Loneliness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  She collected her best stuff into Make Me a Woman (2010, Drawn & Quarterly), as whole and complete a memoir as anything more structured or preconceived. Davis’s stories highlight the strength of your voice as a structural force. Davis established her work and her voice piece by piece; one strip at a time, often one panel at a time. In Davis’s early work, she worked with loose page structures, (right). Later, she structured her pages more tightly to allow more involved stories to flow. Vanessa by Vanessa JULY DIARY and Other Works by Gabrielle Bell RAW COMMUNICATION Gabrielle Bell started making comics about her simple day-to-day life early on, but as the years went by, her comics became more and more raw, and more about desperation, intense alienation, and loneliness. They even began looking more raw—she started adopting a style that makes it look as if she’s scraping skin and texture off of everything and everyone. Bell’s comics are so bare that you can almost miss how intelligent and witty and even funny they are. For instance, she occasionally ventures into “fake autobiography,” where the story veers off in an improbable direction that only reveals itself as improbable once you’re fully in it, as she did with a story about supposedly adapting Valerie Solanas’s famous SCUM Manifesto, or the page left, where she imagines herself suddenly with a husband and family. Gabrielle by Gabrielle JULY DIARY Every July, Bell makes her “July Diary.” She’s said that in that month, she, who is ordinarily reserved and reluctant to leave home, makes sure to agree to any request to go try something, or to go see an event or go hiking, etc. She chooses this month to be alert to the world, and to record the results for her journal. The sample of first panels below show the depths she explores even when she does barely leave her house. Bell starts with one event, one incident, one day at a time. Through her honesty, vulnerability, and wit, she became one of America’s top cartoonists. DAY BY DAY So like Bell, Davis, and Glidden, just capture one event, one sequence, or one moment, and share it. There is immense satisfaction in that. And then do it again, and again. Soon you’ll have the momentum to keep going on that big project you’ve been planning, or on more day-to-day pieces that will work together to reveal a larger, unified you. Starting MY STORY STARTING WITH WHAT YOU KNOW My case may not be so relevant here, because this is one of the few projects for which I had no fear of beginning. My life was upturned. I turned to writing and drawing for my sanity. I didn’t have it all mapped out. I knew the events of the past and the present when I started writing, but I didn’t know the structure, I just knew I had to make this thing.

• From Querelle (1953)

  11 I QUERELLE whose feet rest on the waters of the sea. By meditating op Querelle, by using, in his imagination, his most beautiful traits, his muscles, his rounded parts, his teeth, his guessed·at genitals, Lieutenant Seblon has turned the sailor into an angel (as we shall see, he describes him as "the Angel of Loneliness"), that is to say, into a being less and less human, crystalline, around whom swirl strands of a music based on the opposite of harmony-or rather, a music that is what remains after har mony has been used up, worn out, and in the midst of which this immense angel moves, slowly, unwitnessed, his feet on the water, but his head-or what should be his head-in a dazzle of rays from a supernatural sun. The y themselves tending to deny it, the strangely close resemblance between the two brothers Querelle appeared at tractive only to others. They met only in the evenings, as late as possible, in the one bed of a furnished room not far from where their mother had eked out her meager existence. They met ag ain, perhaps, but somewhere so deep down that they could not see anything clearly, in their love for their mother, and certainly in their almost daily arguments. In the morning they parted without a word. They wanted to ignore each other. Already, at the age of fifteen, Querelle had smiled the smile that was to be peculiarly his for the rest of his life. He had chosen a life among thieves and spoke their argot. We'll try to bea r this in mind in order to understand Querelle whose mental makeup and very feelings depend upon, and assume the form of, a certain syntax, a particular murky orthography. In his conversation we find turns like "peel him rawl" "boy, am I Hying," "oh, beat offl" "he better not show his ass in here again," '1Ie got burnt all right," "get that punk,'' "see the guy making tracks," "hey, baby, dig my hard-on," "suck me off," etc., expressions which are never pronounced clearly, but mut tered in a kind of monotone and as if from within, without the speaker rea�ly "seeing" them. They are not projected, and thus Querelle's words never reveal him; they do not really define him

