocketbook, I asked. He laughed. It’s not her money, he said, it’s his . And what have they done for me? They were always farming me out. The first thing they taught me was how to cheat people. That’s a hell of a way to raise a kid. . . . There’s not a red cent in the house. Curley’s idea of a way out is to go with me to the office where he works and while I engage the manager in conversation go through the wardrobe and clean out all the loose change. Or, if I’m not afraid of taking a chance, he will go through the cash drawer. They’ll never suspect us , he says. Had he ever done that before, I ask. Of course . . . a dozen or more times, right under the manager’s nose. And wasn’t there any stink about it? To be sure . . . they had fired a few clerks. Why don’t you borrow something from your Aunt Sophie, I suggest. That’s easy enough, only it means a quick diddle and he doesn’t want to diddle her any more. She stinks, Aunt Sophie. What do you mean, she stinks? Just that . . . she doesn’t wash herself regularly. Why, what’s the matter with her? Nothing, just religious.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She felt that Sandra viewed her fictional job with a mixture of secret repugnance and respect, astounded that a person she knew could do such a job without any apparent loss of self-esteem. Sandra began to talk about the opening. After Stephanie had left, an important East Village art critic had arrived, and Sandra had hoped he would pay attention to her. But he ignored her completely and openly admired the work done by her friend Yolanda. “I know it’s petty, but by the end of the night, I could hardly speak to her. It’s not just this one incident either; she’s always getting attention—ever since she started putting those little beads in her hair and going out with that guy Serge. And I know what this sounds like, but sometimes I think people respond to her just because she’s black and they want to prove they’re not racist. I mean, I know she’s good, but I work all the time, and she only does one painting every few months. And her stuff is derivative as hell. I mean, I know everybody’s derivative in a way, but you know what I mean. It makes me feel like a piece of shit. Am I being awful?” “Well…sort of,” said Stephanie, who thought Yolanda’s work was clearly better than Sandra’s. “But I understand how you feel.” She told Sandra how annoyed she was when the name of a writer she didn’t think much of began appearing in bold print in gossip columns everywhere. “When I saw that picture of him in Vanity Fair at the Palladium with China Smith, I almost threw up,” she said. They talked about how shallow and fake it all was, and once again Stephanie told the story of the twenty-three-year-old clerk who had driven her to despair with stories of his impending publication in Esquire and his subsequent book contract, until she found out that he was certifiably nuts and on lithium, and couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. Stephanie hung up feeling vaguely humiliated. She thought of her job at Christine’s, almost so she could feel worse, but felt strangely comforted instead. This made no sense to her, but she accepted the comfort. She wished that she could tell Sandra about her real job, but she didn’t dare. Perhaps Sandra wouldn’t be shocked, but she would think it was self-destructive and insulting to women. Well, maybe it was. She never got any writing done while she was hooking. Somehow the idea of coming home after a day at Christine’s and sitting down to write was impossible; her thoughts were clotted by the clamoring, demanding ghosts of the men she’d seen that day. She needed to make herself a nourishing meal and sit still and take care of herself, as her mother used to say. Working at Christine’s was a time for making money and resting her brain, she told herself. Writing would come later.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  home. But Salomé did not stay long: she accepted an invitation of Nietz-herself And in this she succeeded with little effort, sche's to visit him, unchaperoned, in Tautenburg. In her absence Rée was for indeed she was a consumed with doubts and anger. He wanted her more than ever, and was woman more to be wooed prepared to redouble his efforts. When she finally came back, Rée vented than to do the wooing. his bitterness, railing against Nietzsche, criticizing his philosophy, and ques-And now listen to the splendid sequel: not long tioning his motives toward the girl. But Salomé took Nietzsche's side. Rée afterward it happened that was in despair; he felt he had lost her for good. Yet a few days later she sura letter which she had prised him again: she had decided she wanted to live with him, and with written to her lover fell into the hands of another him alone. woman of comparable At last Rée had what he had wanted, or so he thought. The couple set-rank, charm, and beauty; tled in Berlin, where they rented an apartment together. But now, to Rée's and since she, like most women, was curious and dismay, the old pattern repeated. They lived together but Salomé was eager to learn secrets, she courted on all sides by young men. The darling of Berlin's intellectuals, opened the letter and read who admired her independent spirit, her refusal to compromise, she was it. Realizing that it was written from the depths of constantly surrounded by a harem of men, who referred to her as "Her Ex-passion, in the most loving cellency." Once again Rée found himself competing for her attention. and ardent terms, she was Driven to despair, he left her a few years later, and eventually committed at first moved with suicide. compassion, for she knew very well from whom the In 1911, Sigmund Freud met Salomé (now known as Lou Andreas-letter came and to whom it Salomé) at a conference in Germany. She wanted to devote herself to the was addressed; then, psychoanalytical movement, she said, and Freud found her enchanting, al-however, such was the power of the words she though, like everyone else, he knew the story of her infamous affair with read, turning them over in Nietzsche (see page 46, "The Dandy"). Salomé had no background in psy-her mind and considering choanalysis or in therapy of any kind, but Freud admitted her into the in-what kind of man it must be who had been able to ner circle of followers who attended his private lectures. Soon after she arouse such great love, she joined the circle, one of Freud's most promising and brilliant students, Dr. at once began to fall in love Victor Tausk, sixteen years younger than Salomé, fell in love with her. Sa-with him herself; and the lomé's relationship with Freud had been platonic, but he had grown ex-letter was without doubt far more effective than if the