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 Henry and June (1986)

  “But meanwhile,” says Henry, “it is Fred who has written three wonderful pages about you. He raves about you, he worships you. I am jealous of those three pages. I wish I had written them.” “You will,” I say confidently. “For example, your hands. I had never noticed them. Fred gives them so much importance. Let me look at them. Are they really as beautiful as that? Yes, indeed.” I laugh. “You appreciate other things, perhaps.” “What?” “Warmth, for instance.” I’m smiling, but there are so many fine lacerations that Henry’s words open. “When Fred hears me talk about June, he says I do not love you.” Yet he won’t let me go. He calls out to me in his letters. His arms, his caresses, and his fucking are voracious. He says, with me, that no amount of thinking (Proust’s words, or Fred’s, or mine) will stop us from living. And what is living? The moment when he rings at Natasha’s door (she is away and I have her place) and immediately desires me. The moment when he tells me he has had no thoughts of whores. I am so idiotically fair and loyal to June in every word I utter about her. How can I deceive myself about the extent of Henry’s love when I understand and share his feelings about June? He sleeps in my arms, we are welded, his penis still in me. It is a moment of real peace, a moment of security. I open my eyes, but I do not think. One of my hands is on his gray hair. The other hand is spread around his leg. “Oh, Anaïs,” he had said, “you are so hot, so hot that I can’t wait. I must shoot into you quickly, quickly.” Is how one is loved always so important? Is it so imperative that one should be loved absolutely or greatly? Would Fred say of me that I can love because I love others more than I love myself? Or is it Hugo who loves when he goes three times to the station to meet me because I have missed three trains? Or is it Fred, with his nebulous, poetic, delicate comprehension? Or do I love most when I say to Henry, “The destroyers do not always destroy. June has not destroyed you, ultimately. The core of you is a writer. And the writer is living.” “Henry, tell Fred we can go and get the curtains tomorrow.” “I’ll come, too,” said Henry, suddenly jealous. “But you know Fred wants to see me, to talk with me.” Henry’s jealousy pleased me. “Tell him to meet me at the same place as last time.” “About four o’clock.”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Yet I dreamed of June last night. June had suddenly returned. We shut ourselves up in a room. Hugo, Henry, and other people were waiting for us to dress and have dinner together. I wanted June. I begged her to undress. Piece by piece I discovered her body, with cries of admiration, but in the nightmare I saw the defects of it, strange deformations. Still, she seemed altogether desirable. I begged her to let me see between her legs. She opened them and raised them, and there I saw flesh thickly covered with hard black hair, like a man’s, but then the very tip of her flesh was snow-white. What horrified me was that she was moving frenziedly, and that the lips were opening and closing quickly like the mouth of the goldfish in the pool when he eats. I just watched her, fascinated and repulsed, and then I threw myself on her and said, “Let me put my tongue there,” and she let me but she did not seem satisfied while I flicked at her. She seemed cold and restless. Suddenly she sat up, threw me down, and leaned over me, and as she lay over me I felt a penis touching me. I questioned her and she answered triumphantly, “Yes, I have a little one; aren’t you glad?” “But how do you conceal it from Henry?” I asked. She smiled, treacherously. All through the dream there was a sense of great disorder, of movements which accomplished nothing, of everything being late, of everybody waiting, restless and defeated. And yet I am jealous of all the suffering Henry experiences with her. I feel that I am sinking away from all wisdom and all understanding, that my instincts are howling like jungle animals. When I remember the afternoons with Henry in the Hotel Anjou, I suffer. Two afternoons which are branded on my body and on my mind. When I came home from Eduardo yesterday I took refuge in Hugo’s arms. I was loaded down with feelings of anxiety for Eduardo and yearning for Henry, and at the same time, lying in Hugo’s arms and merely kissing his mouth and neck, I found a feeling so sweet and so profound that it seemed to conquer all the darkness and baseness of life. I felt as if I were a leper and that his strength was so great he could heal me instantly by a kiss. I loved him last night with a sincerity that surpasses all the climaxes my fever makes me crave. Proust writes that happiness is something from which fever is absent. Last night I knew happiness and I recognized it, and I can truly say that only Hugo has ever given it to me, and it runs undefeated by the leapings of my fevered body and mind.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  To my taste, they all spoke far too much about my potential partner in all this glory. I was jealous of this possible brother who prevented me from being the uncontested hero of a ceremony that would occur only once in my lifetime. I realized that even the date of my bar mitzvah had been left undecided, to be determined according to the date of his birth. And so I waited for him. My parents had repeated to me often enough, in spite of all, that I was their first great joy, the only boy and the future head of the family. Now, I learned that I had only just escaped not being what I was. Before me, my parents had had another boy, born with all his fingers joined together, webbed like a duck’s foot: “That was a bad omen, but I looked after him well in spite of it all,” my mother used to say, “though I knew all the time that something would happen to him.” And it did happen, for he died in infancy. On the eve of his death, one of the women next door had heard an owl hoot quite close to our house. As Monsieur Touitou, our teacher, had told us that this superstition was meaningless, I explained firmly to my mother that owls do not kill infants but that the latter die for lack of proper care. The harbinger of death kills nobody; on the contrary, it’s a useful bird. That was exactly what Monsieur Touitou had explained to us. My mother was furious and answered me that I was a fool, a very small rat who thought he had a very long tail; and if school taught me only to make fun of my parents, she would prevent my going there. I thus learned to distinguish more clearly what was right and proper at school from what was right and proper at home, though much to the advantage of school; and I acquired the habit of speaking as little as possible to my parents about what I did at school.