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 Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Good, because I don’t have a great immune system, and, like, it’s socially irresponsible to come out if you’re not feeling well.” “Oh, ‘social responsibility,’ here we go,” the host said, rubbing his greasy fingers across Lionel’s back. “It’s not funny. I mean, not everyone has a robust immune system and—” “Maybe if you ate more vegetables and hit the gym,” the host said with a sneer. Lionel felt conflicted. The man was annoying, but the host was being unnecessarily mean, and Lionel sensed it was because the man was fat and because the host did not find him attractive. “Plant-based diets aren’t actually shown to have a significant protective effect against infections from viral vectors.” “Oh, right, yeah, totally,” the host said, beaming, looking around the room for validation, and since it was his potluck and his apartment, people did go along with him, smiling thinly and humming in assent. The man on the floor turned red, but then shrugged. “Speaking of vegetables, I should probably clean up my mess,” Lionel said. “No, stay,” the host whined. Lionel crouched near the fireplace, but his plate and the food had already been cleared away. What remained was a shiny streak on the scuffed wood flooring. Across the room, Charles had put his arms around Sophie. The two of them were looking at Lionel. Charles had leaned down to say something into her ear, and Lionel watched her eyes narrow fractionally. But then Sophie turned her head and whispered something back to Charles, and the two of them seemed to be chuckling. Lionel wished that the food was still on the floor. Then at least he’d have something to do with himself. Instead, he stood up and made his way to the kitchen. Maybe he could make himself useful, get started on the dishes. Charles followed him, and then it was the two of them at the host’s sink. More of the small fried fish lay on a plate nearby. Charles picked one up and chewed on its crispy fins. “You didn’t have to do that,” Lionel said. “I could have cleaned it up.” “Figured it was half my mess, too.” “Sophie seems nice.” Lionel ran water into a plastic cup. The sink was too full for him to want to actually help out. He’d lost his nerve or his charitable impulse or both. “She’s something else,” Charles said. Lionel was about to ask why Charles had followed him into the kitchen and why he was standing so close, when the host rounded the corner. He was a little surprised to see the two of them there, it was obvious, but he recovered like a cat shifting its weight mid-fall, and he reached around Charles to pull the fridge open. “You boys want some wine?” “None for me,” Charles said, drawing his fingers cross his neck in prohibition.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The conversation was difficult to catch. Everyone was talking in extended references to other moments, other events, other parties, and each reference, instead of drawing two things into relation, was instead the whole of the idiom, the entirety of the gesture. Which was fine, okay, he had gone to college with men who talked only in references to Will Ferrell movies and Adam McKay jokes. But he had not gone to these other parties. He had no way of getting inside the reference, the system. He laughed hollowly when other people did, though on a delay, but soon he grew tired of the feeling of falseness vibrating in his sinuses. The man next to him kept looking his way, and one or two times their eyes caught, and Lionel wondered at the feeling of recognition he experienced. The two of them were, by some strange bit of luck, on the outside of the conversation, though Lionel suspected that for the man this was intentional. He envied that. The way some people could choose to be in a moment with others or not. It was a choice he didn’t have access to, personally. He always felt that he was arriving at the moment just as it was ending and everyone was moving on. He had no sense of timing. But the man’s eyes kept catching him, and Lionel started to feel that the two of them, on the outside, had come to rest in their own moment. Their own tempo. “I’m Charles,” the man said eventually. “Lionel.” “I heard. You’re famous now.” “Well, he’s like that. He thinks everything is okay as long as he can laugh about it,” Lionel said. Charles raised his eyebrows. “Is that right?” “Yes,” Lionel started to say, but then stopped because he didn’t want to be considered a gossip, and Charles had leaned toward him slightly like gossiping was exactly what he had in mind. “He’s funny that way.” “You a vegetarian?” Charles asked. The randomness of the remark, coming as it did from out of the ether, wrongfooted Lionel. “How did you know? Something on my face?” “Your plate,” Charles said. “You’re living that grain life.” Lionel, as though he hadn’t made up the plate with his own hands, looked down and saw the food assembled there. The rice and kale mixed up. The stalks of asparagus. Oxidizing avocado chunks going soft. “Guilty.”