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The woman has no one to saw her tree in two. She is advised, gently, to ask a neighbor. But she won’t. She says she no longer knows her neighbors well enough. 163 The developers subdivided the ten square miles they bought into forty individual tracts. Most were 157 acres. A few tracts were as small as 20 acres. The biggest tracts had 640 houses each. The families that moved into them averaged 4.2 persons, higher than the national average of 3.2 in 1953. That accounted for mom and dad and 2.2 children. The biggest tracts had a population of 2,400 as soon as the moving vans pulled away from the curb. 164 Families moved in at the rate of thirty-five a day. Life magazine recorded their arrival in a photo story. Don Rochlen, the publicist for the developers, staged the principal photograph. He offered local movers the chance to have one of their trucks pictured in Life . The companies provided more than a dozen moving vans. Rochlen positioned a van in the driveway of nearly every house along a block. He invited the homeowners who wanted to be in Life to recreate their moving day. Some brought a few chairs out of the house and set them below the tailgate of the moving van in their driveway. The Life photographer took the picture standing on top of one of the vans. The street, the moving vans, and the dwindling figures of parents and children recede into the distance. The enormous vans, their company names and telephone numbers painted on their sides, fill the foreground. When you call the picture service for Time and Life and mention the name of my city, the archivist will ask if you want to purchase the staged photograph of the moving vans. [image "Image" file=Image00013.jpg] 165 The Life story calculated the cost of moving into the new suburb. The writer chose an average couple. He said they paid $10,290 for their house, including options. He said they spent another $6,860 for furnishings and a new car. 166 The engineering plan estimated that the completed development would have a population of about seventy thousand. That was larger than the population of Tampa, Savannah, or South Bend. 167 At first, it wasn’t a city at all. The developers called it a “$250,000,000 planned community.” According to the engineering drawings, it was 105 acres of concrete sidewalks and 133 miles of paved streets lined with 5,000 concrete light poles. These were paid for by the three developers. It was the service roads that paralleled the major streets, to keep traffic out of residential neighborhoods. According to the sales brochure, it was two coats of paint on the interior walls and wallpaper above the chair rail in the dining room. It was a garbage disposal in every kitchen.

• From Querelle (1953)

  165 I QUERELLE whom he could talk shop. A guy similar to him, his height, his build-well, his brother, as he sometimes wished, but only for a few seconds: his brother was too much of ·a mirror image having to his credit crimes different from those Querelle him self had comn1itted, but equally beautiful, as grave, as reprehen sible. He did not exactly know how he could have recognized such a man in the street, by what outward signs, and sometimes his loneliness grew so great that he dreamed (but hardly, and very fleetingly) of giving himself up in order to be sent to prison, where he could meet some of the murderers that had been \vrittel) up in the newspapers. But he abandoned that notion quickly. Those murderers were of no interest-they had been stripped of their secrets. The yearning for such a miracu lous friend was partly due to his close resemblance to his brother. Looking at Robert he asked himself whether he wasn't a criminal, too. He was afraid of that, and he wished it � ere true. He would have liked to be part of such a miracle in this world. But he feared it because he would then have lost his superiority over Robert. But now, in the abandoned prison, he was to meet a young fellow who had killed. The thought of it made him feel tender. This assassin. was just an awkward kid, a murderer for nothing. An idiot. But thanks to Querelle he would be credited with a true murder as well, because the authorities assumed that the mur dered sailor had been robbed as well. Even before seeing Gil again Querelle felt almost paternal toward him. He was going to entrust him with one of his murders. In any case Gil was just a dumb kid, he couldn't be the hoped-for buddy. These thoughts (not in the definitive state we are reporting them in, but surging about formlessly), rapid and shifting, self-destruct ing , one being reborn out of the other, were milling around in his body and limbs rather than in his head. He was. walking along, elevated and buffeted by this gale of shapeless notions, none of which really stuck in his mind but left th er e a feeling of discomfort, insecurity and fear. But Querelle did not relinquish

• From Querelle (1953)

  206 I JEAN GENET isolate the sailor in his own universe of silence that even the vast noise of the train could not penetrate. It rushed past them with a terrifying roar. Querelle was overwhelmed by such a strong feeling of abandonment that he let Mario do what he wanted. The train disappeared into the night, with desperate speed. It was rushing to some unknown destination, some place serene, tranquil, terrestrial-unlike any place the sailor had known for a long time. Only the sleeping passengers might have been witnesses to his making love to a cop: but they just left him and the cop behind like two lepers or beggars on a river bank. "Hey, now." Bu t Mario couldn't come. Querelle turned around, abruptly, and squatted down on the ground. As if ordained by fate, the detective's prick plunged into his mouth,_ just as the train plunged into the tunnel leading to the station. It was the first time Querelle kissed a man on the mouth. It seen:ted to him he was pressing his face against a mirror reflect ing his own image while letting his tongue run over the harsh surfaces inside a head hewn out of granite. Nevertheless, as it was an act of love, and of forbidden love, he knew that he was committing evil. His erection hardened. Their mouths re mained soldered together, their tongues lolling round each other or pricki&Jg each other with their tips; neither one of them dared to move on to the rough cheeks, where a kiss would have been a sign of tenderness. Their open eyes met and mirrored expressions of gentle sarcasm. The detective's tongue was very hard. Querelle's work as a steward neither humiliated him nor lowered his prestige in the eyes of his comrades. Performing all

• From Querelle (1953)