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I was rather fond of Mina because of her very realistic views about other girls. She was the daughter of a tradesman who had made good, but she could still remember what life had been like before her father had struck it rich, and she now observed her new social background with a very lucid mind. Her sarcasm was pitiless but always smiling, and her own rather sickly health was certainly at the root of much of her bitterness. Her rather pleasant venom may also have acted upon me as a revenge for some of my own jealousy that I was never ready to confess. “By the way,” she suddenly confided rather knowingly, “let me congratulate you. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard Ginou talk like that about any boy. She’s a reasonable girl, and one who is well aware of her own charm. That’s why she never does anything silly. Well, she mentioned your name to me six times in six days of summer camp, and even told me all about how she had dreamed about you. I think she would be ready to allow you to sit in the front row, just beyond the footlights of the stage where she gives her personal appearances.” I knew how much Mina enjoyed all kinds of go-between business. It gave her a chance to exercise her catty tongue and her foxy mind. That was why everyone was a bit scared of her but quite willing to use her services once in a while. So although I only shrugged my shoulders, I decided that she couldn’t be inventing all of it. True, she helped people to fall into each other’s arms, but she never brought couples together at random. Anyhow, I was too much interested and flattered by what she hinted at, and that alone excited me, though I tried to force myself to act as if I didn’t care much. So I threw the ball back toward her, carelessly at that, so that it fell without much of a splash on the crest of a lazy wave, borne almost to the shore, and then immediately lost again in the light foam. The sea was like us, content to play languidly with the tips of its fingers. But Mina insisted: “Still, Ginou’s a wonderful kid. You know, she’s my best friend, and she really dreamed about you.” Ginou, also called Jeannette, was playing ball over the breakwater just beyond ours; she was the only girl there, in a crowd of five boys.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I came home and threw myself on the couch; I found it hard to breathe. In answer to Eduardo’s plea I met him early this morning. He had spent two days feeling jealous of Henry, realizing that he, the narcissist, was at last possessed by another. “How good it is to come out of one’s self! I have thought of you continuously for two days, have slept badly, have dreamed that I struck you hard, oh, so hard and that your head fell off and I carried it about in my arms. Anaïs, I am going to have you all day. You promised me. All day.” All I want is to dart out of the café. I tell him so. His pleadings, softness, intensity vaguely stir my old love and my pity, the Richmond Hill love, with its vague expectancies, the old habit of thinking: of course I want Eduardo. I fear he might shut himself up again in narcissism because he cannot bear pain. “To think I have come to worship your very bones, Anaïs!” I am faintly, faintly stirred, yet I want most of all to run away from him. I don’t know why, I obey him, follow him. I feel hurt while reading Albertine disparue , because it is marked by Henry, and Albertine is June. I can follow each amplification of his jealousies, his doubts, his tenderness, his regrets, his horror, his passion, and I am invaded by a burning jealousy of June. For the moment this love, which had been so balanced between Henry and June that I could not feel any jealousy, this love is stronger for Henry, and I feel tortured and afraid.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The women spat on the floor, assured everyone loudly that nobody on earth would want to have such little runts; after which they laughed silently among themselves, the only human witnesses. As for me, I felt that the babies really didn’t deserve so much attention. They were still as ugly, red, and round as blood sausages, with mouths that took up all their gnomelike faces. My mother, unable to control her expressions, didn’t seem happy. My father had refused to ask Uncle Aroun to be the godfather. Uncle Aroun had already enjoyed the honor of being my own godfather, but he had failed after that to show any generosity. What is the use of such a godfather? Offended and especially disappointed at having failed to obtain a blessing that always brings children to the one who accepts it, my uncle had then decided not to attend the ceremony. He had gone away, his head thrust forward, far ahead of him like that of a hasty giraffe. My mother wept bitter tears as a result of this, and my father lost his temper once more over his wife’s partiality for her own family. I could feel jealousy tearing at my heart as I sat and waited for my share of the congratulations, my hair glued flat with brilliantine, swarthy and thin and goatlike in my dark suit. But most of our guests seemed to forget that our party was in my honor too. Twins are indeed an unusual event. I made fun of their absurd play in front of the babies as they tried to make them laugh, rolling their eyes like clowns and grunting. A few guests remembered me too and uttered some kind remarks, but I felt, quite unjustly, that they were being hypocritical or condescending. So I moved to the terrace where my father and my aunts took turns, on the threshold, at greeting our guests. An imaginary line divided into two parts, with all the young people on one side and their elders on the other, separated as oddly as too different fluids in one and the same container. The young people, all thin, stood about, not very firmly rooted to the ground, and danced according to an exact and almost mechanical pattern; while their stout elders, on the other half of the terrace, sat together in a crowd that had no conventions, eating pickled kidney beans and spitting out the skins onto the floor, all talking loudly and at the same time. Nobody paid any attention to me: I belonged to neither group and understood none of their games. The younger men had set up a phonograph on a chair and were dancing in a kind of frenzy, cutting in all the time on the same few girls and trying to have all the fun they could during the evening.