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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Howie didn’t want to be liked, or if he did, then only after I’d passed tests calculated to eliminate anyone with the least bit of pride. Despite my fears and my aching loneliness, I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love. But Howie just as stubbornly knew things wouldn’t work out. He was convinced he’d die before he was twenty. He knew people weren’t equal, that they were wired for hatred, that they were glandularly incapable of decency and that any semblance of goodness had to be attributed to the last vestiges of hypocrisy that fools were tearing away, like gauze from a mummy—not, as we’d been assured, perfectly preserved but rather compounded of dust and rot. He had put on his large pale green officer’s hat with the mirror-shiny black visor and the pewter swastika and now he was striding about the dorm room slapping his boots with a crop. Everything in sight—the single cot, the piles of books on the desk, the mirror above the dresser, the rugless floor, the simple muslin cloth on big wood rungs that concealed the narrow opening to the walk-in closet—everything was spotless as it had to be for morning inspections, but everything smelled of a sulfurous acne cream. Howard was striding back and forth, his glasses slipping down his nose, his pale, pudgy knuckles dimpling and paling still whiter where he grasped the crop. He was laughing in short, metallic bursts. And yet he was someone I could talk to about Rimbaud, the poet who’d conquered Paris or at least Verlaine by age sixteen (I was fifteen—a year to go). I’d sneak into the bathroom after lights-out and sit on the toilet behind a locked stall door and read “The Drunken Boat” or “The Poet at Age Seven” or best of all “A Season in Hell” and I’d glance back and forth in my bilingual edition from the smooth French gallop to the jarring English trot, every night hoping to change magically our bony native nag for the sleek back of that Gallic charger but always falling off in midstream, unseated—or rather seated on that hardwood toilet seat, my eyes burning from the strain of reading by the light of a single dim ceiling bulb, my bare chest covered with goose bumps from the night chill and my left leg asleep, a horrible slab of dead beef to be dragged down the corridor until life sparkled back into it. Then I’d lie under covers in the darkness and conspire to be great: I must run away tomorrow, to New York, poems in hand, scorn and genius in my heart, an amiable, infatuated older lover within my grasp … It always disturbed me that Rimbaud was the infernal bridegroom, Verlaine the foolish virgin.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Perhaps such a reversal of traditional roles shocked my bourgeois heart, or perhaps their truth came too close to my fondest if most dangerous fantasy, the one in which I’d no longer be the obliging youth but the harsh young lord, the prince with the pewter ornament stuck in his hat, my older lover helpless, betrayed.… Howard and I would fight and not speak to each other for a week, and then I was truly alone. Although I’d been popular for a moment back home, my suffering over Helen Paper and my bout of mononucleosis had caused me to lose my social nerve. I now looked back on those days at public school when I’d said hi to so many people as a fabulous era. I’d been rich and famous and young, before this long, bitter decline I’d entered, this threnody I’d become. Now I was living in shadow between two radiances, the mythic past and the mythic future, the past the dreamlike, confusing story of injured love, the future a cheerful, perfectly crisp fable of love about to be crowned, and this contrast, this partitioning of time into genres, articulated a sense of duration, of endured if not always endurable history. I suffered now. I felt isolated to the point of craziness, but with a faint recourse to melodrama, to a potential audience and an attendant end to loneliness, for if I imagined complete despair I pictured it as an emptying of the theater, a feeling that the stalls and boxes would never be peopled again but would vacantly surround the stage on which the sole actor writhes and sobs, then sleeps, then wakes to speak in a voice he need no longer project. I hadn’t reached that point. I was conscious of the emblem of proud and tragic loneliness I was embroidering stitch by stitch before the eyes of the other boys. Every time I crossed the wintry quadrangle alone or sat alone in my room during free period (but with a door open to expose my solitude) I knew I was drawing another silk thread through the cloth. By day I gave myself over to a covert yearning for men. I’d linger in the locker room and study the brawny back of a senior, a body builder, a German with blond hair greased into symmetrical waves, with a faint dusting of brown hair on his shoulders and (he’s turning around, he drops his towel) with an almost pinkish-red puff of seemingly rootless pubic hair somehow floating in a cloud of smoke above his penis, as though the big gun had just been fired.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  To careless Adrian [I wrote] who loses books. With love and many kisses, your friendly social worker from New York— And I wrote my New York address and telephone number on the endpaper again, knowing he’d probably lose this copy too. That was how we parted. Loss piled on loss. My life spilling out into the street, and nothing but a slim volume of verse between me and the void. — In the café, I sat next to my suitcase and ordered another beer. I was dazed and exhausted—almost too exhausted to be as miserable as I knew I ought to be. I would have to look for a hotel. It was getting dark. My suitcase was terribly heavy and I might have to wander the streets dragging it behind me and climb all those spiral staircases to inquire about rooms which would turn out to be occupied. I put my head down on the table. I wanted to weep out of sheer exhaustion, but I knew I couldn’t make myself that conspicuous. Already I was attracting the kind of quizzical glances a woman alone attracts. And I was too tired and harassed to react with subtlety. If anyone tried to pick me up now, I would probably scream and begin swinging with my fists. I was beyond words. I was tired of reasoning and arguing and trying to be clever. The first man who approached me with a cynical or flirtatious look would get it: a knee in the balls or a punch in the jaw. I would not sit there cowering in fear as I had at age thirteen when exhibitionists started unzipping their pants