  191 I QUERELLE his cock so its tip vanished from sight, then rinsing it, carefully drying it. A bizarre idea flashed into her mind, but did not amuse her overmuch: "He's afraid of getting poisoned by my mouth. It's he who spurts venom, and it's me who poisons him." She felt lonely, old. Robert went on washing himself at the porcelain hand basin. His muscles were in motion, jumping about in his shoulders, arms, calves. The daylight grew brighter. Madame Lysiane tried to visualize Querelle's body; she had only seen him in his sailor's uniform. ' • It's the same ... but that isn't possible, surely there's some part ... maybe his prick is different ... " (and we shall see the development of that symptom). She was very much alone and tired. Robert turned around, calm, solid, centered in his brother, centered in himself. She said: "\Vhy don't you open the curtains." It had been her intention to add the word "darling," but was prevented from it by a kind of humility arising out of her feeling of uncleanliness : she did not want to blemish this man, so radiant, so dear by virtue of the night's revelations and the gentling effect of sexual satisfaction, by any insulting intimacy. Without noticing the omission, Robert pulled the drawstring of the curtains. The pale daylight undid the room, as one says someone's face is "undone" by the signs of a grave disease, by great nausea. She felt the need to die, that is to say, her left ann turned into a huge shark's fin, and she longed to wrap herself in it. Thus Lieutenant Seblon dreamt o f wearing a wide black cape, in which he could wrap himself, and under the folds of which he could masturbate. Such a garment would set him apart, give him a hieratic and mysterious appearance. A creature without arms ... We read, in his diary : To wear a pelerinc, a ca pe. To have no arms any longer, hardly any legs. To become a larva again, a pupa, while secretly retain-

• From Querelle (1953)

  Querelle was wandering about amongst the brambles. He could hear the delicate sound of the wind rustling through the tips of the grasses, familiar from the previous evening, after the murder. He felt no fear, no remorse either, and this will be less of a surprise once one realizes that Querelle had already accepted the fact that he carried the crime in · him-not that he was part of the crime. This calls for a brief explanation. If Querelle had suddenly found himself, with his �abitual responses to normal situations, in a transformed universe, he would have experienced a certain sense of loneliness, a certain fear: the awareness of being an alien. But, as he accepted it, the idea of the murder was more than familiar to him, it was merely an exhalation from his body, and he drenched the whole world with it. His actions were not without an echo. Thus Querelle felt a different sense of loneliness : that of his creative singularity. Let us emphasize, however, that we are describing a mechanism our hero used without being fully aware of it himself. He 131 I QUERELLE

• From Querelle (1953)