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “If you dropped me now, I would suffer as a doctor from not succeeding in my cure of you, and I would suffer personally because you are interesting. So you see, in a way, I need you as much as you need me. You could hurt me by dropping me. Try to understand that in all relationships there is dependency. Don’t be afraid of dependency. It is the same with the question of domination. Don’t try to tip the scales. The man must be the aggressor in the sexual act. Afterwards he can become like a child and depend on the woman and need her like a mother. You are not domineering intrinsically, but in self-defense—against pain, against the fear of abandonment, which perpetually recalls to you your father’s abandonment of you—you try to conquer, to dominate. I see that you do not use your power for evil or cruelty, but just to satisfy yourself of its effectiveness. You have conquered your husband, Eduardo, and now Henry. You do not want weak men, but until they have become weak in your hands you are not satisfied. Be careful of this: drop your defensive attitude, drop, above all, your fears. Let go.” Henry writes me a thoughtless letter about the little nineteen-year-old Paulette Fred has brought to Clichy to live with him. Henry is joyous because she is doing the housekeeping and urges Fred to marry her because she is adorable. This letter tore into my flesh. I visualized Henry playing with Paulette while Fred went to work. Oh, I know my Henry. I withdrew into myself like a snail, I didn’t want to write in my journal, I refused to think, but I must cry out. If this is jealousy, I must never again inflict it on Hugo, on anyone. Paulette, in Clichy; Paulette, free to do everything for Henry, eating with him, spending the evenings with him while Fred is at work. A summer evening. Henry and I are eating in a small restaurant wide open to the street. We are part of the street. The wine that runs down my throat runs down many other throats. The warmth of the day is like a man’s hand on one’s breast. It envelops both the street and the restaurant. The wine solders us all, Henry and me, the restaurant and the street and the world. Shouts and laughter from the students preparing for the Quatz Arts Ball. They are in barbaric costumes, red-skinned, feathered, overflowing from buses and carts. Henry is saying, “I want to do everything to you tonight. I want to lay you on this very table and fuck you before everybody. I’m nuts about you, Anaïs. I’m crazy about you. After dinner we’re going to the Hotel Anjou. I’ll teach you new things.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Graziani, the gateman, then appeared in the entrance, clapped his hands and began to push open the heavy door. The group around Birdie slowly dispersed. Out of a feeling of friendship, I waited for Saul who was now fumbling in his satchel. He finally spoke to me, asking me with great affability: “Can you lend me two pennies?” I was his last chance, and I didn’t hesitate long. To be sure, I didn’t have much time to think it over and the whole situation was too new for me. Poor little rich boy Saul needed my money, my two pennies. I was vaguely and stupidly proud of this. Perhaps, too, I would have been ashamed to say no, and I later felt more resentful toward him because of this feeling of shame than of anything else. Saul had offered me, from time to time, chocolate or candy, but I had never offered him anything. I knew exactly where my own money was tucked away. But as I always hid it in a tobacco tin, well concealed beneath my apron, in the breast pocket of my shirt, and as Saul was now in a hurry, I fumbled around with my fingers in the pleats of the shirt and Saul became impatient. “Hurry up!” he exclaimed. I hastened to open the tin that was rattling with the only sound of my single coin and handed him the two-penny piece that was intended for my sandwich. Saul was thus able to complete the required sum, bought the last Nestlé bar, tore the wrapping, and exclaimed to me, in disgust: “What? Another fish? Well, I have no luck today.” It seemed to me that nobody had any luck at all that day. The street was deserted and Graziani was shaking his head with a sad expression, acting as if he were about to close the gate. We rushed in through the opening that was scarcely wide enough to allow a cat to pass. “Ragazzi! Ragazzi!” the old Italian grumbled affectionately. The massive door shut loudly behind us. We went to our seats in the first-year class and sat still. The crowd was now transmuted into an organized little society that respected order, and silence followed the earlier clamor. It was then that my stomach chose to rumble loud and long as I realized that I would get no breakfast. I felt that I had been imposed upon. Up till then, I had never experienced the revelation of jealousy and envy. I had envied Saul his fine clothes and his pocket money, but it had been without any true bitterness or animosity. Later, I began to hate the Sauls of life, but the power of the rich, at that time, still inspired in me some respect, as if I were witnessing a constant and almost magical run of luck.