• 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)

  It seemed impossible, though, with Charles’s hand coming to rest between his thighs, that he’d wake up tomorrow and be alone again. Yet it was true. That was what would happen. Charles twisted some of Lionel’s wiry pubic hair. The skin over his pelvis grew taut when Charles pulled. They were connected by that single fiber, that single black thread of hair. He imagined the place down far in his skin where the hair was rooted. He could graph in his mind the function that would perfectly describe the growth of hair over a period of time. And then he could see the derivative of that function. Nested inside each other, the calculus of his changing form. And, too, the function that would describe the application of a force at a radius the length of a public hair. It was a comfort to him, this math. This easy, direct calculus. All of life was shifting equations. But then Charles pulled so hard that the hair came free of Lionel with a burning jolt, and he yelped at the surprise of it. “There you are,” Charles said. “What do you mean?” “You kind of spaced on me. You were just zoned-out there.” “I was thinking about functions to describe biological processes,” Lionel said. “Was that your project? Before?” Lionel laughed and Charles pulled three more of his pubic hairs free. Lionel tried to get loose, but Charles pushed his shoulders flat and rolled on top of him. “Why’s that so funny, tough guy?” “I’m not much of a modeler,” Lionel said. “That stuff is so dry. It sounds cool, but it’s really tedious. Imagine spending your life picking nits out of eight million lines of code. Modeling is so awful.” Charles blinked at him slowly, and though they were physically touching, Lionel felt far away from him. It was not merely the difference in their chosen fields. It was a difference in the very constitution of their minds. Lionel felt lonely there under Charles. He had made a poor choice. He should have stayed with the host last night. There was some shared language there. “You should get back to Sophie, I guess.” “I don’t have to be there.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m sure,” Charles said, mocking Lionel a little. “Do you want me to leave? I can.” “No,” Lionel said. “Good.” Charles sat back on Lionel’s legs, and Lionel gasped. It was the pathetic, involuntary sound of his body giving in without his permission, opening itself. “Oh, little baby wants.” “Yes,” Lionel said, because the light had come into Charles’s eyes again.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Jim begins to move away. “I do—by you.” “I would,” Jim says, “but not out here.” Not an overt invitation, this is his way of suggesting an encounter at home, without committing himself. “No, let's do it here,” the man insists. He begins to unbuckle his pants. Now he reaches over and squeezes Jim's nipples, tightly. Suddenly turned off by the gesture, Jim pushes the man away. Back on the main street, Jim sees a car about to park on a perpendicular side. But, seeing Jim, the driver makes a U-turn to intercept him as he crosses the street. Pausing at the intersection, motor running, he lets his hand dangle over the side of the car. Jim walks up to the window. In the back of the car another man, drunk or stoned, lies sleeping. The driver blows Jim briefly through the car window. Jim resumes walking. Across the street an attractive man pauses. Jim waits, the man waits. Neither crosses to the other's side. Stalemate. Not even looking back, each walks away from the other. Jim moves to a side street. In a darkened lot a man squats, mouth open ready to take a cock, any cock; an old desperate ugly man. Jim retreats from the huddled shadow. Jim is in the yard of the unfinished house. A man is groping him clumsily. Now the man grabs Jim's hand and tries to force it on his cock, to have Jim play with him. But Jim is not attracted to him and he pulls his hand forcefully away. “You don't do anything back, huh?—well, fuck it! You're not that goddam good!” Instant enemies, they split. Abandoned in the shadows, Jim remembers the angry man in the lot earlier. Then he thinks of Steve—the young bodybuilder he saw again minutes earlier in Greenstone. Yes, he would have gone with him again. If they had talked—… 1:23 A.M. Outside the Turf Bar. A Parking Lot. The Alley. Still “Sunday night.” The bar at the corner will soon close, like the others. Already it's spilling outlaws into the night. The hot, hot spell may be about to break, there is the hint of a breeze. Dead palmtree leaves rustle. Mist is rising. Shirtless, Jim goes to the cubicle in back of the locked building on the dark lot. Under the smashed lightbulb like a gaping mouth of shattered teeth, a cluster of men are pressed grayly. Jim walks on. He sees a man leaning against a van. Pants down around his knees, shirtless, he's playing with himself. Jim walks through the thickening haze. The man calls to him in a whispery voice. Inside the van, both men lie on the floor. The man is goodlooking, tall. He removes Jim's clothes and his own. Occasionally a passing shadow cuts the light entering through the van's window from the street. Footsteps prowl, alerted instinctively to the scene inside. The man licks Jim's body, takes his cock in his mouth.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  I was of Montefeltro, I am Buonconte; 4 Giovanna, or any other hath no care for me; wherefore I go among these, with downcast brow.” And I to him: “What violence or what chance made thee stray so far from Campaldino, that thy burial place ne er was known?” “Oh,” answered he, “at Casentino’s foot a stream crosses, which is named Archiano, and rises in the Apennines above the Hermitage. There where its name is lost, did I arrive, pierced in the throat, flying on foot, and bloodying the plain. There lost I vision, and ended my words upon the name of Mary; and there fell I, and my flesh alone was left. I will speak sooth, and do thou respeak it among the living; the angel of God took me, and one from Hell cried: ‘O thou from Heaven, wherefore robbest thou me?

