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)

  Because my sister tormented me and I loved her but feared her, I turned away from her to imaginary playmates. There were three of them. Cottage Cheese, the girl, was older than I, sensible and bossy but my ally. She and I tolerated our good-natured younger sidekick, Georgie-Porgie, a dimwit we fussed over for his own good. We felt nothing of this benign condescension toward Tom-Thumb-Thumb, the hellion who roamed the woods beyond the barbed wire fence guarding the neighbor’s property, off limits to us and to him too, I’m sure, though he ignored this rule and all others. He was just a rustle of dried leaves, a panting of quick hot breath behind the honeysuckle, a blur of tanned leg and muddy knees or a distant hoot and holler—an irrepressible male freedom (all the freer because he was a boy and not a man). He needed no one, he’d listen to no reprimand. One time Cottage Cheese and I cornered him (we’d taken him by surprise as he was furtively pawing my father’s untouchable tools in the garage) and we lectured him at length, but his eyes, the whites flashing wonderfully clear and bright through the matted hair, never stopped darting back and forth looking for an escape route—and then he was off, leaving behind him only the resonance of the concrete vault and our voices calling Tom, calling, calling out to him, Tom, to behave, to be good, Tom, as good as we had to be. He never cared for me. Cottage Cheese and I, determined that naive Georgie-Porgie should not fall under Tom’s spell, made a great show of listing Tom’s faults—but privately I worried about Tom and at night I wondered where he was sleeping, was he dry, was he warm, hungry. I even envied his sovereignty, though the price of freedom—total solitude—seemed more than I could possibly pay. Tom’s independence and Georgie’s dependence rendered them both unsatisfactory as playmates. If the family was going on a trip I gladly left the boys behind so long as I could take Cottage Cheese with me. My mother made sure there was always a place for Cottage Cheese beside me in the back seat of the pale blue Chrysler with its royal blue upholstery, its delicate chrome ashtray tilting out from the quilted rear panel of the front seat and its translucent celluloid knobs on the window cranks—although once Cottage Cheese, in an uncharacteristically willful moment, insisted on riding the exterior running board as I held her hand through the lowered window. Her skirts flew up and her taffeta hair ribbons bobbed crazily behind her until she looked as windswept as the silver figurine on the hood.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  My parents only stuck around for a week or so and then they were off to Italy to check up on an ice-bucket factory. Fortunately, they have an import-export business which permits them to pick up and fly away whenever the internecine family warfare escalates to the bombing level. They fly in full of gifts and good feelings and fly out when the shit hits the fan. The whole process takes about a week. The rest of the year they pine for their far-flung children and wonder why most of them live so far from home. During the years I was in Germany and Randy was in Beirut, my mother wondered wistfully why two of her brood had chosen to live (as she put it) “in enemy territory.” “Because it seemed more hospitable than home,” I said, winning her everlasting enmity. It was a bitchy remark—I’ll grant that—but what have I ever had to protect me against my mother except words? It was still pretty crowded after my parents left: four sisters, Pierre, six kids (there were only six in 1965), a nursemaid, and a cleaning lady. It was so hot that we scarcely left the air-conditioned apartment. I kept wanting to go sightseeing, but the family lethargy was contagious. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll leave for Cairo, but I was really scared to go to Cairo alone and neither Lalah nor Chloe would go with me. Things went on in this depressing vein for another week. On one occasion, we all went to a cabana club where the beach was rocky and Pierre poeticized about the blue Mediterranean until you felt like puking. (He was always lecturing us about the good life in Beirut and how he had come to get away from “the commercialism of America.”) At the club he introduced us to one of his friends as his “four wives,” and I had such a creepy feeling that I wanted to go home then and there. But where was home? With my family? With Pia? With Charlie? With Brian? Alone?