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  She sat there filled with champagne. She talked about hashish and its effects. I said, “I have known such states without hashish. I do not need drugs. I carry all that in myself.” At this she was a little angry. She did not realize that I achieved those states without destroying my mind. My mind must not die, because I am a writer. I am the poet who must see. I am not just the poet who can get drunk on June’s beauty. It was her fault that I began to notice discrepancies in her stories, childish lies. Her lack of coordination and logic left loopholes, and when I put the pieces together, I formed a judgment, a judgment which she fears always, which she wants to run away from. She lives without logic. As soon as one tries to coordinate June, June is lost. She must have seen it happen many times. She is like a man who is drunk and gives himself away. We were talking about perfumes, their substance, their mixtures, their meaning. She said casually, “Saturday, when I left you, I bought some perfume for Ray.” (Ray is a girl she has told me about.) At the moment I did not think. I retained the name of the perfume, which was very expensive. We went on talking. She is as affected by my eyes as I am by her face. I told her how her bracelet clutched my wrist like her very fingers, holding me in barbaric slavery. She wants my cape around her body. After lunch we walked. She had to buy her ticket for New York. First we went in a taxi to her hotel. She brought out a marionette, Count Bruga, made by Jean. He had violet hair and violet eyelids, a prostitute’s eyes, a Pulcinella nose, a loose, depraved mouth, consumptive cheeks, a mean, aggressive chin, murderer’s hands, wooden legs, a Spanish sombrero, a black velvet jacket. He had been on the stage. June sat him on the floor of the taxi, in front of us. I laughed at him. We walked into several steamship agencies. June did not have enough money for even a third-class passage and she was trying to get a reduction. I saw her lean over the counter, her face in her hands, appealing, so that the men behind the counter devoured her with their eyes, boldly. And she so soft, persuasive, alluring, smiling up in a secret way at them. I was watching her begging. Count Bruga leered at me. I was only conscious of my jealousy of those men, not of her humiliation. We walked out. I told June I would give her the money she needed, which was more than I could afford to give, much more.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I begged her to let me see between her legs. She opened them and raised them, and there I saw flesh thickly covered with hard black hair, like a man’s, but then the very tip of her flesh was snow-white. What horrified me was that she was moving frenziedly, and that the lips were opening and closing quickly like the mouth of the goldfish in the pool when he eats. I just watched her, fascinated and repulsed, and then I threw myself on her and said, “Let me put my tongue there,” and she let me but she did not seem satisfied while I flicked at her. She seemed cold and restless. Suddenly she sat up, threw me down, and leaned over me, and as she lay over me I felt a penis touching me. I questioned her and she answered triumphantly, “Yes, I have a little one; aren’t you glad?” “But how do you conceal it from Henry?” I asked. She smiled, treacherously. All through the dream there was a sense of great disorder, of movements which accomplished nothing, of everything being late, of everybody waiting, restless and defeated. And yet I am jealous of all the suffering Henry experiences with her. I feel that I am sinking away from all wisdom and all understanding, that my instincts are howling like jungle animals. When I remember the afternoons with Henry in the Hotel Anjou, I suffer. Two afternoons which are branded on my body and on my mind. When I came home from Eduardo yesterday I took refuge in Hugo’s arms. I was loaded down with feelings of anxiety for Eduardo and yearning for Henry, and at the same time, lying in Hugo’s arms and merely kissing his mouth and neck, I found a feeling so sweet and so profound that it seemed to conquer all the darkness and baseness of life. I felt as if I were a leper and that his strength was so great he could heal me instantly by a kiss. I loved him last night with a sincerity that surpasses all the climaxes my fever makes me crave. Proust writes that happiness is something from which fever is absent. Last night I knew happiness and I recognized it, and I can truly say that only Hugo has ever given it to me, and it runs undefeated by the leapings of my fevered body and mind. Now, when I am living the richest period of my life, again my health fails me. All the doctors say the same thing: no illness, nothing wrong but general weakness, low stamina. The heart barely beats, I am cold, I am easily tired out. Today I was tired out for Henry. How precious the moment in the Clichy kitchen, with Fred, too. They were eating breakfast at two o’clock. Books piled up, the ones they want me to read and the one I brought them. Then in Henry’s room, alone.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  It was her fault that I began to notice discrepancies in her stories, childish lies. Her lack of coordination and logic left loopholes, and when I put the pieces together, I formed a judgment, a judgment which she fears always, which she wants to run away from. She lives without logic. As soon as one tries to coordinate June, June is lost. She must have seen it happen many times. She is like a man who is drunk and gives himself away. We were talking about perfumes, their substance, their mixtures, their meaning. She said casually, “Saturday, when I left you, I bought some perfume for Ray.” (Ray is a girl she has told me about.) At the moment I did not think. I retained the name of the perfume, which was very expensive. We went on talking. She is as affected by my eyes as I am by her face. I told her how her bracelet clutched my wrist like her very fingers, holding me in barbaric slavery. She wants my cape around her body. After lunch we walked. She had to buy her ticket for New York. First we went in a taxi to her hotel. She brought out a marionette, Count Bruga, made by Jean. He had violet hair and violet eyelids, a prostitute’s eyes, a Pulcinella nose, a loose, depraved