at me on the deserted subway to high school. I actually used to be afraid they’d be insulted and take terrible revenge unless I remained rooted to my seat. So I stayed, looking away, pretending not to notice, pretending not to be terrified, pretending to be reading and hoping somehow that the book would protect me. Later, in Italy, when men followed me in the ruins or pursued me in cars down the avenues (opening their doors and whispering vieni, vieni ), I always wondered why I felt so sullied and spat upon and furious. It was supposed to be flattering. It was supposed to prove my womanliness. My mother had always said how womanly she felt in Italy. Then why did it make me feel so hunted? There must be something wrong with me I thought. I used to try to smile and toss my hair to show I was grateful. And then I felt like a fraud. Why wasn’t I grateful for being hunted? But now I wanted to be alone, and if anybody interpreted my behavior differently, I’d react like a wild beast. Even Bennett, with all his supposed psychology and insight, maintained that men tried to pick me up all the time because I conveyed my “availability"—as he put it. Because I dressed too sexily.

• 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 The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The others annoyed me with their objections to every detail, their constant mingling of legends and superstitions. This was no time for slow demonstrations, though I did not want to shock them in any way. So I continued the same comedy and accepted the role of a learned and progressive rabbi, giving answers as best I could even to questions of religious orthodoxy. An expected consequence of these sessions was that the men regained an awareness of a renewed faith. The rediscovery of the Biblical belief that misfortune is the just punishment of sin gave them the impetus to live more purely. On Friday evenings and Saturdays they refrained from lighting any new fires and tolerated no smokers; they even forced our cooks to prepare the three Sabbath meals in advance and, if our little lamps went out, went to bed in the tents in the dark. I thought I did well to approve all such behavior. What discouraged me most, however, was the impossibility of becoming really intimate with the men. They never quite considered me as one of them. They could not see why I stayed in the camp when all the other intellectuals and middle-class men managed, in the long run, to get themselves evacuated. When, of an evening, I would slip into one of their tents where they were still awake around a carefully camouflaged light, they would make room for me and often give me the place of honor, but they changed the topic of their conversation at once and became self-conscious. They avoided, for instance, all trivialities. I told them my father was an artisan, but they did not believe me. Those who did had more respect for me: a son of the people who has worked his way up is more to be admired than a middle-class boy. As for me, must I confess that I never really felt at ease among them? I wanted to love them, and I fear I managed only to be sorry for them. I reproached myself for this pity because I so much wanted to be one of them! In spite of myself, I watched myself and played a part. Perhaps, as is so natural to me, I exaggerate my guilt; had I been one of them, I could not have helped them. But what I did not see clearly at the time was that I was seeking in the camp and in the approbation of others only my own self-respect; after a few months, I was sure I had failed. It seemed clear to me that the men respected or distrusted me but that they would never adopt me. I saw this well one evening. As we had returned too late from work to eat by daylight, we had retired to our tents to sit around the lamps. I had left the scouts to join one of the other groups.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Divorce sets off a bomb in a family. Kids need the comfort of other survivors. No matter what was going on in her personal life, Judy could take solace in one thing: that as an author, she genuinely connected with children. Her young readers had begun writing her letters to tell her so. First, just a few arrived; then they came in by the hundreds. By the mid-1980s, when she published Letters to Judy , she was receiving almost two thousand fan letters a month, all carefully handwritten and filled with children’s deepest secrets, questions, and confessions. They wrote about everything from friendships, to puberty, to arguments with their teachers and parents. Some of them reached out with darker problems. Most of the kids who contacted Judy received a mailer in return, complete with a signed black-and-white headshot and some jovial family photos: Randy smiling while her mom eats an ice cream cone; a floppy-haired Larry posing with Judy in front of a bus. It came with a cheery note typed on the back. “I wish I could write to you individually but then I would never have time to write another book,” the message said. “The letters I receive from young readers are very important to me and the highlight of my day is sitting down to read my mail. Because writing is such lonely work, and I am really a people person, your letters remind me that I’m not alone,” it went on, before offering up some breezy biographical details. In fact, Judy did write back personal notes to a handful of her young correspondents, particularly those who shared they were suicidal or victims of incest or other physical abuse. She maintained an epistolary relationship with some of these children for years on end, becoming something of a lifeline for them. Letters to Judy is a mixture of memoir and samples of all kinds of letters. “Could you sort of be a second mother to me and tell me the facts of life?” an eleven-year-old named Camille wrote her after sharing that she felt she couldn’t ask her own mom. A fifteen-year-old named Alisa sent Judy a letter about her battles with alcohol abuse, obesity, and depression. “Besides family and doctors you are the only person I’ve ever told this to,” Alisa admitted. “You seem to understand teenagers so much that I figure you’d understand my problems.” Judy had become a mother figure to an entire country’s worth of children, which was ironic, because at home she was struggling to raise her own pair of angry, rebellious teenagers. Randy and Larry didn’t have the luxury of seeing their mom as some magnanimous, all-knowing guru. “With her own children, Judy Blume concedes, she’s less a heroine than she is with all those other people’s kids who write to her,” Joyce Maynard wrote in the New York Times .