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I stayed “home” in a sterile motel outside San Antonio, watched television, tinkered with my poems, felt enraged and powerless. Like most native New York girls, I had never learned to drive. I was twenty-four and stranded in a Texas motel facing a sun-parched strip of highway between San Antonio and Austin. I slept until ten-thirty, awoke and watched television while I carefully made up my face (for whom?), went downstairs and gorged myself on a Texas brunch of pancakes, sausages, and grits, put on my bathing suit (which was growing tighter and tighter), and baked in the sun for two hours or so. Then I swam in the pool for five minutes and went back upstairs to confront my “work.” But I found it nearly impossible to work. The loneliness of writing terrified me. I looked for every excuse to escape. I had no sense of myself as a writer and no faith in my ability to write. I could not see then that I had been writing all my life. I had begun composing and illustrating little stories when I was eight. I had kept a journal from the age of ten. I was an avid and ironic letter-writer from age thirteen, and I consciously aped the letters of Keats and G.B.S. throughout my adolescence. At seventeen, when I went to Japan with my parents and sisters, I dragged along my Olivetti portable and spent every evening recapitulating the day’s observations into a loose-leaf notebook. I began to publish poems in small literary magazines during my senior year in college (where I won most of the poetry prizes and edited the literary magazine). And yet despite the obvious fact that I was obsessed with writing, despite publications and despite letters from literary agents asking whether I was “working on a novel,” I didn’t really believe in the seriousness of my commitment at all. Instead, I had allowed myself to be shunted into graduate school. Graduate school was supposed to be safe. Graduate school was supposed to be the thing that you got “under your belt” (like a baby?) before you settled down to writing. What an obvious swindle it now seems! But then it seemed prudent, wise, and responsible. I was such a compulsive good girl that my professors were always dangling fellowships before me. I longed to turn them down but hadn’t the guts to—so I wasted two and a half years on an M.A. and part of a Ph.D. before it occurred to me that graduate school was seriously interfering with my education.

• 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.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons? And then a note arrived at the Belsey house, hand-delivered. It was from Carlene. Christmas was approaching, and Carlene felt she was behind as far as presents were concerned. She had spent another spell in bed of late, and her family had gone to New York for a short break so the children might shop and Monty attend to some of his charity work. Would Kiki think about accompanying her on a shopping trip into Boston? On a drear Saturday morning, Kiki picked up her friend in a Wellington taxi. She put Carlene in  the anatomy lesson the front passenger seat and sat herself in the back, lifting her feet so she didn’t have to contend with the ice water swilling around on the floor. ‘Where you want?’ asked the cab driver, and when Kiki told him the name of the mall, he had not heard of it, although it was a Boston landmark. He wanted the street names. ‘It’s the biggest mall in town. Don’t you know the city at all ?’ ‘It not my job. You should know where you want go.’ ‘Honey, that’s exactly your job.’ ‘I don’t think they should be allowed to drive with poor English like that,’ complained Carlene primly, without lowering her voice. ‘No, it’s my fault,’ mumbled Kiki, ashamed to have started this. She sank back in her seat. The car crossed Wellington Bridge. Kiki watched a swell of birds swoop under the arch and land on the frozen river. ‘Are you of the opinion,’ asked Carlene worriedly, ‘that it is better to go to a lot of different shops or just to find one big shop and stick with it?’ ‘I’m of the opinion that it’s better not to shop at all!’ ‘You don’t like Christmas?’ Kiki considered. ‘No, that’s not quite true. But I don’t have a feeling for it like I used to. I used to love Christmas in Florida – it was warm in Florida – but that’s not it really. My daddy was a minister and he made Christmas meaningful to me – I don’t mean in the religious sense, but he thought of it as a ‘‘hope for the best things’’. That was his way of putting it. It was a kind of reminder of what we might be. Now it feels like you just get presents.’ ‘And you don’t like presents.’ ‘I don’t want any more things, no.’ ‘Well, I’m still putting you on my list,’ said Carlene brightly, and from the front seat waved a little white notebook. Then, more seriously, she said, ‘I would like to give you a gift, as a thank you. I’ve been rather lonely. And you’ve thought to visit me and spend a little time with me . . . even though I’m not much fun at the moment.’  On Beauty ‘Don’t be crazy.