mouth, consumptive cheeks, a mean, aggressive chin, murderer’s hands, wooden legs, a Spanish sombrero, a black velvet jacket. He had been on the stage. June sat him on the floor of the taxi, in front of us. I laughed at him. We walked into several steamship agencies. June did not have enough money for even a third-class passage and she was trying to get a reduction. I saw her lean over the counter, her face in her hands, appealing, so that the men behind the counter devoured her with their eyes, boldly. And she so soft, persuasive, alluring, smiling up in a secret way at them. I was watching her begging. Count Bruga leered at me. I was only conscious of my jealousy of those men, not of her humiliation. We walked out. I told June I would give her the money she needed, which was more than I could afford to give, much more. We went into another steamship agency, with June barely finishing some mad fairy tale before she stated her errand. I saw the man at the counter taken out of himself, transfixed by her face and her soft, yielding way of talking to him, of paying and signing. I stood by and watched him ask her, “Will you have a cocktail with me tomorrow?” June was shaking hands with him. “Three o’clock?” “No. At six.” She smiled at him as she does at me. Then as we left she explained herself hurriedly. “He was very useful to me, very helpful. He is going to do a lot for me. I couldn’t say no.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  “I observed that she was not beautiful, and it gave me pleasure. I also asked your maid if it was your wife who decorated your house, because I liked the decoration. I think I was making comparisons between us. I am sorry I said that about your wife not being beautiful.” “That is not very wicked, if that is all you thought.” “But I also felt that I was beautiful the night of the concert.” “You certainly were en beauté. Is that all?” “Yes.” “You are repeating the experience of your childhood. Identifying my wife, who is forty years old, with your mother and wondering if you can win your father (or me) from her. My wife represents your mother and that is why you dislike her. You must have been, as a child, very jealous of your mother.” He talks a great deal about a woman’s need to be subjugated, the joy I do not know yet, he believes, of letting go entirely. Physically first, because Henry has aroused me so deeply. I begin to find flaws in his formulas, to be irritated at his quick filing away of my dreams and ideas. When he is silent, I analyze my own actions and feelings. Of course, he could say that I am trying to find him defective, to make an equal of him, because he obtained my confidence about his wife. At the moment I feel he is distinctly stronger than I, and I want to balance this by doing some independent analysis about the bracelets. I am therefore half submissive, half rebellious. Allendy accentuates the ambivalence of my desires. He senses that he is also approaching the sexual key to my neuroses, and I realize he is, too, like a deft detective. To test Hugo I have mentioned once or twice the idea of an “evening off”—once a week, perhaps, when we might each go out separately. It is understood that he finds no pleasure in going out with Henry because of an obscure jealousy. Finally we agreed that I could go to the movies with Henry and Fred while he went out with Eduardo. At the last moment Eduardo could not go. I offered to postpone my engagement. Hugo would not hear of it. He said he would go out anyway, and that it was a good thing for both of us. He said this in a normal tone of voice. I don’t know for sure whether he was secretly hurt by my request for independence. He maintained that he was not. Whether he is hurt or not, it is necessary. I feel that gradually he will make good use of his own liberty.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘What did you say?* he asked Desmond. ‘I never said a word/ his well-trained friend said stiffly. ‘It must have been someone talking outside in the courtyard/ Cheri went out, slamming the door behind him, and returned to his own rooms. They were filled with the dim continual hubbub of the fully awakened Rue de Rivoli, and Cheri, through the open window, could see the spring foliage, the leaves stiff and transparent like thin jade knives against the sun. He closed the window and sat down on a useless little chair which stood against the wall in a dingy comer between his bed and the bathroom door. ‘ How can it be? ...’he began in a low voice, and then said no more. He did not understand why it was that during the last six and a half months he had hardly given a thought to Lea’s lover. *Pm making a perfect fool of myselfj were the actual words of the letter so piously preserved by Charlotte Peloux. “A perfect fool?” Cheri shook his head. “It’s funny, but that’s not how I see her at all. What sort of a man can she be in love with? Somebody like Patron — rather than like Desmond, of course. An oily little Argentine? Maybe. Yet all the same ...” He smiled a simple smile. “Apart from me, who is there she could possibly care for? ” A cloud passed over the sun and the room darkened. Cheri leaned his head against the wall. “ My Nounoune ... My Nounoune... Have you betrayed me? Are you beastly enough to deceive me? ... Have you really done that?” He tried to give a sharper edge to his suffering by a misuse of hisimagination: the words and sights it presented left him more astonished than enraged. He did his best to evoke the elation of early morning delights when he was living with Lea, the solace of the prolonged and perfect silences of certain afternoons, with Lea — the delicious sleepy hours in winter spent in a warm bed in a freshly aired room, with Lea but, all the time, in the suffused cherrycoloured afternoon light aflame behind the curtains of Lea’s room,, he saw in Lea’s arms one lover and one lover only — Cheri. He jumped up, revived by a spontaneous act of faith. “It’s as simple as that! If I’m unable to see anyone but myself beside her, then it’s because there is no one else to see.” He seized the telephone, and was on the point of ringing her up, when he gently replaced the receiver. “No nonsense. ...”