• From Querelle (1953)

  Although both of them knew the game they were playing, they still kept it within the bounds of innocence. They were afraid of abandoning themselves to the truth too precipitately, to rend its veil too soon. Slowly, still smiling, to allow Mario to lOS I QUERELLE go on believing in his false naivete (while knowing Mario didn't believe in it for one minute ) -to uphold the pretense that this was merely a joke, child's play, and looking the copper straight in the eye, Querelle undid the buttons : one, two, three. In a voice that he wanted to sound clear but that was vaguely excited he said : "You were right. Not bad." "You like it.". Querelle withdrew his hand. Still smiling. "I told you, I'm not interested in pricks. No matter what size they are." With one hand still on the sailor's shoulder, Mario thrust his other hand into his pocket and flipped his rod out into the open air. He stood there, legs apart, confronting the sailor who was looking at him and smiling. Quere11e whispered : "Not here. Isn't there some other place?'' Close to his ear, Quere11e heard the quiet noise the saliva was making in the detective's mouth. His moist lips were parting, perhaps in readiness for a kiss, the tongue ready to dart into an ear and to flicker about there .. They heard the steam whistle of a night train. Querelle listened to its rumbling, almost breathing approach . The two men had arrived at the railroad embankment. It was dark, but the cop's face had to be very close to his own. Again he heard that sharp little noise, now a little hissing and amplified by the freely flowing spittle. It seemed to him ]ike the mysterious preparation for an amorous debauch the likes of which he had never even imagined. He felt a little disquieted by his ability to distinguish such an intimate manifestation of Mario's, to thus perceive his innermost secrets. Even though he had moved his lips, and his tongue inside his mouth, in a completely natural fashion, it appeared to Querelle as if he were smacking his ]ips at the thought of the ensuing orgy. That quiet spittle-noise in Qucrelle's ear was enough to 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."

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Lenny’s face turned bright red. He looked like he was going to cry. Marta sat back down. He shook his head hard. “Why is it always like this,” he said. “Why don’t anybody want me back. Why don’t anyone ever want me.” Marta sat there clutching her beer can. Nobody had ever wanted her, either, except Peter. Except Lenny. “You get used to it,” she said. “After a while, you stop noticing.” Lenny chuckled bitterly. “Hell, I don’t know about that.” “You’re probably right,” she said. “You’re probably right.” She did not sleep with Lenny. But she did sit with him until the Daytona was over, and then she went home. He had been right about the walk back to her place. It was easy, and it was beautiful. She walked along the street that ran parallel to the stream, over a small bridge. She stopped to look through the trees that opened over it, and high above everything, the moon. It was cool then, and she wrapped her jacket around herself. When she got home, she lay awake in bed for a long time, and then she made a profile on a dating website. She had been thinking about that feeling she’d had when Peter had asked her to marry him, that sudden recognition of what she’d felt all the time they’d been together, the reason that she couldn’t with Lenny, the sharpening resolution with which she saw herself. When the website asked her what she was interested in, she selected women and not men. • • • That summer, Sigrid wanted to rent a place up north for a few days. She wanted to get out of the city and wake up to birds singing and deer in the yard. She wanted to spend some time reading for pleasure and not for work. It was difficult for Marta, because she did not have much money and did not have many days off. Sigrid kept saying that capitalism was a crime, that it robbed people of their will to live, and Marta would shake her head and think, Someone’s got to pay for all that living. They were thinking about moving in together. Marta’s roommate had cleared off with a boyfriend, and Sigrid’s roommate was getting worse by the day. Thad took Adderall to stay awake and to study. More than once—more than twice—Sigrid had found him standing buck naked in the kitchen in the middle of the night, staring out the window. She had also noticed that when she left her wallet on the coffee table, she came back to find money missing. Never a huge sum, five dollars here, three dollars there, but enough to notice and enough that, after a while, it could turn into a large sum. Sigrid didn’t think about that. Sigrid didn’t think about the future, really, whereas it was all that Marta could think about.