  Lysiane went on down. Robert rose. Lysiane again, and then Robert, finally decisive, imperious and urgent, took hold of her shoulders and pushed her down. She took his whole cock in her mouth and swallowed the jism. Robert made no sound : he was a man, he didn't '1et himself go." By the time her face had reappeared above the covers, the light of dawn came trickling in through the curtains that had not been drawn quite shut. She looked at Robert. He was calm, indifferent. Through the strands of hair falling over her face she smiled at him, such a sad smile that Robert kissed her to console her (she understood that, and it made her feel quite desperate ) . Then he got up. And then she knew, full force, that everything had changed : for the first time in her life, after making love-after making a male happy-she did not hasten to wash herself, to get' up with her lover and to use the bidet. The strangeness of such a situation houbled her: there she was, lying on the bed-having the bed all to herself-while Robert went to wash. Besides, what would she have had to wash? To rinse her mouth, to gargle, would have seemed ridiculous, after swallowing the spunk. She felt dirty. She watched Robert performing his ablutions, lathering 191 I QUERELLE his cock so its tip vanished from sight, then rinsing it, carefully drying it. A bizarre idea flashed into her mind, but did not amuse her overmuch : "He's afraid of getting poisoned by my mouth. It's he who spurts venom, and it's me who poisons him." She felt lonely, old. Robert went on washing himself at the porcelain hand basin. His muscles were in motion, jumping about in his shoulders, arms, calves. The daylight grew brighter. Madame Lysiane tried to visualize Querelle's body; she had only seen him in his sailor's uniform. '•It's the same . . . but that isn't possible, surely there's some part . . . maybe his prick is different . . . " (and we shall see the development of that symptom ) . She was very much alone and tired. Robert turned around, calm, solid, centered in his brother, centered in himself. She said : "\Vhy don't you open the curtains." It had been her intention to add the word "darling," but was prevented from it by a kind of humility arising out of her feeling of uncleanliness : she did not want to blemish this man, so radiant, so dear by virtue of the night's revelations and the gentling effect of sexual satisfaction, by any insulting intimacy.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But like Scheherazade, who evaded death by telling irresistible stories, the loner moves his coffee mug toward us and begins to talk: In World War II, I was in Indochina—that’s what Vietnam was called then—and I didn’t just meet Ho Chi Minh, I knew him. We were fighting the Japanese, and so was he. We were allies. Plus he was our hero because his guerrilla fighters rescued American pilots shot down in the jungle by the Japanese. Ho spent so much time with Americans that sometimes his own men only recognized him by the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket. Also, he loved President Roosevelt for pissing off Churchill by saying that colonialism had to end after the war. Ho even knew our Declaration of Independence by heart—it was his model for sending the French colonists home. But after FDR died, everything changed. Truman sold Ho Chi Minh down the river by supporting the French—otherwise France wouldn’t join NATO. But didn’t we also fight a revolution to get rid of the British? Didn’t we fight a civil war to keep our country from being split into north and south? Well, that’s what Ho Chi Minh is doing now—and we’re on the wrong side. There is silence. I can’t tell whether the three young guys think this is truth or treason, but they slap money on the counter and drift away. I go over to talk to this man I now think of as the Prophet of the Diner. He’s the first American I’ve ever heard say what I was told as a student in India long ago: that Ho Chi Minh just wanted independence for his country and would make it a buffer against China—the very opposite of the American belief that Ho’s victory would have a “domino effect” of pushing other Asian countries toward China. At the risk of sounding around the bend, I explain to the Prophet that I’ve read Ho Chi Minh’s poetry and he doesn’t sound power-mad to me. It’s part of the reason I keep a sign on my bulletin board: ALIENATION IS WHEN YOUR COUNTRY IS AT WAR AND YOU WANT THE OTHER SIDE TO WIN. He laughs and says he himself went to the State Department to remind them that Ho Chi Minh was once an ally—and could be again. Other vets have done the same thing, including a former OSS doctor who treated Ho Chi Minh for malaria. Some have offered to be go-betweens and help bring the United States and Ho together to talk. But as far as the Prophet knows, everyone has been turned down. When he learns that I’m a writer from New York, he says I should write about Ho Chi Minh, who once lived in and loved New York. It’s a personal note that might humanize him. I promise to try, but I don’t have much hope in the middle of a war. I do some reading.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The attachment he felt to Anna precluded in his heart every need of intimate relations with others. And now among all his acquaintances he had not one friend. He had plenty of so-called connections, but no friendships. Alexey Alexandrovitch had plenty of people whom he could invite to dinner, to whose sympathy he could appeal in any public affair he was concerned about, whose interest he could reckon upon for anyone he wished to help, with whom he could candidly discuss other people’s business and affairs of state. But his relations with these people were confined to one clearly defined channel, and had a certain routine from which it was impossible to depart. There was one man, a comrade of his at the university, with whom he had made friends later, and with whom he could have spoken of a personal sorrow; but this friend had a post in the Department of Education in a remote part of Russia. Of the people in Petersburg the most intimate and most possible were his chief secretary and his doctor. Mihail Vassilievitch Sludin, the chief secretary, was a straightforward, intelligent, good-hearted, and conscientious man, and Alexey Alexandrovitch was aware of his personal goodwill. But their five years of official work together seemed to have put a barrier between them that cut off warmer relations. After signing the papers brought him, Alexey Alexandrovitch had sat for a long while in silence, glancing at Mihail Vassilievitch, and several times he attempted to speak, but could not. He had already prepared the phrase: “You have heard of my trouble?” But he ended by saying, as usual: “So you’ll get this ready for me?” and with that dismissed him. The other person was the doctor, who had also a kindly feeling for him; but there had long existed a taciturn understanding between them that both were weighed down by work, and always in a hurry. Of his women friends, foremost amongst them Countess Lidia Ivanovna, Alexey Alexandrovitch never thought. All women, simply as women, were terrible and distasteful to him. Chapter 22 Alexey Alexandrovitch had forgotten the Countess Lidia Ivanovna, but she had not forgotten him. At the bitterest moment of his lonely despair she came to him, and without waiting to be announced, walked straight into his study. She found him as he was sitting with his head in both hands. “_J’ai forcé la consigne_,” she said, walking in with rapid steps and breathing hard with excitement and rapid exercise. “I have heard all! Alexey Alexandrovitch! Dear friend!” she went on, warmly squeezing his hand in both of hers and gazing with her fine pensive eyes into his. Alexey Alexandrovitch, frowning, got up, and disengaging his hand, moved her a chair. “Won’t you sit down, countess? I’m seeing no one because I’m unwell, countess,” he said, and his lips twitched.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “No, tell me all the same.... You see my life. But you mustn’t forget that you’re seeing us in the summer, when you have come to us and we are not alone.... But we came here early in the spring, lived quite alone, and shall be alone again, and I desire nothing better. But imagine me living alone without him, alone, and that will be ... I see by everything that it will often be repeated, that he will be half the time away from home,” she said, getting up and sitting down close by Dolly. “Of course,” she interrupted Dolly, who would have answered, “of course I won’t try to keep him by force. I don’t keep him indeed. The races are just coming, his horses are running, he will go. I’m very glad. But think of me, fancy my position.... But what’s the use of talking about it?” She smiled. “Well, what did he talk about with you?” “He spoke of what I want to speak about of myself, and it’s easy for me to be his advocate; of whether there is not a possibility ... whether you could not....” (Darya Alexandrovna hesitated) “correct, improve your position.... You know how I look at it.... But all the same, if possible, you should get married....” “Divorce, you mean?” said Anna. “Do you know, the only woman who came to see me in Petersburg was Betsy Tverskaya? You know her, of course? _Au fond, c’est la femme la plus depravée qui existe._ She had an intrigue with Tushkevitch, deceiving her husband in the basest way. And she told me that she did not care to know me so long as my position was irregular. Don’t imagine I would compare ... I know you, darling. But I could not help remembering.... Well, so what did he say to you?” she repeated. “He said that he was unhappy on your account and his own. Perhaps you will say that it’s egoism, but what a legitimate and noble egoism. He wants first of all to legitimize his daughter, and to be your husband, to have a legal right to you.” “What wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my position?” she put in gloomily. “The chief thing he desires ... he desires that you should not suffer.” “That’s impossible. Well?” “Well, and the most legitimate desire—he wishes that your children should have a name.” “What children?” Anna said, not looking at Dolly, and half closing her eyes. “Annie and those to come....” “He need not trouble on that score; I shall have no more children.” “How can you tell that you won’t?” “I shall not, because I don’t wish it.” And, in spite of all her emotion, Anna smiled, as she caught the naïve expression of curiosity, wonder, and horror on Dolly’s face. “The doctor told me after my illness....” “Impossible!” said Dolly, opening her eyes wide.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Jim reaches for the other's cock. But the man rejects Jim's motion. “Just let me do everything,” he tells Jim. Jim leans back, hands under his head. He hardly moves, an adored statue which the man is licking all over from fingers to feet. A face stares in through the van's window. Inside, the man jerks off. Jim dresses. He walks out into the night. Once again, there is a momentary stasis in the hunt—like when the angry drunken youngman accosted him here earlier. The shadowy outlines stand unmoving against a gray sky. Seconds later—the recurring spell again crushed by movement—the shadows search through the gathering mist. 2:08 A.M. A Deserted Part of the Beach. Impulsively Jim drove to the beach, speeding urgently along the almost empty freeway. Despite the fog invading the city, at the beach the night is paradoxically starlit, a childhood-remembered night. The foggy cloud is moving inland from the darkness. Jim walks beyond the parking lot, cars cruising—parking, moving, stopping; walks beyond the craggy rocks; past dark sex-hunting ghosts standing along the sandy rim of the ocean; like the traumatized birds that stare daily at the coming night. Slowly, male forms emerge in sexual outlines, others lie on the moist beach. But this time Jim walks on, farther, until he's reached a deserted part of the beach. He stands at the very edge of the ocean. The breeze is cool on his bare chest. He's aware of the mystery concealed within night and ocean. The breeze is even cooler on his chest, but he continues standing here. What secrets? He walks back to his car without joining the shadowy hunt here. VOICE OVER: The Sexual Outlaw VOICE OVER: The Sexual Outlaw T HEREFORE: Promiscuous homosexuals (outlaws with dual identities—tomorrow they will go to offices and athletic fields, classrooms and construction sites) are the shock troops of the sexual revolution. The streets are the battleground, the revolution is the sexhunt, a radical statement is made each time a man has sex with another on a street. What is it to be a sexual outlaw? Archetypal outsider, he is a symbol of survival, living fully at the very edge, triumphant over the threats, repression, persecution, prosecution, attacks, denunciations, hatred that have tried powerfully to crush him from the beginning of “civilization”: Each night after the hunt, the outlaw knows he's won an ancestral battle—just because he's still alive and free. Only a tiny segment of the vast homosexual world, the outlaw world—secretly admired and envied but publicly put down by the majority of safe homosexuals cozy in heterosexual imitation—is not one easily chosen nor lived in, beautiful yet drenched in recurrent despair. Like the monastic life, it requires total commitment. It's a world one doesn't recruit for, must even warn against because of the dangers, risks, sacrifices the outlaw faces, takes, makes for his outlaw joy.