• From What We Lost in the Swamp: Poems (2023)

  THE SOMETIMES-JEALOUS GUYI am so mad at you when I wake up from this dream that I want to scream, that I want to shake you from your deep & distant slumber to demand some semblance of an answer. How could you? How could you sit in that dark sailors’ bar with my nemesis & laugh (LAUGH) at all his useless starfish jokes? How could you go behind my back & massage his meaty calves with all your strength? Did you forget that that’s our thing? That all those young & impressionable seashells were watching? How could you? How could you let his disgusting crab claws pinch your perfect speckled cheeks? I won’t believe it. My lying eyes: You, putting down your spaghetti to stand & check his head for lice. Is there anything more intimate? Or how about next, when you together started naming all the mice that scurried by? Fiona. Mr. Billy. Wet Willy. Princess Di. No, no, of course, I’ll never say out loud that I’m a sometimes-jealous guy. It’s just my mind, it runs quite wild, being blessed (but also stricken) with this vast (& sometimes rash) imagination. THE LITTLE BUILDER MANAnytime my lover & I get into a (very rare) fight & it’s my fault, my anger, my doing, the little builder man inside my throat unfurls, walks around in circles, stomping his feet, reciting my apology. It goes like this for hours: constant chattering so I can’t read, can’t sleep, can’t think about anything but the inevitable. It’s his way of making sure I know I cannot sit & sulk forever, that when the necessary silence has passed, the distance done, I will have to open my mouth to let him out, to fix the bridge I broke. SALLY (WHEN THERE’S NOTHING LEFT TO SELL)Plants in Los Angeles look like coral, like seaweed, which is another way to say that every time I’m walking down the street, I’m underwater. Look at that bush over there with its long, pipe cleaner limbs, like a spindly green octopus. How’d you get so deep down here? he asks, but I’m too busy looking up at the surface, minding my silence, wondering why every note that dives below sounds muted, wondering how something as violent as drowning, as sinking to the bottom, from above looks peaceful, looks small, looks practically invisible to the flock of gulls passing by. DIE HARDOver dinner, you ask me how my day went & I explain how at work today, I shrank down to the size of a push pin, followed an absurd & scrambling line of ants to their crack in the curb. You say, Why do you always make yourself so small? When you really mean, Why do you hate yourself? Is this somehow my fault? I say, Don’t you know how many secret cities I’ve seen? When I really mean, This is my escape. This is how I’ve learned

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Two motors were dozing in the shade of the low-hanging branches just inside the gates, one his wife’s and the other American, both in the charge of an American chauffeur who was himself taking a nap. Cheri drove on as far as the deserted Rue de Franqueville, and then walked back to his own front door. He let himself in without making a sound, took a good look at his shadowy form in the green-surfaced mirror, and softly went upstairs to the bedroom. It was just as he had longed for it to be - blue, fragrant, made for rest. In it he found everything that his thirsty drive had made so desirable: and more besides, Cor there was a young woman dressed in white, powdering her face and tidying her hair in front of a long looking-glass. Her back was turned to Cheri, and she did not hear him enter. Thus he had more than a moment to observe in the glass how flushed luncheon and the hot weather had made her, and to note her strange expression of untidiness and triumph and her general air of having won an emotionally outrageous victory. All at once Edmee caught sight of her husband and turned to face him without saying a word. She examined him critically from top to toe, waiting for him to speak first. Through the half-open window facing the garden floated up the baritone notes of Doctor Arnaud’s voice, singing, 4 Oy Marie, Oy Marie' Edm^e’s whole body seemed to incline towards this voice, but she restrained herself from turning her head in the direction of the garden. The slightly drunken courage visible in her eyes might well forebode a serious situation. Out of contempt or cowardice, Cheri, by putting a finger to his lips, enjoined silence upon her. He then pointed to the staircase with the same imperative finger. Edmee obeyed. She went resolutely past him, without being able to repress, at the moment when she came closest to him, a slight twist of the hips and quickening of the step, which kindled in Cheri a sudden impulse to strike her. He leant over the banisters, feeling reassured, like a cat that has reached safety at the top of a tree; and, still thinking of punishing, smashing, and taking flight, he waited there, ready to be wafted away on a flood of jealousy. All that came to him was a mediocre little feeling of shame, all too bearable, as he put his thoughts into words, “Punish her, smash up the whole place! There’s better to do than that. Yes, there’s better to do.” But what, he did not know. Each morning for him, whether he woke early or late, was the start of a long day’s vigil. At first he paid but scant attention, believing it to be merely the persistence of an unhealthy habit picked up in the army.