• 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 Filthy Animals (2021)

  But he had not gone to these other parties. He had no way of getting inside the reference, the system. He laughed hollowly when other people did, though on a delay, but soon he grew tired of the feeling of falseness vibrating in his sinuses. The man next to him kept looking his way, and one or two times their eyes caught, and Lionel wondered at the feeling of recognition he experienced. The two of them were, by some strange bit of luck, on the outside of the conversation, though Lionel suspected that for the man this was intentional. He envied that. The way some people could choose to be in a moment with others or not. It was a choice he didn’t have access to, personally. He always felt that he was arriving at the moment just as it was ending and everyone was moving on. He had no sense of timing. But the man’s eyes kept catching him, and Lionel started to feel that the two of them, on the outside, had come to rest in their own moment. Their own tempo. “I’m Charles,” the man said eventually. “Lionel.” “I heard. You’re famous now.” “Well, he’s like that. He thinks everything is okay as long as he can laugh about it,” Lionel said. Charles raised his eyebrows. “Is that right?” “Yes,” Lionel started to say, but then stopped because he didn’t want to be considered a gossip, and Charles had leaned toward him slightly like gossiping was exactly what he had in mind. “He’s funny that way.” “You a vegetarian?” Charles asked. The randomness of the remark, coming as it did from out of the ether, wrongfooted Lionel. “How did you know? Something on my face?” “Your plate,” Charles said. “You’re living that grain life.” Lionel, as though he hadn’t made up the plate with his own hands, looked down and saw the food assembled there. The rice and kale mixed up. The stalks of asparagus. Oxidizing avocado chunks going soft. “Guilty.” Lionel looked at Charles’s plate. He had two fish portions, the kind with the head still on and the skin all crispy and brown. They looked like brim or something. Lionel had stopped eating meat the year before, when he was in the hospital. There was something so awful about it. Meat was so proximal to death, and he’d spent too much time looking at videos of the commercial food industry while he was in the private care facility. The kind shot on shaky camera phones and involving a lot of panting and rustling clothes, up-close shots of the cows pressing their snouts to mud-streaked bars or lying pathetically on their sides, suffering, with oozing sores and distended abdomens. He wasn’t radically vegetarian. He possessed no militant energy whatsoever. But still he felt insecure about it, because the origin of his desire to forgo meat wasn’t environmental or even about the animals, really.

• From Escape (2007)

  Mother had been so proud of our faith and culture. Seeing what it had become made leaving the only option. My father did not try to stop her. Unlike almost every other man in the FLDS, he felt that my mother had the right to choose how she wanted to live her life. He told her to pack what she wanted to take with her and he’d have a truck come by early one morning and move her out. My mother and my two siblings, Jennifer, sixteen, and Winston, nine, left on April 19, 2003. She walked away from the only life she’d ever known for fifty years. Once she was out of the community she filed for a divorce and ended her thirty-eight-year marriage. When my mother left I felt unbearably alone. We had grown closer over the years and she helped me so much—especially with Harrison. I know the day she drove us to the emergency room it broke her heart not to be able to stay and see us through the crisis. But that was too risky because she’d taken us to the hospital without Merril’s permission. Those moments cut her to the quick. I kept quiet about my plans to flee, but others in the community were discussing the option for themselves. Audrey and her husband were planning to quit and move to northern Idaho. I was losing the people I was closest to and afraid to confide in those who were still left. I never knew if some offhand remark of mine might be reported back to Warren Jeffs and create problems for me. I was determined to maintain a semblance of normalcy. I never gave a hint to any of my children about my plans. But as I’d learn later, LuAnne began to have dreams about our escaping. In her dreams she’d see us all together in a house outside Colorado City. All her brothers and sisters were crying and saying they wanted to go back to their father and half brothers and sisters. Betty was pleading with me to take everyone home. LuAnne’s fear in the dream was that we were all going to hell and she was scared and crying. As she’d explain later, it was a relief when she awoke and found that she was still with her father’s family. But her dream kept recurring. Betty was the only person she confided in, and she told LuAnne that the reason she kept having the dream was because she didn’t say her bedtime prayers. I did not make waves within the family. Bryson and Harrison were a shield for me because they still required so much care. I dutifully had sex with Merril to keep up the façade. It was a tense and unpredictable time. Anything could happen at any time. Three days after my mother left, my moment arrived. After the Escape