• 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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  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? By afternoon, we were drunk and jolly. We were soused on beer. We stopped to buy peaches from a roadside farmer and found that he’d only sell them by the box, so we drove off with the Triumph loaded with peaches. A huge crate of them filling the back of the car. I began eating them greedily and discovered that nearly all of them had worms. I laughed and I ate around the worms. I tossed the wormy peach halves out into the countryside. I was too drunk to care about worms or pregnancy or marriage or the future. “I feel great!” I said to Adrian. “That’s the idea, ducks. Now you’ve got the idea.” — But by evening, when the beers wore off, I was depressed again.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The blond leg was pulled in, the car door was slammed—was re-slammed—and driver Haze at the violent wheel, rubber-red lips writhing in angry, inaudible speech, swung my darling away, while unnoticed by them or Louise, old Miss Opposite, an invalid, feebly but rhythmically waved from her vined veranda. 16 The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita—full of the feel of her pre-adolescently incurved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down while I held her. I marched into her tumbled room, threw open the door of the closet and plunged into a heap of crumpled things that had touched her. There was particularly one pink texture, sleazy, torn, with a faintly acrid odor in the seam. I wrapped in it Humbert’s huge engorged heart. A poignant chaos was ’welling within me—but I had to drop those things and hurriedly regain my composure, as I became aware of the maid’s velvety voice calling me softly from the stairs. She had a message for me, she said; and, topping my automatic thanks with a kindly “you’re welcome,” good Louise left an unstamped, curiously clean-looking letter in my shaking hand. This is a confession: I love you [so the letter began; and for a distorted moment I mistook its hysterical scrawl for a schoolgirl’s scribble]. Last Sunday in church—bad you, who refused to come to see our beautiful new windows!—only last Sunday, my dear one, when I asked the Lord what to do about it, I was told to act as I am acting now. You see, there is no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life. Now, my dearest, dearest, mon cher, cher monsieur, you have read this; now you know. So, will you please, at once, pack and leave. This is a landlady’s order. I am dismissing a lodger. I am kicking you out. Go! Scram! Departez! I shall be back by dinnertime, if I do eighty both ways and don’t have an accident (but what would it matter?), and I do not wish to find you in the house. Please, please, leave at once, now, do not even read this absurd note to the end. Go. Adieu. The situation, chéri, is quite simple. Of course, I know with absolute certainty that I am nothing to you, nothing at all. Oh yes, you enjoy talking to me (and kidding poor me), you have grown fond of our friendly house, of the books I like, of my lovely garden, even of Lo’s noisy ways—but I am nothing to you. Right?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (Which, as you may recall, is the climactic line from Strindberg’s Miss Julie. ) “Adrian Goodlove,” he said. And with that he turned suddenly and upset his beer all over me. “Terribly sorry,” he kept saying, wiping at the table with his dirty handkerchief, his hand, and eventually his Indian shirt—which he took off, rolled up and gave me to wipe my dress with. Such chivalry! But I was just sitting there looking at the curly blond hair on his chest and feeling the beer trickle between my legs. “I really don’t mind at all,” I said. It wasn’t true that I didn’t mind. I loved it. Goodlove, Goodall, Goodbar, Goodbody, Goodchild, Goodeve, Goodfellow, Goodford, Goodfleisch, Goodfriend, Goodgame, Goodhart, Goodhue, Gooding, Goodlet, Goodson, Goodridge, Goodspeed, Goodtree, Goodwine. You can’t be named Isadora White Wing (née Weiss—my father had bleached it to “White” shortly after my birth) without spending a rather large portion of your life thinking about names. Adrian Goodlove. His mother had named him Hadrian and then his father had forced her to change it to Adrian because that sounded “more English.” His father was big on sounding English. “Typical tight-ass English middle class,” Adrian said of his Mum and Dad. “You’d hate them. They spend their whole lives trying to keep their bowels open in the name of the Queen. A losing battle too. Their assholes are permanently plugged.” And he farted loudly to punctuate. He grinned. I looked at him in utter amazement. “You’re a real primitive,” I sneered, “a natural man.” But Adrian kept on grinning. Both of us knew I had finally met the real zipless fuck. — OK. So I admit my taste in men is questionable. Plenty more evidence of that will follow. But who can debate taste anyway? And who can convey an infatuation? It’s like trying to describe the taste of chocolate mousse, or the look of a sunset, or why you can sit for hours and make faces at your own baby…. Who is there who adds up to all that much on paper? We take Romeo on faith, and Julian Sorel and Count Vronsky, and even Mellors the gamekeeper. The smile, the shaggy hair, the smell of pipe tobacco and sweat, the cynical tongue, the beer spilling, the exuberant public farting…. My husband has a beautiful head of black hair and long thin fingers. The first night I met him, he also grabbed for my ass (while discussing new trends in psychotherapy). In general, I seem to like men who can make that quick transition from spirit to matter. Why waste time if the attraction is really there? But if a man I didn’t like made a grab for me, I’d probably be outraged and maybe even disgusted. And who can explain why the same action disgusts you in one case and thrills you in another? And who can explain the basis for selection? Astrology nuts try. So do psychoanalysts.