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘ Oh well, not quite as bad as that, you know. There was rather more air than yesterday. My office down there is cool, you know. And then, we’ve had no time to think about it. My young man in bed twenty-two, who was getting on so well ...’ ‘ Oh yes! ’ ‘Yes, Doctor Arnaud isn’t too pleased about him.’ She didn’t hesitate to make play with the name of the Physicianin-Charge, much as a player moves up a decisive piece on the chessboard. But Cheri did not bat an eyelid, and Edmee followed his movements, those of a naked male body dappled a delicate green from the reflected light of the blue curtains. He walked to and fro in front of her, ostentatiously pure, trailing his aura of scent, and living in another world. The very self-confidence of this naked body, superior and contemptuous, reduced Edmee to a mildly vindictive immobility. She could not now have claimed this naked body for her own except in a voice altogether lacking the tones and urgency of desire - that is, in the calm voice of a submissive mate. Now she was held back by an arm covered with fine gold hairs, by an ardent mouth behind a golden moustache, and she gazed at Cheri with the jealous and serene security of a lover who covets a virgin inaccessible to all. They went on to talk about holidays and travelling arrangements, in light-hearted and conventional phrases. * The war hasn't changed Deauville enough, and what a crowd Cheri sighed. * There’s simply no place where one can eat a good meal, and it’s a huge undertaking to reorganize the hotel business! * Edmee affirmed. One day, not long before the Quatorze Juillet, Charlotte Peloux •was lunching with them. She happened to speak of the success of some business deal in American blankets, and complained loudly that L£a had netted a half share of the profits. Cheri raised his head, in astonishment. ‘So you still see her?’ Charlotte Peloux enveloped her son in the loving glances induced by old port, and appealed to her daughter-in-law as witness: ‘He’s got an odd way of putting things - as if he’d been gassed — hasn’t he? ... It’s disturbing at times. I’ve never stopped seeing Lea, darling. Why should I have stopped seeing her?’ ‘Why?’ Edmee repeated. He looked at the two women, finding a strange flavour in their kindly attention. ‘Because you never talk to me about her ...’ he began ingenuously. ‘Mel* barked Charlotte. ‘For goodness’ sake ... Edmee, you hear what he says? Well at least it does credit to his feelings for you. He has so completely forgotten about everything that isn’t you.’

• From White Oleander (1999)

  We heard the crunch of Starr’s Torino turning into the yard, car tires in the gravel, earlier than she normally came home. I was disappointed. Ray paid attention to me when she was gone, but when she came home I went back to being just one of the kids. What was she doing home so early anyway? She usually stayed out until eleven, drinking coffee with the addicts, or discussing Matthew 20 verse 13 with the old ladies at the church. “Shit.” Uncle Ray quickly pocketed his stash and small pipe just as the screen door swung open and the bug zapper zapped a big one at the same time. Starr stopped for a second at the door, seeing us, and the boys sitting on the couch, mesmerized by the TV. Then it was like she was confused to find herself home so soon. She dropped her keys and picked them up. Uncle Ray watched her, her breasts practically coming out of the scooped neck of her dress. Then her smile came on, and she kicked off her shoes and sat on the arm of his chair, kissed him. I could see her sticking her tongue in his ear. “Was it canceled?” he asked. It was my move, but he wasn’t paying attention. She draped herself over his shoulder, her breast squashed into his neck. “Sometimes I just get so tired of hearing them complain. Taking everybody else’s darn inventory.” She picked up my remaining white knight. “I love this,” she said. “Why don’t you ever teach me, Ray baby?” “I did once,” he said in a murmuring, tender voice, turning his head and kissing her breast, right in front of me. “Don’t you remember? You got so mad you turned the board over.” He plucked the knight from her hand and put it back down on the board. King 5. “That was in my drinking days,” she said. “‘Can white mate in one move?’” he repeated out of the Bobby Fischer book. “One move?” she said, tickling his nose with a strand of her hair. “That doesn’t sound too exciting.” White knight to king’s bishop 6. I rode the delicately carved knight into place. “Mate.” But they were kissing and then she told the boys to go to bed when they were done and led Uncle Ray back to her bedroom. ALL NIGHT LONG as I lay in my sleeping bag with its bucking broncos and lariats, I heard their headboard smacking the wall, their laughter. And I wondered whether real daughters were jealous of their mothers and fathers, if it made them sick to see their fathers kiss their mothers, squeeze their breasts. I squeezed my own small breast, hot from the sleeping bag, and imagined how it might feel to another hand, imagined having a body like Starr’s. She was almost a different species with her narrow waist, her breasts round as grapefruit, her bottom round like that too.