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The conversation was difficult to catch. Everyone was talking in extended references to other moments, other events, other parties, and each reference, instead of drawing two things into relation, was instead the whole of the idiom, the entirety of the gesture. Which was fine, okay, he had gone to college with men who talked only in references to Will Ferrell movies and Adam McKay jokes. But he had not gone to these other parties. He had no way of getting inside the reference, the system. He laughed hollowly when other people did, though on a delay, but soon he grew tired of the feeling of falseness vibrating in his sinuses. The man next to him kept looking his way, and one or two times their eyes caught, and Lionel wondered at the feeling of recognition he experienced. The two of them were, by some strange bit of luck, on the outside of the conversation, though Lionel suspected that for the man this was intentional. He envied that. The way some people could choose to be in a moment with others or not. It was a choice he didn’t have access to, personally. He always felt that he was arriving at the moment just as it was ending and everyone was moving on. He had no sense of timing. But the man’s eyes kept catching him, and Lionel started to feel that the two of them, on the outside, had come to rest in their own moment. Their own tempo. “I’m Charles,” the man said eventually. “Lionel.” “I heard. You’re famous now.” “Well, he’s like that. He thinks everything is okay as long as he can laugh about it,” Lionel said. Charles raised his eyebrows. “Is that right?” “Yes,” Lionel started to say, but then stopped because he didn’t want to be considered a gossip, and Charles had leaned toward him slightly like gossiping was exactly what he had in mind. “He’s funny that way.” “You a vegetarian?” Charles asked. The randomness of the remark, coming as it did from out of the ether, wrongfooted Lionel. “How did you know? Something on my face?” “Your plate,” Charles said. “You’re living that grain life.” Lionel, as though he hadn’t made up the plate with his own hands, looked down and saw the food assembled there. The rice and kale mixed up. The stalks of asparagus. Oxidizing avocado chunks going soft. “Guilty.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It’s not so bad.” “You ever think about moving back to town? You could probably get an okay amount for this place.” “Yeah, I think about it.” “But you won’t.” “No, probably won’t. I came out here to get away from all that, I guess.” “It’s not exactly a metropolis you’re escaping,” Hartjes said. “It’s not about the size of the place. It’s about . . . hell, I don’t know. I guess it’s about living on your own terms. Setting a limit for yourself. Being about something. In your own way.” “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.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Davis texts Grace throughout the week: You seen Big Davis? Tell him he was right about Marshfield being awful Remind him the pond needs to be restocked Tell him about this new rabbit trap Tell him they be shooting out here Tell him something for me Sometimes Grace wants to weep at how pitiful it is. The Tell him something for me is the worst of it. She could read the text message in its entirety. It’s not the words. It’s not the what. Enid knows about the text messages. She has made her feelings known. Which is why he does not call her. Not because of the gay thing—Enid is ambivalent on the point of sexuality. What room would she have to judge, her own life having exploded so spectacularly? No. It’s something else. Judgment. Davis feels judged, he says. Sometimes she act like I’m trying to murder somebody. Just to be asking about Big Davis. She act like she don’t care I don’t exist anymore, is what Davis said the last time they spoke about it. “She’s projecting,” Grace had said. Because years ago, when they were small, Enid had shown up at this house with Grace and Davis squeezed tight to her like a shield bearer wading into a sea of pikemen. Grace’s father had gotten himself stabbed outside a bar in Charlottesville—no surprise, considering, was what the church ladies said. It had never been a secret how Big Davis felt about white people, and here Enid was. The church ladies had words for that, too. Begging. Cut off from her own kind, like she hadn’t known what would happen. Grace wonders if Enid sees in this needling some imitation of how it had been years before, when they were younger, and pushed like little pawns across a chessboard. Sees, perhaps, some reflection of the deceased Junior. “He should be a man,” Enid says. “He’s a man. Big Davis is a man,” Grace replies. “That’s the problem.” “Men and trouble, like water and a grease fire.” “We ain’t,” Big Davis replies as the door bangs shut behind him. Sweat and the scent of earth trail out ahead of him. He bends down and kisses the top of Grace’s forehead. She rubs his back, feels the damp of him through his shirt. His whiskers bristle against her cheek. He’s purple-black with stark white hair, deep blue eyes. “You are,” Enid says. “Big Davis.” “Enid,” he says, taking from the plate almost all of the orange segments. She squints at him. Grace feels a flutter of relief. Leans back in her chair and lets it hold her up. The strain of maintaining her posture has left her feeling a little winded. “I sure thank you for taking Grace in for the appointment today.” “Well, I took her fishing. I took her to school. I took her for ice cream. To the movies. I reckon it makes sense I’ll take her to get well.” “All that in one day?”