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “In spite of my vow to respect her privacy, I finally opened it and read the last few entries,” Blume writes in Letters to Judy . “It was clear she was feeling alienated, frightened and confused and that we needed help.” Judy couldn’t really blame her; she didn’t like Los Alamos, either. The area was teeming with ambitious husbands but it was almost impossible to find any equally fulfilled wives. “It is a town with very frustrated, resentful, talented women who have very few outlets and few job opportunities,” Blume said later. In her 1981 novel Tiger Eyes , which mostly takes place in Los Alamos, Blume depicts it as an odd little world filled with narrow-minded white people who carry guns for no reason and look down their noses on minorities. Davey Wexler, the book’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, clashes with her aunt and uncle who live there and have taken her and her family in. Uncle Walter is a pedantic, neurotic type who works for LASL and imposes rules on Davey that she resents. “You’re the one who’s making the bombs,” she yells at him after he warns her that learning to drive is too dangerous. “You’re the one who is figuring out how to blow up the whole world. But you won’t let me take Driver’s Ed.” Judy was lonely there, and not just because she had trouble making friends. Her marriage to Tom was falling apart. They’d hardly known each other when they moved in together, and despite the initial attraction, they had very little in common. She’d gotten married to save face, to protect her kids from any harmful gossip—a divorcée living with a man out of wedlock was enough to spin the rumor mill in the 1970s—and of course, to satisfy her mother. But in the process, she’d once again managed to sacrifice her own happiness. Tom, whose kids were older, didn’t approve of her parenting and competed with Randy and Larry for her attention. Judy had two abortions during that time, to avoid the prospect of the pair of them raising a baby together. Their home wasn’t peaceful. “From the beginning, we fought,” Blume said. “We fought, I think, because we didn’t take the time to get to know each other. Each of us had invented the person of our dreams and then we were disappointed when we turned out not to be.” So Judy leaned into her professional life: The Career , as she called it. In many ways, it was the only thing keeping her sane. In 1977, she published Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself , a highly autobiographical novel about an imaginative Jewish girl growing up in the post–World War II era. It’s 1947 and Sally lives with her family in Elizabeth, New Jersey: her kindly dentist father, her reserved mother, and her brilliant yet troubled older brother, Douglas, whose stubborn case of nephritis prompts a temporary move down to Miami Beach, Florida, for the winter.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  While the divorce was still pending and the school year still in session, our mother moved my sister and me to a hotel in a community that had been built to resemble a Tudor village, all half-timbered stucco. That entire spring it seemed to rain. Every day after school I went walking for hours through unknown streets that were nearly empty. The intense, pure colors of traffic signals burned through the rain and cast long edible smears on the wet pavement. Green, yellow, red. A click in the box. Then red, yellow, green. I found a church, ivied and squat, with rounded arches and murky painted windows and, inside, the smell of floor polish. I walked down the resonant deserted aisles and came upon a carved wood door behind and to one side of the altar. A sign indicated that this was the minister’s office. I knocked on the door. A pleasant man in a dark business suit opened it. “Yes?” “Are you the minister?” “Yes.” “Do you mind if I talk to you? I have a problem.” “That’s what I’m here for. Come in.” The office seemed efficient with its typewriters and files and fluorescent ceiling lamps and water cooler; it struck a reassuringly practical note of business. He indicated I should sit in a green leather chair. He then sat down and faced me across the desk. “Are you busy?” “No. I have a few minutes. What’s the problem?” “My parents are getting divorced.” “Does that disturb you?” “Yes. Well, maybe.” “Are you going to live with your mother?” “Yes.” “Would you rather live with your father?” “No.” “Do you dislike your father?” “Goodness no.” “Would you like to see your parents stay married?” The sympathy in his eyes caused me to say, “Yes.” Once I had, I realized that this single lie had made me into a character in a story—just like one of the marionettes. “I want them to—yes.” I felt my face become more beautiful. I hoped the minister would invite me to his house and take care of me, or at least tell my mother how wonderful I was. I hoped the minister would tell his congregation about the wonderful little boy who had visited him one rainy afternoon. “Is there anything I can do? To bring them back together?” I asked. “Probably not. You can pray for them, for both of them to make the best possible decision.”