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I was the one they envied in public and laughed at in private. I could imagine the reporting of these events in Class News: Isadora White Wing and new hubby Doctor Adrian Goodlove are living in London near Hampstead Heath—not to be confused with Heathcliff, for the benefit of all you Math majors. Isadora would love to hear from fellow Barnardites abroad. She is busily engrossed in writing a novel and a new book of poems, and in her spare time attends the International Psychoanalytic, where she congresses.... All my fantasies included marriage. No sooner did I imagine myself running away from one man than I envisioned myself tying up with another. I was like a boat that always had to have a port of call. I simply couldn’t imagine myself without a man. Without one, I felt lost as a dog without a master; rootless, faceless, undefined. But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I’ve no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn’t have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn’t automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah. Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family. I think of them living in places where they can’t work, where they can’t speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and thinks herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right? A grim picture.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  That was how lonely I felt, how utterly bereft. “No one, no one, no one, no one...” I moaned, hugging myself like the big baby I was. I was trying to rock myself to sleep. From now on, I thought, I will have to be my own mother, my own comforter, my own rocker-to-sleep. Perhaps this is what Adrian meant about going down into the bottom of yourself and pulling yourself back up. Learning how to survive your own life. Learning how to endure your own existence. Learning how to mother yourself. Not always turning to an analyst, a lover, a husband, a parent. I rocked myself. I said my own name to try to remember who I was: “Isadora, Isadora, Isadora, Isadora...Isadora White Stollerman Wing...Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing...B.A., M.A., Phi Beta Kappa. Isadora Wing, promising younger poet. Isadora Wing, promising younger sufferer. Isadora Wing, feminist and would-be liberated woman. Isadora Wing, clown, crybaby, fool. Isadora Wing, wit, scholar, ex-wife of Jesus Christ. Isadora Wing, with her fear of flying. Isadora Wing, slightly overweight sexpot, with a bad case of astigmatism of the mind’s eye. Isadora Wing, with her unfillable cunt and holes in her head and her heart. Isadora Wing of the hunger-thump. Isadora Wing whose mother wanted her to fly. Isadora Wing whose mother grounded her. Isadora Wing, professional patient, seeker of saviors, sensuality, certainty. Isadora Wing, fighter of windmills, professional mourner, failed adventuress....” I must have slept. I woke up to see the sunlight streaming in through the brilliant blue of the pup tent. Adrian was still snoring. His hairy blond arm had fallen heavily across my chest and was pressing down on it, making me uncomfortably conscious of my breathing. The birds were chirping. We were in France. By some roadside. Some crossroads in my life. What was I doing there? Why was I lying in a tent in France with a man I hardly knew? Why wasn’t I home in bed with my husband? I thought of my husband with a sudden wave of tenderness. What was he doing? Did he miss me? Had he forgotten me? Had he found someone else? Some ordinary girl who didn’t have to take off on adventures to prove her stamina. Some ordinary girl who was content with making breakfast and raising kiddies. Some ordinary girl of car pools and swimming pools and cesspools. Some ordinary American girl out of Seventeen Magazine? 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.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Kiki heard her son sigh into the phone. ‘Mom, I don’t think it’s time for an intervention. Just because she can’t come to the phone doesn’t mean the evil Republican is beating her. Mom . . . I really don’t want to come home at Christmas and find Victoria drinking eggnog in my kitchen . . . Could we just . . . like, could we cool it on the ‘‘being neighbourly’’ vibe? They’re pretty private people.’ ‘Who’s bothering them!’ cried Kiki. ‘OK, then!’ echoed Jerome, imitating her. ‘Nobody’s bothering anybody,’ muttered Kiki irritably. She stepped aside to allow a woman with a double stroller to get by. ‘I just like her. The woman lives near by, and she’s obviously not well, and I’d like to see how she’s doing. Is that allowed?’ It was the first time she had articulated these motives, even to herself. Hearing them now, she recognized how approximate and shoddy they were when placed alongside the strong, irrational desire she had to be in that woman’s presence again. ‘OK . . . I just – I guess I don’t see why we have to be friends with them.’ ‘You have friends, Jerome. And Zora has friends, and Levi practically lives with his friends – and’ – Kiki followed the thought to the edge of the cliff and beyond – ‘well, we sure as hell know now how close your father is to his friends – and what? I can’t make friends? Y’all have your life and I have no life?’ ‘No, Mom . . . come on, that’s not fair . . . I just . . . I mean, I wouldn’t have thought she was your type of person . . . Makes it a little awkward for me, that’s all. Anyway, whatever. You know . . . you do what you want.’ A mutual bad temper stretched its black wings over the conversation. ‘Mom . . .’ mumbled Jerome contritely, ‘look, I’m glad you rang. How are you? Are you OK?’ ‘Me? I’m fine. I’m fine .’ ‘OK . . .’ ‘Really,’ said Kiki. ‘You don’t sound great.’ ‘I’m fine .’  On Beauty ‘So . . . what’s going to happen? With you . . . you know . . . and Dad.’ He sounded almost tearful, anxious not to be told the truth. It was wrong, Kiki knew, to be antagonized by this, but she was. These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you – even when it isn’t in your power to bestow it – and then when the real shit hits the fan , when you need them to be adults, suddenly they’re children again. ‘God, I don’t know, Jay. That’s the truth. I’m getting through the days here. That’s about it.’ ‘I love you, Mom,’ said Jerome ardently. ‘You’re gonna get through this. You’re a strong black woman.’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It was so hot that we scarcely left the air-conditioned apartment. I kept wanting to go sightseeing, but the family lethargy was contagious. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll leave for Cairo, but I was really scared to go to Cairo alone and neither Lalah nor Chloe would go with me. Things went on in this depressing vein for another week. On one occasion, we all went to a cabana club where the beach was rocky and Pierre poeticized about the blue Mediterranean until you felt like puking. (He was always lecturing us about the good life in Beirut and how he had come to get away from “the commercialism of America.”) At the club he introduced us to one of his friends as his “four wives,” and I had such a creepy feeling that I wanted to go home then and there. But where was home? With my family? With Pia? With Charlie? With Brian? Alone? Our family lethargy seemed aimless, but actually it had a sort of routine to it. We rose at one, listened to the kids screaming, played with them a bit, ate an enormous brunch of tropical fruit, yogurt, eggs, cheeses, and Arabic coffee, read the Paris Herald-Tribune around the holes the censor had cut in it. (Any mention of Israel or Jews was prohibited—as were movies by those two notable Israelites, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Elizabeth Taylor.) Then we began debating how to spend the day. In that, we were about as united as Arabs planning an attack on Israel. On any given occasion, you could lay bets that everyone in the household would have a different preference. Chloe would suggest the beach; Pierre, Byblos; Lalah, Baalbek; the oldest boys, the archaeological museum; the littler kids, the amusement park; and Randy would veto everything. By the time we went through the full debate, it would be too late to go anywhere anyway. So we’d have supper and then either watch Bonanza on TV (with Arabic and French subtitles which covered nearly the whole screen), or go to some cruddy movie on Hamra Street. On some occasions our afternoon debate was interrupted by the arrival of Pierre’s mother and aunts—three ancient ladies in black (with gigantic bosoms and fuzzy mustaches) who looked so much alike you could hardly tell them apart. They would have made a great singing group except that they only had one song. It went: “How you like Lebanon? Lebanon better than New York?” And they played it over and over just to make sure you got the words. Oh they were nice enough, but not terribly easy to converse with. As soon as they arrived, Louise (the maid) would appear with coffee, Pierre would suddenly remember a business engagement, and Randy (pleading her delicate condition) would disappear into the bedroom for a nap. Lalah and Chloe and I were left to cope, ringing endless changes on the refrain “Yes—Lebanon is better than New York.