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Why don’t anyone ever want me.” Marta sat there clutching her beer can. Nobody had ever wanted her, either, except Peter. Except Lenny. “You get used to it,” she said. “After a while, you stop noticing.” Lenny chuckled bitterly. “Hell, I don’t know about that.” “You’re probably right,” she said. “You’re probably right.” She did not sleep with Lenny. But she did sit with him until the Daytona was over, and then she went home. He had been right about the walk back to her place. It was easy, and it was beautiful. She walked along the street that ran parallel to the stream, over a small bridge. She stopped to look through the trees that opened over it, and high above everything, the moon. It was cool then, and she wrapped her jacket around herself. When she got home, she lay awake in bed for a long time, and then she made a profile on a dating website. She had been thinking about that feeling she’d had when Peter had asked her to marry him, that sudden recognition of what she’d felt all the time they’d been together, the reason that she couldn’t with Lenny, the sharpening resolution with which she saw herself. When the website asked her what she was interested in, she selected women and not men. • • • That summer, Sigrid wanted to rent a place up north for a few days. She wanted to get out of the city and wake up to birds singing and deer in the yard. She wanted to spend some time reading for pleasure and not for work. It was difficult for Marta, because she did not have much money and did not have many days off. Sigrid kept saying that capitalism was a crime, that it robbed people of their will to live, and Marta would shake her head and think, Someone’s got to pay for all that living . They were thinking about moving in together. Marta’s roommate had cleared off with a boyfriend, and Sigrid’s roommate was getting worse by the day. Thad took Adderall to stay awake and to study. More than once—more than twice—Sigrid had found him standing buck naked in the kitchen in the middle of the night, staring out the window. She had also noticed that when she left her wallet on the coffee table, she came back to find money missing. Never a huge sum, five dollars here, three dollars there, but enough to notice and enough that, after a while, it could turn into a large sum. Sigrid didn’t think about that. Sigrid didn’t think about the future, really, whereas it was all that Marta could think about. She’d come to understand their work as opposite in that way.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Tonight they’d stay at a Negro resort twenty miles away and dance and laugh far into the night, eat ribs, wear gowns, talk louder and laugh harder than they could the rest of the week in the staid houses where they served. Most of the time they were exiled, dispersed into the alien population; only once a week did the authorities allow the tribe to reconvene. They were exuberant people forced to douse their merry flames and maintain just the palest pilot light. At that moment I really believed I, too, was exuberant and merry by nature, had I the chance to show it. In the silence that ebbed in behind the departing car, the air was filled with the one-note chant of crickets. Their song seemed like the heartbeat of loneliness, a beat that sang up and down the wires of my veins. I was desolate. I toyed again with the idea of becoming a general. I wanted power so badly that I had convinced myself I already had too much of it, that I was an evil schemer who might destroy everyone around me through the poison seeping out of my pores. I was appalled by my own majesty. I wanted someone to betray. Kevin and his family stayed on three more days. Mr. Cork became incoherent with drink one night and cracked the banister as he reeled up to bed. Mrs. Cork exploded the next morning and told my stepmother she loathed eggs “swimming in grease.” Katy, the Hungarian cook, locked herself in her room and emerged red-eyed and sniffling two hours later. Kevin and Mrs. Cork argued with each other, or rather she nagged him and he ridiculed her; when they made up, their embrace was shockingly intimate—prolonged, wordless nuzzling. On a rainy afternoon the boys roughhoused until Peter overturned the table and smashed one of the hand-painted tiles set into the top; his parents seemed almost indifferent to the damage and allowed the pushing and shoving to continue. Mrs. Cork’s way of conspicuously ignoring the pandemonium was to vocalize, full voice. Each night Kevin came to my bed, though now I no longer elaborated daydreams of running away with him. I was a little bit afraid of him; now that he knew I was a sissy, he could make fun of me whenever he chose to. Who knew what he’d do? After witnessing his vituperation against his mother, followed by the weird nuzzling, I could not continue to think of him as the boy next door. The last night I tried kissing him again, but he turned his head away. On the afternoon they left, Mrs. Cork flushed a deep, indignant red and chased Kevin halfway up the stairs. He crouched and shouted, his face contorted, “You scumbag, you old scumbag,” and pushed her down the stairs. My father was furious. He lifted the woman from the floor and said to Kevin, “I think you’ve done enough for one day, young man.