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Sometimes I imagine black wings. Specifically, I am lying on my bed at night, on my left side, and I imagine someone climbing in next to me and wrapping long black wings over me. It took a long time to learn that these things helped, and talking about it did not. When I talked about it, people would cry, or get disgusted, or horrified, or say they just didn’t understand how anyone could do that, or they would have elaborate thoughts about the failings of our justice system and how it could be better in particular ways that might or might not involve the death penalty. Or they would wish out loud that they could kill my abusers, as though that was a thing they were actually going to do. Frequently, the person I just told would need me to be supportive while they went through a range of emotions and feelings, sometimes very intensely, and then they would usually tell me nothing would change in how they felt about me. And then things would change. People you tell will make comparisons. They will compare you to everyone else they have heard of who has experienced something similar, and they will rate how you are doing according to that metric. Are you more or less functional than their college roommate? Are you more or less sexual than that one woman at the office? Are you thinner or fatter than the other survivors they know, does it sound like something they heard about on TV, did they read a book about it, can they tell their partner about it over dinner that night as a sad story and shake their head? They will want details, as many details as you can give them, until they suddenly don’t want details anymore, and it’s too much. Then they will revise backward. They will take every opinion they’ve ever heard from you, every personality trait, every action, and recast them in light of what you told them. This will be particularly true of your sexual behavior and your appearance. Probably this is why you are such a slut. Probably this is why you don’t date at all. Probably this explains everything about you, really, why you fuck the people you fuck and love the people you love, or do neither, ever. Probably this is why you are such a mess and they are safe. Even many people who are mostly on your side will think that you must have done something. That it would not happen to them, or to the people they love, because their lives are organized better, they don’t take chances, they don’t know anyone who would do anything like that.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When my sister taught me ways to be popular she was teaching me something I hadn’t known about. She filled a need the instant she created it. Or perhaps I should say she taught me that the loneliness I felt like a bad burn could be soothed. I most certainly had been lonely. I had ached and writhed with loneliness, twisting around and smearing it on me as though it were a tissue of shame pouring out of my body: shameful, familiar, the fell of shame. And yet the company I longed for, the radiant face smiling down into mine, the arm around my shoulders (an arm so lean every vein could be read through it, as light can be seen between marks on vellum)—in my daydreams this company came to me unbidden. The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted. Under my sister’s tutelage I learned that love or at least friendship must be coaxed, that there are skills (listening, smiling, remembering, flattering) that lure it closer. Sometimes, as I learned, a friend is no more than someone to kill time with, a voice chattering into the receiver a litany of questions, all those lumpy sandbags—individually light but cumulatively heavy—that hang from the girdle around the balloon’s suspended car to slow its ascent into cold, unbreathable solitude. But the very act of enticing friendship, of managing and conducting it, the whole politics of sentiment—well, I didn’t despise it, for how could I despise what I needed so much? While I was growing up I had never glimpsed the underbrush of kid society that lay just behind the topiary of the classroom. Dumb me—I’d just assumed the kids knew only whoever happened to be in their home room. Nor did I suspect some kids saw each other every day after school, saw and saw each other strolling under a shifting leaf spray of social lights and sexual shadows, imprints of illumination that had nothing to do with the grid of adult arrangements. A popular boy named Butch was the son of a bone surgeon; his girl was the daughter of a delivery man.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I suffered now. I felt isolated to the point of craziness, but with a faint recourse to melodrama, to a potential audience and an attendant end to loneliness, for if I imagined complete despair I pictured it as an emptying of the theater, a feeling that the stalls and boxes would never be peopled again but would vacantly surround the stage on which the sole actor writhes and sobs, then sleeps, then wakes to speak in a voice he need no longer project. I hadn’t reached that point. I was conscious of the emblem of proud and tragic loneliness I was embroidering stitch by stitch before the eyes of the other boys. Every time I crossed the wintry quadrangle alone or sat alone in my room during free period (but with a door open to expose my solitude) I knew I was drawing another silk thread through the cloth. By day I gave myself over to a covert yearning for men. I’d linger in the locker room and study the brawny back of a senior, a body builder, a German with blond