• From Querelle (1953)

  a I JEAN GENET mounted upright in the middle of the same courtyard where once the convicts were mustered for the galleys. It is astonishing that turning criminals into sailors used to be regarded as a form of punishment. Went past La Feria. Saw nothing. Never any luck. Over in Recouvrance I caught a glimpse of an accordion-a sight I fre quently see on board, yet never tire of watching-· . folding, unfold ing on a sailor's thigh. Se brester, to brace oneself. Derives, no doubt, from bretteur, fighter: and so, relates to se quereller, to pick a fight. When I learn-if only from the newspaper-that some scandal is breaking, or when I'm just afraid that it may break upon the world, I make preparations to get away: I always believe that I shall be suspected of being the prime mover. I regard myself as a demon-ridden creature, merely because I have imagined certain subjects for scandal . As for the hoodlums I hold in my arms, tenderly kissing and caressing their faces before gently covering them up again in my sheets, they are no more than a kind of passing thrill and experi ment combined. Mter having been so overwhelmed by the lone liness to which my inversion condemns me, is it really possible that I may some day hold naked in my arms, and continue to hold, pressed close to my body, those young men whose courage and hardness place them so high in my esteem that I long to throw myself at their feet and grovel before them? I dare hardly believe this, and tears well up in my eyes, to thank God for grant-