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Today coming out in all its stages is generally easier than it was fifty or even thirty years ago. Almost any evening’s television programming or month’s worth of film releases deal with homosexuality, often positively or even humorously. Gays have replaced blacks as the staple source of most television comedy. Liberationists might complain that gays are almost never shown among themselves; that they are always paired with heterosexual men and women, often as zany sidekicks. But complaints about how gays are represented are outweighed by their massive visibility. When I was growing up the only plays that mentioned homosexuality were The Children’s Hour, Tea and Sympathy, and The Immoralist, and the first two presented it as a form of social damnation, whereas the third, based on Gide’s novel, was so shadowy that only someone on the lookout would have detected the underlying subject. Radio and television never mentioned homosexuality at all. There was a complete media blackout. No wonder so many young lesbians and gay boys so often felt they were the only ones in the whole world—a sense of isolation unimaginable today. Medical books discussed the subject in frightening terms, equating homosexuality to the most startling forms of mental and physical illness. There were few fictional representations of lesbianism or male homosexuality; an alert reader could ferret out Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Gide’s novels and essays, Isherwood’s autobiographical fiction (in which the sex of the love object was never specified and his or her name was represented by unrevealing initials). There was also Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. More obscurely there were Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (with its single remembered kiss between two women) and her gender-bending Orlando. And in Gertrude Stein’s highly coded pages there were a few sly references to women who liked women. On a lower and less accessible level there were a few pornographic novels, but they were hard to find and illegal to possess. And in between there were a few sad, very sad novels about tormented love, madness, and eventual suicide, books with titles such as Quatrefoil and Finisterre. Perhaps for men the most attractive, well-written, and uplifting books were, strangely enough, those written by two women—Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Mary Renault’s The Bull from the Sea and The Charioteer and The Persian Boy. How curious that a whole generation of gay men in America went into secret raptures over these highly romantic tales set in ancient Greece and Rome, written by two lesbians, one French and one English. Today coming out may be easier in some ways because homosexuality is more visible, but the representations of male homosexuality can strike a youngster as intimidating and overwhelming—the seeming necessity to be movie-star handsome, massively muscular, sexually super-endowed and brilliantly quick-witted. And of course many kids, especially in America, are still brought up in religious communities that take a punitive view of homosexuality.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Charles braced himself on the table. He was soaked. The tips of his curls were beaded with something chalky: sweat or shampoo that he hadn’t washed out entirely, melting snow. Charles hung his head, his expression hidden from Lionel, which was just as well, because Lionel felt at that moment that he probably should leave. He pulled his scarf free from the back of the chair and turned to take up his coat. “I’ll let you guys be,” he said. “No way,” Sophie said. “You stay put.” He felt her foot then against his knee, keeping in place. She smiled at him, but it was not a joke. Then she turned to Charles and asked him if he wanted some water or a coffee. Charles said that he wanted an espresso, with a tonic back. She made an elaborate bow at him and got up. Charles took her chair, and when she was around the corner, when they could hear her tamping out the used coffee, Charles turned to Lionel. “What’s all this?” “She asked me here,” Lionel said. “I’m not trying anything.” “That is so typical of her.” Charles shook his head, leaned back in the chair. “She’s playing a game. She thinks everything is fucking hilarious.” “She said she knew already. About last night.” “Yeah, I told her earlier—sorry if that was supposed to be a secret or something,” Charles said. Lionel watched his lips shape into an amused smirk, the little dimple in his right cheek appearing, then vanishing. “She seemed fine with it.” Charles turned and gripped the back of the chair, gave his body a hard wrench. Lionel’s breath caught at the mobility of his joints. How easy it was for him to attain such a ridiculous position. The espresso machine hissed. “You all right?” “I can go if you want.” “No, don’t. She’d just make a whole case about it,” Charles said. “Better to let her have her way.” Sophie returned with the espresso and the small glass boot filled with tonic water. Charles shifted over to the empty chair closer to the window, away from Lionel, and Sophie reclaimed her seat. The small espresso cup was a deep caramel color. The crema was beautiful, perfect, and Charles sipped it to test the heat. Sophie had her chin on her palm, appraising his reaction. They had a whole routine down. One that excluded Lionel, made him feel extraneous, with his collar with the hole in it and his scarf and his anxiety. He rolled his sleeves down and buttoned them, and in the process drew Sophie’s attention. Not in any obvious way, but he could feel the tension in her gaze shift slightly in his direction. Charles had seen him naked, of course, and had touched him. But that touching and that seeing had been focused in its particulars. They hadn’t talked about their bodies, only used them.