hair greased into symmetrical waves, with a faint dusting of brown hair on his shoulders and (he’s turning around, he drops his towel) with an almost pinkish-red puff of seemingly rootless pubic hair somehow floating in a cloud of smoke above his penis, as though the big gun had just been fired. In the shower room I’d linger as long as possible and watch the water turn wintry chalk into summer marble. Imprisoned under all our layers of long underwear, thick socks, shirts, vests, jackets, coats and hoods were these tropical bodies; the steam and hot water brought color back into the pallor, found the nacreous hollow in a hip, detected the subtly raised triceps, rinsed a sharp clavicle in a softening flood, swirled dull brown hair into a smooth black cap and pulled evening gloves of light over raw hands and skinny, blue-veined forearms. Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, though all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex: the Italian with the hairy butt, thick legs and jaw darkened by a four- if not yet five-o’clock shadow; or take the blond darling of the football team with the permanent blush in his full cheeks, the distrustful smile of someone hard of hearing and the smooth, fleshy body and incipient beer belly resplendent with quivering health, feminine on a Rubens scale were it not for the way he moved—pigeon-toed athlete’s walk and lordly rocking tilt from side to side, something stiff in the back and shoulders and floppy in the hands and arms, loose ribbons around the rigid maypole.

• 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).

• From On Beauty (2005)

  happily, and, as the laughter slowed, it became a kind of groan, and then a wispy sigh, and then nothing. She wiped her eyes. ‘Well,’ she said. Howard put his glass down on the table, ready to say something, but she was already at the doorway. She told him there was a clean sheet for the divan to be found in the upstairs closet.  Levi needed his sleep. He had to get up early in order to pay a call in Boston and be back in school by midday. By eight thirty he was in the kitchen, keys in his pocket. Before leaving, he stopped by the larder, not quite sure what he was looking for. As a child he had accompanied his mother as she paid calls in Boston neighbourhoods, visiting sick or lonely people she knew from the hospital. She would always arrive with food. But Levi had never paid this kind of call before, not as an adult. He looked blankly into the larder. He heard a door open upstairs. He grabbed three packets of Asian noodle soup and a box of rice pilaf, stuffed them in his knapsack and left the house. The uniform of the streets comes into its own during the January freeze. While others shivered, Levi was cosy in his sweatshirts and hoods, wrapped up in there with his music. He stood by the bus stop, unconsciously reciting, listening to a tune that really called for a girl to be right in front of him, moving when he moved, fitting her curves into his sculpted crevices, bouncing. But the only female in sight was the stone Virgin Mary behind him in the courtyard of St Peter’s. She was, as ever, missing both her thumbs. Her hands were full of snow. Levi studied her pretty, sorrowful face, familiar to him from so many waits at this bus stop. He always liked to have a look at what she was holding. In late spring she held flower petals, which had rained down from the trees above her. When the weather grew less volatile, people put all kinds of weird stuff in her mutilated hands – little chocolates, photos, crucifixes, a teddy bear, once – or  On Beauty sometimes they tied a silk ribbon round her wrist. Levi had never put anything in her hands. He didn’t feel it was his place to do so, not being a Catholic. Not being an anything. The bus approached. Levi did not notice it. At the last minute he stretched out his hand. The bus screeched and stopped a few feet ahead of him. He did his funky limp towards it. ‘Hey, man, how about a little more wah-ning next time?’ said the bus guy. He had one of those broad-as-hell Boston accents.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I suddenly had a passion to be that ordinary girl. To be that good little housewife, that glorified American mother, that mascot from Mademoiselle, that matron from McCall’s, that cutie from Cosmo, that girl with the Good Housekeeping Seal tattooed on her ass and advertising jingles programmed in her brain. That was the solution! To be ordinary! To be unexotic! To be content with compromise and TV dinners and “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” I had a fantasy then of myself as a happy housewife. A fantasy straight out of an adman’s little brain. Me in apron and gingham shirtwaist waiting on my husband and kiddies while the omnipresent TV set sings out the virtues of the American home and the American slave-wife with her tiny befuddled brain. I thought of how homeless and rootless I had felt the night before and the answer to it all suddenly seemed clear: be ordinary! Be a safe little wife in her safe little house and you’ll never wake up desolate by the side of a road in France again. But then the fantasy exploded. It burst like the bubble it was. I thought of all those mornings in New York when I had awakened with my husband and felt just as lonely. All those lonely mornings we stared at each other across the orange juice and across the coffee cups. All those lonely moments measured out in coffee spoons, in laundry bills, in used toilet paper rolls, in dirty dishes, in broken plates, in canceled