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  But flight attendants experience work as a group. When I first began flying a lot in the early 1970s, planes meant only mindlessness, escape from phones, maybe a movie, and most of all, sleep. Even if I took work on board, I nodded off as soon as we were aloft. Like a flying version of Pavlov’s dog, just being carried through space made me feel I needed to make no further effort. Once when I stayed awake long enough to admire the olive twill pants of a flight attendant’s uniform, she let me order a pair at her discount, thus combining shopping with travel. It was the beginning of a lifetime of finding girlfriends in the sky. I noticed that stewardesses were all young—and all female—but I assumed they wanted a few years of travel before doing something else, or this was an entry-level job and a pipeline for airline executives. I only began to pay attention when I was shuttling constantly between the start-up of Ms. magazine in New York and the organizing of the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington. Once when exhaustion caused me to fall asleep with my credit card in my hand, a kindhearted stewardess removed the card, ran it through the onboard ticket machine—the way one paid for the shuttle in those days—and put it back in my hand without waking me. Neither she nor others knew who I was or why I was such a frequent-flying oddity among the mostly male passengers going to our nation’s capital, but we seemed to share a sense of being outsiders. On longer trips with various airlines, I began to hang out in the galley, where I could ask questions and listen. I learned that the first stewardesses had been registered nurses hired to make passengers feel safe at a time when flying was new, airsickness was frequent, and passengers were fearful. Some pilots resented this female invasion of their macho air space so much that they quit. Like the first American astronauts who compared sending a Soviet woman into space with sending up a monkey, the presence of any woman devalued a masculine domain. Once male business travelers became the airlines’ bread and butter, everything changed. Stewardesses were hired as decorative waitresses with geishalike instructions.

• From Querelle (1953)

  147 I QUERELLE for not being as magnificent as he should have been. The walls seemed to hold blood- o ripping secrets, more terrible than his own. His physical appearance surprised the Police Chief. He would never have dreamt the murderer looked like th is. When he had instructed !vtario to put a little more zing into the investigation, he had been unable to resist the temptation to de scribe the potential suspect in some detail. However, crime is an area where previous experience is virtually useless. He had been sitting there at his desk, toying with a ruler, trying to conjure up the portrait of a homosexual murderer. Mario had listened, without believing a word of it. "There are precedents. Like Va cher. These are types who get carried away by their vices. Sadists, that's what they are. And these two murders are the handiwork of a sadist."· \V ith similar buoyant assurance the Commissioner had then gone on to discuss the matter with his counterpart in the Navy Police. Both of them ended up struggling to make the notion of a murderer coincide with their notions of what inverts were, what they looked like. They invented monsters. The Police ·Commissioner persisted in looking for clues in the style of that famous little flask of oil that one notorious criminal had carried about him to facilitate the buggering of his victims, or again, for something like fresh fecal matter at the murder site. Not knowing that the murders had been committed by two separate individuals, he tried to connect them, to splice their motives together. He could not know that every murder obeys, in its execution as well as in its motivation, certain laws that make it into a work of art. Besides the moral solitude of Querelle and Gil there was the solitude of the artist who cannot admit of any authority, not even that of a fellow craftsman. (This was wh at rendered Querelle doubly lonely. ) The masons claimed that Gil was a pederast. They regaled the police with a hundred details to prove that hell, yes, he was a fairy, all right. They did not realize that th is meant to describe him, not as if he was, that is to say, a child persecuted by a man in the clutches of his obscs-