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (He gives the words singly like little gifts. Like hard little turds.) “What was it about that scene that got me?” “Don’t quiz me. Tell me!” (She puts her arms around him. He pulls away. She falls to the floor holding onto his pajama leg. It looks less like an embrace than like a rescue scene, she sinking, he reluctantly allowing her to cling to his leg for support.) “Get up!” (Crying) “Only if you tell me.” (He jerks his leg away.) “I’m going to bed.” (She puts her face to the cold floor.) “Bennett, please don’t do this, please talk to me.” “I’m too mad.” “Please.” “I can’t.” “Please.” “The more you plead, the colder I feel.” “Please.” They are lying in bed thinking. The bolster on her side is wet. She is shivering and sobbing. He seems not to hear. Whenever they roll toward the depression in the center of the bed, he is the first to draw back. This happens repeatedly. The bed is hollowed out like a log canoe. She likes the warmth and hardness of his back. She would like to put her arms around him. She would like to forget the whole scene, pretend it never happened. When they make love, they’re together for a while. But he won’t. He snatches her hand from his pajama fly. He pushes her away. She rolls back. He moves to his outer edge. “That’s no solution,” he says. Listen to the rain falling. Out in the street there are occasional shouts from students coming home drunk. Wet cobblestones. Paris can be so wet. After the movie tonight, they went to Notre Dame. They were packed in between wet wool coats and wet fur coats. Midnight Mass. Umbrella points dripping into their shoes. They couldn’t move backward or forward. A mob of people stuck there, clogging the aisles. Paix dans le monde, said a high, electronically amplified voice. There is nothing worse than the smell of wet fur. He’s home in Washington Heights. His father has died. He feels nothing. It’s funny that he feels nothing. When people die you are not supposed to feel nothing.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  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. She feels the convulsions of the orgasm suck violently around her fingers. Her hand falls to her side and then she sinks into a dead sleep. She dreams she is back in the apartment where she grew up, but this time it was planned by a dream architect. The halls leading to three-walled bedrooms meander like ancient riverbeds and the kitchen pantry is a wind tunnel hung with cabinets too high to reach. The pipes fret like old men gargling; the floorboards breathe. In her bedroom, the frosted doorway glass is full of faces crying their anguish to the moon with O-shaped mouths. A long syllable of moonlight slides forward silvering the floor, then shatters with the sound of breaking glass. The faces in the door are wolfish. Blood stiffens in the corners of their mouths. The maid’s bathroom has a claw-footed tub where a child can imagine herself drowning. Four brass lanterns hang from the living-room ceiling. It is fathoms high and covered with tarnished gold leaf. Above the living room is a balcony with turned railing posts just wide enough apart for a child to ease through and begin floating through the air. One flight farther up and she is in the studio which smells of turpentine. The ceiling points up like a witch’s hat. A spiked iron chandelier hangs dead center from a black chain. It swings slightly in the wind which hisses between the trapezoidal northern window and the trapezoidal southern window. Beethoven’s plaster death mask hangs on the wall. His domed lids are shut. She climbs up on a chair and runs her fingers across them. The black soot streaks the plaster.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I sell these handbags. How would that be?’ ‘That’s cool,’ said Levi quietly. ‘ Best movies, top movies, three for ten dollars! ’ called Levi into the street. He dug into his pocket and found two individually wrapped Junior Mints. He offered one to Choo, who declined it sniffily. Levi unwrapped his own mint and popped it into his mouth. He loved Junior Mints. Minty and chocolatey. Just everything you want from a candy, basically. The last of the peppermint slipped down his throat. He tried really hard not to say anything at all. And then he said: ‘So you got a lot of friends here?’  On Beauty Choo sighed. ‘No.’ ‘No one in the city?’ ‘No.’ ‘You don’t know anyone ?’ ‘I know two, three people. They work across the river. At Wellington. In the college.’ ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Levi. ‘Which department?’ Choo stopped organizing the money in his fanny pack and looked at Levi curiously. ‘They’re cleaners,’ he said. ‘I don’t know which department they clean.’ OK, OK, you win, bro, thought Levi, and crouched down to the DVDs to pointlessly rearrange a row of them. He was done with this guy. But now it was Choo who seemed freshly interested. ‘And you – ’ said Choo, pursuing him. ‘You live in Roxbury, Felix tells me.’ Levi looked up at Choo. He was smiling, at last. ‘Yeah, man, that’s right.’ Choo looked down at him like the tallest man who had ever lived. ‘Yes. That’s what I heard, that you live in Roxbury. And you rap with them too.’ ‘Not really. I just went along. It’s good, though – it’s got that political vibe. Real angry. I’m learning more about the . . . like, the political context, that’s what I’m into right now,’ said Levi, referring to a book on Haiti he had borrowed (though it was as yet unread) from Arundel School’s -year-old library. It was the first time Levi had ever entered that cloistered, dark little space without the propulsion of a school project or imminent exam. ‘But they say they never see you there, in Roxbury. The others. They say they never see you.’ ‘Yeah, well. I pretty much keep myself to myself.’ ‘I see. Well, maybe we shall see each other there, Levi,’ said Choo, and his smile grew wider, ‘down in the hood.’  the anatomy lesson  Katherine (Katie) Armstrong is sixteen.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  self-control, I told her. She said she was trying to be more sensitive to my needs. When she would once have given me advice or commented on the state of the apartment, she now bit her tongue. She complained less. She also started giving me hugs and air kisses whenever she said good-bye. She did this by bending over me on the sofa. I imagine she got in the habit because of her bedbound mother. It made me feel like I was on my deathbed, too. In fact, I appreciated the affection. By Thanksgiving I’d been hibernating for almost six months. Nobody but Reva had touched me. • • • I DIDN’T TELL Dr. Tuttle about my blackouts. I was afraid she’d cut me off out of fear of potential lawsuits. So when I went to see her in December, I just complained that the insomnia had crept up with a vengeance. I lied that I could stay down for no more than a few hours at a time. Bouts of sweat and nausea made me dizzy and restless, I told her. Imaginary noises shook me awake so violently “I thought my building had been bombed or struck by lightning.” “You must have a callus on your cortex,” Dr. Tuttle said, clucking her tongue. “Not figuratively. Not literally, I mean. I’m saying, parenthetically,” she held up her hands and cupped them side by side to demonstrate the punctuation. “You’ve built up a tolerance, but it doesn’t mean the drugs are failing.” “You’re probably right,” I replied. “Not probably.” “Parenthetically speaking, I mean, I probably need something stronger.” “Aha.” “Pillwise, I mean.” “You’re not being sarcastic, I hope,” Dr. Tuttle said. “Of course not. I take my health completely seriously.” “Well, in that case.” “I’ve heard of an anesthetic they give to people for endoscopies. Something that keeps you awake during the procedure, but you can’t remember anything afterward. Something like that would be good. I have a lot of anxiety. And I have an important business meeting coming up later this month.” Really, I just wanted something especially powerful to blindfold me through the holidays. “Give these a try,” Dr. Tuttle said, sliding a sample bottle of pills across her desk. “Infermiterol. If those don’t put you down for the count, I’ll complain directly to the manufacturer in Germany. Take one and let me know how it goes.” “Thank you, doctor.” “Any plans for Christmas?” she asked, scribbling my refills. “Seeing the folks? Where are you from again? Albuquerque?” “My parents are dead.” “I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m not surprised,” Dr. Tuttle said, writing in her file. “Orphans usually suffer from low immunity, psychiatrically speaking. You may consider getting a pet to build up your relational skills. Parrots, I hear, are nonjudgmental.” “I’ll think about that,” I said, taking the sheaf of prescriptions she’d written, and the Infermiterol sample.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  A patina of frost had collected on top of the puddles here in the potholes and natural gulleys created by uneven asphalt. Some puddles had already resolved themselves into slush, but others maintained their pristine, wafer-thin ice rinks. Zora threw her cigarette on to one of these and at once lit another. She found it difficult, this thing of being alone, awaiting the arrival of a group. She prepared a face – as her favourite poet had it – to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact, when she was not in company it didn’t seem to her that she had a face at all . . . And yet in college, she knew was famed for being opinionated, a ‘personality’ – the truth was she didn’t take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn’t feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescued Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. It was either only Zora who experienced this odd impersonality or it was everybody, and they were  On Beauty all play-acting, as she was. She presumed that this was the revelation college would bring her, at some point. In the meantime, waiting like this, waiting to be come upon by real people, she felt herself to be light, existentially light, and nervously rumbled through possible topics of conversation, a ragbag of weighty ideas she carried around in her brain to lend herself the appearance of substance. Even on this short trip to the bohemian end of Wellington – a journey that, having been traversed by car, offered no opportunity whatsoever for reading – she had brought along, in her knapsack, three novels and a short tract by De Beauvoir on ambiguity – so much ballast to stop her floating away, up and over the flood, into the night sky. ‘The Zor meister – rocking with the salt of the earth .’ At her right were her friends, greeting her; at her left, the homeless guy, just at her shoulder, from whom she now moved away, laughing stupidly at the idea of any connection between them. She was hugged and shaken. Here were people, friends. A boy called Ron, of delicate build whose movements were tidy and ironic, who liked to be clean, who liked things Japanese. A girl called Daisy, tall and solid like a swimmer, with an all-American ingeńue face, sandy hair and more of a salty manner than she required, given her looks.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Happe in which we had spoken of my night terrors. I remembered my adolescent fantasy of being stabbed or shot by a strange man. I would be sitting at my desk writing and the man would always attack from behind. Who was he? Why was my life populated by phantom men? “Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath asked in one of her desperate last poems. If I was trapped, I was trapped by my own fears. Motivating everything was the terror of being alone. It sometimes seemed I would make any compromise, endure any ignominy, stay with any man just so as not to face being alone. But why? What was so terrible about being alone? Try to think of the reasons, I told myself. Try. ME: Why is being alone so terrible? ME: Because if no man loves me I have no identity. ME: But obviously that isn’t true. You write, people read your work and it matters to them. You teach and your students need you and care about you. You have friends who love you. Even your parents and sisters love you—in their own peculiar way. ME: None of that makes a dent in my loneliness. I have no man. I have no child. ME: But you know that children are no antidote to loneliness. ME: I know. ME: And you know that children only belong to their parents temporarily. ME: I know. ME: And you know that men and women can never wholly possess each other. ME: I know. ME: And you know that you’d hate to have a man who possessed you totally and used up your breathing space.... ME: I know—but I yearn for it desperately. ME: But if you had it, you’d feel trapped. ME: I know. ME: You want contradictory things. ME: I know. ME: YOU want freedom and you also want closeness. ME: I know. ME: Very few people ever find that. ME: I know. ME: Why do you expect to be happy when most people aren’t? ME: I don’t know. I only know that if I stop hoping for love, stop expecting it, stop searching for it, my life will go as flat as a cancerous breast after radical surgery. I feed on this expectation. I nurse it. It keeps me alive. ME: But what about liberation? ME: What about it? ME: You believe in independence? ME: I do. ME: Well then? ME: I suspect I’d give it all up, sell my soul, my principles, my beliefs, just for a man who’d really love me.... ME: Hypocrite! ME: You’re right. ME: You’re no better than Adrian! ME: You’re right. ME: Doesn’t it bother you to find such hypocrisy in yourself? ME: It does. ME: Then why don’t you fight it? ME: I do. I’m fighting it now.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  My parents only stuck around for a week or so and then they were off to Italy to check up on an ice-bucket factory. Fortunately, they have an import-export business which permits them to pick up and fly away whenever the internecine family warfare escalates to the bombing level. They fly in full of gifts and good feelings and fly out when the shit hits the fan. The whole process takes about a week. The rest of the year they pine for their far-flung children and wonder why most of them live so far from home. During the years I was in Germany and Randy was in Beirut, my mother wondered wistfully why two of her brood had chosen to live (as she put it) “in enemy territory.” “Because it seemed more hospitable than home,” I said, winning her everlasting enmity. It was a bitchy remark—I’ll grant that—but what have I ever had to protect me against my mother except words? It was still pretty crowded after my parents left: four sisters, Pierre, six kids (there were only six in 1965), a nursemaid, and a cleaning lady. It was so hot that we scarcely left the air-conditioned apartment. I kept wanting to go sightseeing, but the family lethargy was contagious. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll leave for Cairo, but I was really scared to go to Cairo alone and neither Lalah nor Chloe would go with me. Things went on in this depressing vein for another week. On one occasion, we all went to a cabana club where the beach was rocky and Pierre poeticized about the blue Mediterranean until you felt like puking. (He was always lecturing us about the good life in Beirut and how he had come to get away from “the commercialism of America.”) At the club he introduced us to one of his friends as his “four wives,” and I had such a creepy feeling that I wanted to go home then and there. But where was home? With my family? With Pia? With Charlie? With Brian? Alone?