checks, in empty Scotch bottles. Marriage could be lonely too. Marriage could be desolate. All those happy housewives making breakfasts for husbands and kiddies were dreaming of running off with lovers to sleep in tents in France! Their heads were steeped in fantasy. They made their breakfasts, their beds, their brunches, and then they went off shopping to buy the latest installment of Jackie Onassis’ life in McCall’s. They constantly dreamed of escape. They constantly seethed with resentment. Their lives were pickled in fantasy. Was there no way out? Was loneliness universal? Was restlessness a fact of life? Was it better to acknowledge that than to keep on looking for false solutions? Marriage was no cure for loneliness. Children grew up and went away. Lovers were no panacea. Sex was no final solution. If you made your life into a long disease then death was the only cure. Suddenly, it was all so clear. I lay there in that tent, in that double sleeping bag next to that snoring stranger and thought and thought and thought. What next? How do I lead my life? Where do I go from here?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  She is remarking to herself how all the twenty-franc hotels in Paris have the same imaginary decorator. She cannot say this to him. He will think her spoiled. But she tells herself. She hates the narrow double bed which sags in the middle. She hates the bolster instead of a pillow. She hates the dust which flies into her nose when she lifts the bedspread. She hates Paris. He is taking off his clothes, shivering. You will remark how beautiful his body is, how utterly hairless, how straight his back is, how his calves are lean with long brown muscles, how his fingers are slim. But his body is not for her. He puts on his pajamas reproachfully. She stands in her stocking feet. “Why do you always have to do this to me? You make me feel so lonely.” “That comes from you.” “What do you mean it comes from me? Tonight I wanted to be happy. It’s Christmas Eve. Why do you turn on me? What did I do?” Silence. “What did I do?” He looks at her as if her not knowing were another injury. “Look, let’s just go to sleep now. Let’s just forget it.” “Forget what?” He says nothing. “Forget the fact that you turned on me? Forget the fact that you’re punishing me for nothing? Forget the fact that I’m lonely and cold, that it’s Christmas Eve and again you’ve ruined it for me? Is that what you want me to forget?” “I won’t discuss it.” “Discuss what? What won’t you discuss?” “Shut up! I won’t have you screaming in the hotel.” “I don’t give a fuck what you won’t have me do. I’d like to be treated civilly. I’d like you to at least do me the courtesy of telling me why you’re in such a funk. And don’t look at me that way….” “What way?” “As if my not being able to read your mind were my greatest sin. I can’t read your mind. I don’t know why you’re so mad. I can’t intuit your every wish. If that’s what you want in a wife you don’t have it in me.” “I certainly don’t.” “Then what is it? Please tell me.” “I shouldn’t have to.” “Good God! Do you mean to tell me I’m expected to be a mind reader? Is that the kind of mothering you want?” “If you had any empathy for me…” “But I do. My God, you just don’t give me a chance.” “You tune out. You don’t listen.” “It was something in the movie, wasn’t it?” “What, in the movie?” “The quiz again. Do you have to quiz me like some kind of criminal. Do you have to cross-examine me?…It was the funeral scene…. The little boy looking at his dead mother. Something got you there. That was when you got depressed.” Silence. “Well, wasn’t it?” Silence. “Oh come on, Bennett, you’re making me furious. Please tell me. Please.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Let’s go to the beach!” I’d suggest, but everyone was too tired, too hot, too lethargic. It was obvious I’d never get them to Baalbek or the Cedars either. Damascus, Cairo—forget it. Israel was right across the border but we would have to fly via Cyprus and that seemed unthinkable after the last flight. Then there would be the problem of getting back into Lebanon again. All I did was lounge around Randy’s apartment with the rest of them and wait for letters from Charlie—which rarely came. Instead I kept hearing from all those other clowns: the married Florentine who liked me to whisper dirty words, the American professor who claimed I had changed his life, one of the mail clerks at American Express who had convinced himself I was an heiress. It was Charlie I wanted, or no one. And Charlie wanted Sally. I was in despair. I spent half the time in Beirut nursing my clap phobia, inspecting my cunt in the mirror, and douching in Randy’s white marble bidet. When my parents arrived laden with gifts from the supposedly mysterious East, the situation deteriorated still further. Randy was glad to see them for the first three days and then she and Jude got into one of their marathon fights in which they both began dredging up events which took place twenty or twenty-five years ago. Randy blamed my mother for everything: from not changing her diaper often enough to changing it too often; from giving her piano lessons too young to not letting her go skiing young enough. They went at each other like a couple of trial lawyers, cross-examining the past. I kept wondering—why on earth had I come back to them for a rest? I was raring to get away again. I felt like a human Ping-Pong ball. I kept finding men to escape from my family and then running back to my family to escape from the men. Whenever I was home, I wanted to get away, and whenever I got away I wanted to go home again. What do you call that? An existential dilemma? The oppression of women? The human condition? It was unbearable then and it’s unbearable now: back and forth I go over the net of my own ambivalence. As soon as I touch ground, I want to bounce up and fly right back. So what do I do? I laugh. It only hurts when I laugh—though nobody knows that but me.