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Pheasant. Squirrel. Whatever Hartjes trained his rifle on, they pinned and cornered and stalled. They could tree anything, the three of them, even turkeys, frothing with rage, bodies humming, ready to take flight. But the dogs calling in the distance were not his dogs. The dogs baying in the distance slept inside and ran from their shadows. Gristle, Bone, and Marrow would have eaten those dogs alive, because Hartjes had loved them enough to teach them how to fight, how to maim, how to kill, and the people here, in this place, let their dogs sleep in their beds, as though that were love. They ate slowly because the venison was hot. Hartjes dug his spoon into the soft potatoes and the carrots. A light dangled overhead, and in the surface of the broth he saw their shadowed, inverted selves. Hartjes had on his flannel coat, and Simon had wrapped himself in a green wool blanket. The heater, on its lowest setting, droned like cicadas. There was just enough heat to remind them how cold it was. Simon’s spoon clacked against the side of his bowl. He coughed into his shoulder. Hartjes studied the flaking skin along his jaw, the rosettes of sores spotting his cheeks and the primitive cliff of his forehead. “Do you ever get lonely out here?” “You ask that every time.” “Because you never answer,” Hartjes said. “Sometimes. It’s not so bad.” “You ever think about moving back to town? You could probably get an okay amount for this place.” “Yeah, I think about it.” “But you won’t.” “No, probably won’t. I came out here to get away from all that, I guess.” “It’s not exactly a metropolis you’re escaping,” Hartjes said. “It’s not about the size of the place. It’s about . . . hell, I don’t know. I guess it’s about living on your own terms. Setting a limit for yourself. Being about something. In your own way.” “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.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  There was a complete media blackout. No wonder so many young lesbians and gay boys so often felt they were the only ones in the whole world—a sense of isolation unimaginable today. Medical books discussed the subject in frightening terms, equating homosexuality to the most startling forms of mental and physical illness. There were few fictional representations of lesbianism or male homosexuality; an alert reader could ferret out Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness , Gide’s novels and essays, Isherwood’s autobiographical fiction (in which the sex of the love object was never specified and his or her name was represented by unrevealing initials). There was also Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room . More obscurely there were Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (with its single remembered kiss between two women) and her gender-bending Orlando . And in Gertrude Stein’s highly coded pages there were a few sly references to women who liked women. On a lower and less accessible level there were a few pornographic novels, but they were hard to find and illegal to possess. And in between there were a few sad, very sad novels about tormented love, madness, and eventual suicide, books with titles such as Quatrefoil and Finisterre . Perhaps for men the most attractive, well-written, and uplifting books were, strangely enough, those written by two women—Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Mary Renault’s The Bull from the Sea and The Charioteer and The Persian Boy . How curious that a whole generation of gay men in America went into secret raptures over these highly romantic tales set in ancient Greece and Rome, written by two lesbians, one French and one English. Today coming out may be easier in some ways because homosexuality is more visible, but the representations of male homosexuality can strike a youngster as intimidating and overwhelming—the seeming necessity to be movie-star handsome, massively muscular, sexually super-endowed and brilliantly quick-witted. And of course many kids, especially in America, are still brought up in religious communities that take a punitive view of homosexuality. Any gay writer—probably any minority writer—is inevitably aware that he or she is speaking for a whole group of people. Sometimes the writer chooses to ignore or even defy the call to be representative (one thinks of Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint , which at the time outraged many older Jews, who felt the novel portrayed their coreligionists in an unseemly, even outrageous light).