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Once the call clicked off, Alek held up the phone and took a picture of the capitol, all lit up, the snow falling through the streetlights, slanted and whirling. The photo had a reddish tint to it, like a faded wine stain. He looked at the photo for a long time, cropping out a car and the awkward corner of a building, but then he deleted the photo. He turned in the direction of the lake and took a photo of that instead. It was blurry, hazy from the night and from the phone’s weak zoom lens. Grayed out, slashed through with black and white. He texted the photo to Igor and Grigori. He watched for a moment, until dots appeared below it, suggesting that they were typing, and then disappeared. They appeared again and again they disappeared. The snow was still falling. It landed on his fingers and the screen. Melted as the dots rose and fell. They were like a score. He could hear a kind of music to them. Each time they punctured the silence, it was a different note they played. He walked home and sat for a little while in the living room without turning on the light. Igor texted him: nice. Alek texted back, thx. U alright? Ok Nice U? Good School okay? Yeah U? Good Nice Coming home? Maybe. Expensive Me too Maybe Christmas? Nice Haha U happy out there? U? Haha. Nice ANNE OF CLEVES On their first date, Sigrid asked Marta which of Henry VIII’s wives she most identified with, and Marta choked on her white wine. Sigrid repeated the question, slowly, and with a dawning chill, Marta realized that she was serious. “I don’t know much about that,” Marta said, and Sigrid pressed her lips together in what looked like a condescending grin. Marta didn’t know much about history. She didn’t know much about dating women, either. She had recently broken up with a man named Peter, after he asked her to marry him and move to Belize. Every time he kissed her, she could feel a part of herself looking away from him, toward something else that she could not then make out. But when, after three years together, he had asked her to marry him, two things suddenly resolved into sharper focus—that she had been with him only because being with him was easier than no longer being with him, and that she’d been waiting for a moment when this would no longer be the case. Sigrid lifted her glass and examined it, but she didn’t seem like she was in a rush to change the subject. She had the sturdy, upright patience of an elementary-school teacher. Her eyes were very green, Marta noticed.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They were not for Simon, either, in fact, but for Simon’s goats. The goats were named Helena, Maria, Bertram, Vicky, Dude, and Guy. Helena was a boy goat, the others were girls. Simon had named them before he knew their sexes, after picking them out at two different farms three years or so before, when they were all babies and awkward, barely weaned at all, when it was still possible to mistake a boy goat for a girl and vice versa if you didn’t know what you were doing. Hartjes cut the apples up for the goats and fed them from the sloping front porch. They had grown accustomed to his way of doing things on these Tuesday visits, and they formed a neat little line and filed up to him one at a time to receive from his palm a chunk of apple. He patted their sides, felt the bristle of their fur, watched the tufts of steam issue from their nostrils. The horizontal bars of their pupils shivered. Their eyes were pale blue. He fed them from a plastic bag, lifting chunk after chunk until they were all gone, and the goats, brushing his palms with their tongues, nipping at his fingertips, gave up on him. Off they wandered to find food elsewhere. At the kitchen table, Simon sat with his skinny legs crossed, reading the paper. Hartjes came in through the side door (the front door had been bolted for as long as Hartjes had known him). Simon did not look up. He was a tall man, very pale, with thinning white-blond hair. He was just shy of middle age, a little under forty. Hartjes was younger, twenty-five. Two years before, they had met at a party, as people do, and they had fucked three times on three separate occasions, each a little worse, not to any degree that would have made any of the individual incidents awful, but when taken together they represented a doomed enterprise. A year earlier, after the last time they’d had sex, Hartjes said it would be best if they were just friends, and Simon said, “Sure, okay, sure.” But it was clear even then that Simon expected that Hartjes would change his mind, and sometimes he grew irritated that it was taking so long. “It’s getting warmer,” Hartjes said after he had washed his hands and sat down with a glass of water. “So it is,” Simon said from behind the paper. “And the river’s thawed,” Hartjes said. “So it is.” “And then I decided to kill myself,” Hartjes said. “So do it,” Simon said, not letting Hartjes have the satisfaction. “Some friend.” “I can get you a rope.” “Only if you cut me down after,” Hartjes said, putting his head on the table, which smelled like ground pepper and flour. “Har-dee-har-har.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  But that touching and that seeing had been focused in its particulars. They hadn’t talked about their bodies, only used them. It was different in the café. He had that feeling again, the one like watching an intimate function at a friend’s house, the way two people who loved each other shared a context that had nothing to do with him. He was stupid for staying, for listening, when Charles and Sophie told him to stay put. He should have listened to himself. After all, his duty was to himself. Like that old line from his doctors: Your duty is to your health. You owe yourself that much. “I think I should bounce, you guys,” he said. Charles did not look at him. Sophie frowned. “Didn’t I say to stay right where you are?” “It’s getting a little weird, Sophie, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to be funny, but sounding only desperate to himself. “No,” she said. Charles knocked back the entire boot of tonic. “You don’t have to prove anything to her, Lionel. If you want to go, you can go.” Charles pointed to the door over Lionel’s shoulder. Sophie turned her head then, and she put her arm around Charles’s neck in a gesture that was at once playful and threatening. She was smaller than he was, but her arms were taut and strong. She clenched and Charles reached down, lifted her up, and settled her on his lap with no more effort than moving a coat from a chair. “Behave,” Charles said. “You behave,” was Sophie’s reply, but Lionel did see her arm slacken. “Where did you go earlier?” Charles sighed. “Rehearsal. For the spring shows.” “Who’s choreographing?” “Farnland,” Charles groaned, closing his eyes. “I don’t know they let him choreograph still. After the incident.” She said the word with cartoonish exaggeration, turning to Lionel and giving him a very pointed look. “It wasn’t an incident,” Charles said. “Come on. Don’t spread rumors.” She looked at Lionel. “Farnland—allegedly—had an affair with one of the high school boys.” “Sophie, be serious.” The tension in the conversation cut against the casualness of their physical closeness. Sophie’s arm dangled around Charles’s shoulders. He had one arm wrapped around her waist, holding her steady, but with his free hand he swirled the espresso, breaking up the crema. Their limbs were loose and relaxed. But it was clear that this was a thing they disagreed about, and not for the first time, which made Lionel wonder why Sophie had brought it up in the first place. In front of him. “I’m just reporting the facts.” “You mean gossip,” Charles said. “Why’d you go with him, anyway? You could have danced in the stupid classical piece with the rest of us. You don’t even like contemporary.” “It’s neoclassical inspired, for one thing. Don’t be a bitch about it.” “Ah, yes, his Balanchine homage,” Sophie said.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “In my own way,” Hartjes said, singing the words to the melody of some song from years before, on country radio, that had at that very moment surfaced in his memory. “Do you ever get lonely?” “Sure, I get lonely,” Hartjes said, rocking them a little on the bench, his shoes scraping across the grit on the porch. “I get mighty lonely.” Simon nodded but didn’t say anything. They ate quietly. The venison had cooled a little. Simon got up to bring them beers. It was the first one of the evening for them. They popped the tabs and toasted one another, toasted their loneliness. “So, your mother died,” Simon said. “Do you want to talk about it?” “No, I don’t suppose I do.” “People die.” “Such are the facts.” “How did she die?” “Francisco didn’t say.” “Francisco. It’s a family affair.” “Please don’t start.” “I didn’t know you were talking to Francisco.” “I’m not.” “So no teary reunion between brothers after all these years.” “I guess we’re all cried out,” Hartjes said. The beer was cheap and weak. Hartjes burped and wiped the foam from his lips. He saw, briefly, the outline of Francisco’s face: the somber brown eyes, the patchy beard, the flat, crooked nose, and the chipped tooth from the time they’d gone rolling down the hill, punching and kicking at each other. They were all cried out. Francisco had caught his face on the edge of a large rock, had almost sliced his lip right from his mouth. He had blamed Hartjes. It had been his fault. That’s true. It had been his fault for provoking Francisco, calling him Franny, delighting in the rage that had swelled his boy chest and sent him hurtling at Hartjes. Franny, Franny, Franny. Hartjes had been the younger one, but taller, so people mistook him for the older brother. “Family isn’t everything,” Simon said. “No, it isn’t,” Hartjes said. “Do you want another beer?” “It’s my fridge,” Simon said. “You can’t offer me something that’s not yours.” “Oh, and I guess you’re the one who bought it? I guess you’re the one who always buys it and stocks it so you don’t run out.” “I didn’t ask for it, Hartjes.” “You never ask for anything except what you know I won’t give,” Hartjes said, but he regretted it a little. He saw Simon flinch and then go still. Simon drew the blanket around himself. “Well, all right,” he said. “I’ll get that beer,” Hartjes said. Simon was looking at the trees.