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It is the third sultry weekend of August, during which the town of Wellington, Mass, holds an annual outdoor festival for families. Kiki had intended to bring her family, but, by the time she returned from her Saturday-morning yoga class, they had already dispersed, off in search of shade. Outside, the pool stagnated under a shifting layer of maple leaves. Inside, the AC whirred for no one. Only Murdoch was left, she found him flat out in the bedroom, his head on his paws, tongue as dry as chamois leather. Kiki rolled down her leggings and wriggled out of her vest. She threw them across the room into an overflowing wicker basket. She stood naked for a while before her closet, making some astute decisions regarding her weight as it might be placed on an axis against the heat and the distance she would be covering, making her way through Wellington’s celebrations alone. On a shelf here she kept a chaotic pile of multipurpose scarves, like something a magician might pull from his pocket. Now she picked out a brown cotton one with a fringe, and wrapped her hair in this. Then an orange square of silk that could be fashioned into a top, tied beneath the shoulder blades. A deep red scarf, of a coarser silk, she wore around her waist as a sarong. She sat on the bed to fiddle with the buckles of her sandals, a hand idly turning over one of Murdoch’s ears, from the glossy brown to the crenulated pink and back again. ‘You’re with me, baby,’ she said, heaving him up and on to her chest, the hot sack of his belly in her hand. Just as she was about to  kipps and belsey leave the house, she heard a noise from the living room. She retraced her steps down the hallway and put her head around the door. ‘Hey, Jerome, baby.’ ‘Hey.’ Her son sat morosely in the beanbag, in his lap a notebook bound in fraying blue silk. Kiki put Murdoch on the floor and watched his maladroit waddle towards Jerome, where he sat upon the boy’s toes. ‘Writing?’ she asked. ‘No, dancing,’ came the reply. Kiki let her mouth close and then opened it once more with a mordant puck. Since London he was like this. Sarcastic, secretive, sixteen all over again. And always working away at this diary. He was threatening not to go back to college. Kiki felt that the two of them, mother and son, were now moving steadily in obverse directions: Kiki to forgiveness, Jerome to bitterness. For, though it had taken almost a year, Kiki had begun to release the memory of Howard’s mistake.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Stuff ?’ Choo picked up a fat joint from his ashtray and relit it. He offered Levi the only chair and took for himself the corner of the bed. ‘Like, food.’ ‘ NO ,’ said Choo indignantly, cutting the air with his hand. ‘I’m not starving. Forget about charity. I worked this week – I don’t need help.’ ‘No, no, it ain’t like that – I just . . . it’s like, when you go see someone, you bring something. In America – that’s how we do. Like a muffin. My mom always takes muffins or pie.’ Choo stood up slowly, reached over and took the offered packets from Levi’s hands. He seemed unsure as to what exactly they were, but he thanked Levi and, peering at them curiously, walked across the room to put them on the kitchen counter.  on beauty and being wrong ‘I didn’t have no muffins and I just thought . . . Chinese soup. Good for when it’s cold,’ said Levi and mimed coldness. ‘So. How you been? I didn’t see you Tuesday evening.’ Choo shrugged. ‘I have a few jobs. I did a different job on Tuesday.’ Outside on the street came the loud voice of someone crazy, cursing a lot. Levi flinched, but Choo didn’t seem to notice. ‘Scene,’ said Levi. ‘You got a lot of projects, like me – that’s cool. Keeping it all rolling. Hustling.’ Levi sat on his hands to keep them warm. He was beginning to regret coming here. It was a room with no distractions from its own silence. Usually, when he was hanging at a friend’s place, the TV would always be on for background noise. The lack of a television, of all the privations in evidence in this room, struck Levi as the most poignant and unbearable. ‘Would you like some water to drink?’ asked Choo, ‘Or rum? I have good rum.’ Levi smiled hesitantly. It was ten in the morning. ‘Water’s good.’ While the tap ran, Choo opened and closed cabinets, seeking a clean glass. Levi looked around himself. By his chair on a little table was a long sheet of yellow paper, one of those Haitian ‘bulletins’ they gave out for free everywhere. The main feature was a photograph of a little black man on a gold chair with a mixed-race woman on another gold chair beside him. Yes, I am Jean-Bertrand Aristide , read Levi from the caption, and of course I care about the illiterate, poor Haitian scum! That is why I have married my wonderful wife (did I mention she is pale-skinned???), who is bourgeois de souche, not like me, who came from the gutter (and can’t you see how I remember it!). I did not buy these reasonably priced chairs with drug money, no way! I may be an uncommonly totalitarian dictator but I can still have my multimillion-dollar estate while protecting the grinding poor of Haiti!