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  Her thoughts escaped from the domination of these repeated phrases, only to sink into a great unvoiced lament. “ Oh! if only, if only I could somehow be returned to the moment when I was saying, ‘Your second piece of toast, Cheri!’ for that moment’s only just round the corner — it’s not yet lost and gone for ever! Let’s start again from there. The little that’s taken place since won’t count — I’ll wipe it out, I’ll -wipe it out. I’m going to talk to him as though we’re back where we were a moment ago. I’m going to talk to him about our departure, our luggage.” She did, in fact, speak, and said, ‘I see ... I see I cannot treat as a man a creature who, from sheer feebleness of character, can drive two women to distraction. Do you think that I don’t understand? You like your journeys short, don’t you? Yesterday at Neuilly, here today, but to-morrow! To-morrow, where? Here? No, no, my child, no need to lie, that guilty look would never take in even a woman stupider than I am, if there is one like that over there. ...’ She threw out an arm to indicate Neuilly with so violent a gesture that she upset a cake-stand, which Cheri picked up again. Her words had sharpened her grief into anguish, an angry jealous anguish pouring forth like a young wife’s outburst. The rouge on her cheek turned to the deep purple of wine-lees; a strand of her hair, crimped by the curling-tongs, wriggled down her neck like a small dry snake. ‘And even the woman over there, even your wife won’t be found waiting there ever}7 time you choose to come back home! A wife, my child, may not always be easy to find, but she’s much easier to lose! You’ll have yours kept under lock and key by Charlotte, eh? That’s a marvellous idea! Oh, how I’ll laugh, the day when ...’ Cheri got up, pale and serious. ‘Nounoune! ...’ ‘Why Nounoune? What d’you mean, Nounoune? Do you think you’re going to frighten me? You want to lead your own life, do you? Go ahead! You’re bound to see some pretty scenes, with a daughter of Marie-Laure’s. She may have thin arms and a flat behind, but that won’t prevent her from ...’ ‘I forbid you, Nounoune!’ He seized her by the arm; but she rose, vigorously shook herself free, and broke into hoarse laughter: ‘Why, of course, “I forbid you to say a word against my wife!” Isn’t that it?’

• From Henry and June (1986)

  I learn from Henry how to play with a man’s body, how to arouse him, how to express my own desire. We rest. A big bus of students is passing. I jump and run to the window. Henry is asleep. I would like to be at the ball, to taste everything. Henry awakens. He is amused to find me naked at the window. We play again. Hugo may be at the ball, I think. When I gave him his liberty, I know he planned to go. Hugo is at the ball with a woman in his arms, and I am in a hotel room with Henry, with red light shining through the window, a summer night filled with the cries and laughter of the students. I have run naked to the window twice. All this is a dream now. At the time it happened I had a feeling in my body as before a cloudburst. My body remembers the hotness and fever of Henry’s caresses. A story. I must write it a hundred times. But now it brings me pain. In self-protection I will have to detach myself from Henry. I cannot bear this. I hold on while Henry flows carelessly from woman to woman. Today for a moment I softened: It does not matter. Let him have his ordinary little women if it makes him happy. The relief of opening one’s hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge. I give myself to Hugo with such feelings against Henry that I experience a great physical pleasure. My first infidelity to Henry. What subtle forces act on the sensual being. A small hurt, a moment of hatred, and I can enjoy Hugo completely, frenziedly, as much as I have enjoyed Henry himself. I cannot bear jealousy. I must kill it by balance. For every one of Henry’s whores I will avenge myself but in a more terrible way. He has often said that of the two of us, I, in a sense, commit by far the more profane acts. Behind my own drunkenness there is always a certain consciousness, enough to make me refuse to answer Henry’s questions and doubts about me. I do not try to make him jealous, but neither do I admit my stupid fidelity. It is in this way women are pushed into war with men. There is no possibility of absolute confidence. To confide is to put yourself in someone else’s hands and to suffer. Oh, tomorrow, how I will punish him! Already I am glad that when Hugo came back from London I let him kiss me for a long while and carry me in his arms, to the back of the garden, among the mock orange bushes. While he was away, I met with Henry, carrying my pajamas and comb and toothbrush, but poised for flight. I let him talk. “This Paulette and Fred,” he says, “they are cute together.

• 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