• From Escape (2007)

  When he finally had the chance, my father asked her why she had done this. Linda said she was finished with the religion and nothing he could say would make her change her mind. Dad tried to talk her into coming back, but she refused. He finally left with the other men. Linda and her friend knew they had to flee that house before the men came back for them. Someone smuggled them into Salt Lake City. The hunt for them soon became an obsession within the community. It took several weeks, but Linda was finally spotted. Alma, a boy who had fallen in love with Linda at school, headed to Salt Lake to try to find her because it was the most logical place for her to hide. He was on the opposite side of the religious split and there was no way they ever would have been allowed to marry. By this point, the split had completely severed the community in two. All association between one group and the other was unacceptable. Uncle Roy had kicked three apostles out of the FLDS, and they had established their own church. We no longer went to the same dances or celebrated community holidays together. After Linda escaped, Alma left the community, too. His father had a house in Salt Lake City, so he moved there to look for her. One day he saw her working in J.B.’s, a chain restaurant, and so he got a job there, too. Alma helped Linda get her sea legs in Salt Lake. She didn’t know how to use the city bus system, so Alma taught her how to find her way around town and bought her a bus pass. Though Linda was not in love with Alma or even attracted to him, they spent nearly every moment together because she was so lonely and so fearful of being on her own. Word somehow reached my father that Linda had been found in Salt Lake City. Dad got in touch with Alma and then showed up at J.B.’s to talk with Linda. She realized she would have to deal with him. There was no way she could spend the rest of her life running from her father. Dad had one demand: he wanted Linda to speak with the prophet. He promised her that after she talked to Uncle Roy, he would leave her alone. Linda agreed. When they met, Uncle Roy told Linda that although she had fallen away, she could redeem herself by marrying “a good man.” Linda said thanks but no thanks. The prophet exploded and berated her. Since Linda had no intention of being saved, Uncle Roy turned to my father and asked if he had any suggestions. Dad said that there was a young man in Salt Lake who had taken an interest in her. My father said he worried about Linda’s safety in the big city and thought it might be a good idea for Alma to marry Linda.