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I told you I felt nothing, why do you keep asking? Because I have to know you. You never lost anyone. You never had anyone die. Is that why you hate me? We were on relief. You were on Central Park West when we were on relief. Is that my fault? Do you know that Chinese funeral home on Pell Street? When people die they go back to their own. Racists in death. He never believed in God. He never went to church. They said the prayers in Chinese. And I thought: my God, I don’t understand a word. The coffin was open. That’s important. Otherwise you don’t want to believe in death. Psychologically sound. Seems gruesome, though. Then the relatives came and took the last of our money. The business will provide, they said, but the business folded. I was a junior in high school. I could go to work when I graduated, the welfare lady said. But I thought: then I’ll wind up a waiter. And I can’t even be a waiter in a Chinese restaurant because I don’t know Chinese. I’ll be a tool, I thought, a poor slob. I have to go to college. Meanwhile you were on Central Park West. And you were in Cambridge for weekends. In medical school I was feeding laboratory animals. Christmas night. Everyone went out. I was in the lab feeding the goddamn rats. She is lying beside him very still. She touches herself to prove she’s not dead. She thinks of the first two weeks of her broken leg. She used to masturbate constantly then to convince herself that she could feel something besides pain. Pain was a religion then. A total commitment. She runs her hands down her belly. Her right forefinger touches the clitoris while the left forefinger goes deep inside her, pretending to be a penis. What does a penis feel, surrounded by those soft, collapsing caves of flesh? Her finger is too small. She puts in two and spreads them. But her nails are too long. They scratch. What if he wakes up? Maybe she wants him to wake up and see how lonely she is. Lonely, lonely, lonely. She moves her fingers to that rhythm, feeling the two inside get creamy and the clitoris get hard and red. Can you feel colors in your fingertips? This is what red feels like. The inner cave feels purple. Royal purple. As if the blood down there were blue. “Who do you think of when you masturbate?” her German analyst asked. “Who do you sink of?” I sink therefore I am. She thinks of no one really, and of everyone. Of her analyst and of her father. No, not her father. She cannot think of her father. Of a man on a train. A man under the bed. A man with no face. His face is blank. His penis has one eye. It weeps.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I made no effort to draw them out, to elicit or reflect on their confidences, or to advise them. I required almost nothing of them, for if I wasn’t attentive neither was I demanding. Practically anyone could be my friend. For me friendship was an innocent, unconscious habit that didn’t confer prestige on anyone, that led nowhere, that scarcely bore thinking about, unremarkable as breath. When my sister taught me ways to be popular she was teaching me something I hadn’t known about. She filled a need the instant she created it. Or perhaps I should say she taught me that the loneliness I felt like a bad burn could be soothed. I most certainly had been lonely. I had ached and writhed with loneliness, twisting around and smearing it on me as though it were a tissue of shame pouring out of my body: shameful, familiar, the fell of shame. And yet the company I longed for, the radiant face smiling down into mine, the arm around my shoulders (an arm so lean every vein could be read through it, as light can be seen between marks on vellum)—in my daydreams this company came to me unbidden. The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted. Under my sister’s tutelage I learned that love or at least friendship must be coaxed, that there are skills (listening, smiling, remembering, flattering) that lure it closer. Sometimes, as I learned, a friend is no more than someone to kill time with, a voice chattering into the receiver a litany of questions, all those lumpy sandbags—individually light but cumulatively heavy—that hang from the girdle around the balloon’s suspended car to slow its ascent into cold, unbreathable solitude. But the very act of enticing friendship, of managing and conducting it, the whole politics of sentiment—well, I didn’t despise it, for how could I despise what I needed so much? While I was growing up I had never glimpsed the underbrush of kid society that lay just behind the topiary of the classroom. Dumb me—I’d just assumed the kids knew only whoever happened to be in their home room. Nor did I suspect some kids saw each other every day after school, saw and saw each other strolling under a shifting leaf spray of social lights and sexual shadows, imprints of illumination that had nothing to do with the grid of adult arrangements. A popular boy named Butch was the son of a bone surgeon; his girl was the daughter of a delivery man. They made love every afternoon in the basement of her house.