Loneliness

Passages

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

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Look, I’ll be in town all next week—will you take me out to lunch?’ ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t rather take me out?’ ‘I always take you out. I thought we could change it round for once. Of course, I’d suggest coming over to Holland Park, but you can’t cook, can you?’ ‘Not at all, no.’ It was our customary bluff, shy patter. ‘You’d regret it deeply. I’ll take you somewhere very expensive.’ And besides, I felt the demands of an ever-intensifying privacy. Very few people came to the flat; I had whittled my social life down almost to nothing. Since my grandfather had more or less bought the flat for me, I churlishly resented any interest in it on his part; he had not been to it since its previous owner had left. Beneath our joky talk lay the awareness, which neither of us would ever have mentioned, that he had given his money to me already. ‘It’s so nice to be paid for!’ he expanded. Going back to the journals later on I found that they had changed; some of them had noticeably long entries in them, but not, in the two or three I studied, to tell the story of a very complex incident, or gather up several days’ entries. The entries were anyway irregular, and periods of more than a week sometimes elapsed between them. The longer passages, which might start with a routine description, gave way after a paragraph to an earlier period recalled in detail, like a story. One of these, I noticed from the names, was about Winchester, though it had been written up in the course of a visit to the Nuba Hills. I saw Charles retiring from the company of his boorish companions to sit at a little camp table in his tent and reconstruct, amid the boulders and thorn-bushes of Africa, an episode of his English life. At the time Winchester itself had been recorded in the five-year diary. It was written in a studied, microscopic hand, with tangling ascenders and capital letters which emerged from snakelike scrolls. On the bordered title-page the printer’s lettering (again, that effortful Gothic) announcing ‘This diary belongs to: _____’ was outdone by the looping tendrils with which ‘The Hon. Charles Nantwich’ was laboriously rendered in the manner of the signature of Elizabeth I. At a cursory look this diary was unreadable in more senses than one. With a schoolboy’s typical mixture of secrecy and conventionality the entries (which could only cover three lines per day) were written almost entirely in abbreviations.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I wondered what had happened at the man's house in the country. Perhaps he ran a moral self-help centre. I heard Cherif give his mocking hoot at Ty as they passed behind me. "Baby, why do you call Ty Mouchoir?" I asked him, when he'd settled and fussed over me enough. He grinned and pointed between his legs. "Because it is not real. Just a rolled-up hanky." "Don't be ridiculous." He shook his head with a little moue of incontrovertibility. "I know," he said, clearly not wanting to offend me with the details of proof. Actually, I thought the story might help to pass the coming hours. I longed for Edie and wished she would come back again, with her gift for sharing and judging my feelings at the same time. She didn't know how many imagined dialogues she took part in, how often her friend addressed his silent pleas and exclamations to her. Still, soon I would be beyond caring, the wave of drink would rise and after a pretence of doggy-paddle I would embrace Cherif and go under. We sat in silence for a while in one of the side bays, like a couple of forgetful old drunks in the Golden Calf, who had known each other all their lives. When I looked up and across I saw the darker far reaches of the bar, towards the lavs. There was a group of men there who only appeared on Sunday nights, heavily leathered, cropped, studded and tattooed, quiet amongst themselves, like steady-nerved conspirators, holding each other's eyes as they contemplated whatever it was they were about to do. I suspected it would be something demanding and uncomfortable but I envied them—they gave off, in their sexed and sombre way, the certainty that it was what they wanted. Then I heard Luc saying, in his Ealing FUms toff accent, "Well, what's it to be?" For a second I thought the question was addressed to me. I started and then sat very still. A girl's voice replied, "How frightfully kind!" and a rowdy young man said, "Simply splendid!" I reddened at this English mockery, turned, mad and frowning, to face it, but in fact the high varnished back of the stall cut them off from view: they couldn't have known I was there. My heart was pounding with danger and opportunity—the Three right here in the Cassette, joking in spiffing English that no one younger than Perry Dawilsh used, though they still clearly thought it was spot-on. I felt crowded and troubled. Why were they here? They were the world beyond, the bar was where you came for refuge and solace from them.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I couldn’t breathe. They just waved and kept on running. Finally I waited in the car for an hour. Then Dad dropped me off at home.” Billy was also having a great deal of trouble with his mother’s remarriage. “It was bad timing for Billy,” his mother said, shaking her head. “He adored his fifth-grade teacher but she left unexpectedly in the middle of the school year for emergency surgery. So he had to change teachers. This was a week before our wedding. Her leaving really hit him hard and he was very quiet and withdrawn at the wedding. Everyone else had a great time. We were all kind of annoyed at Billy. He was a real party pooper.” Billy’s version of the wedding was slightly different. “The wedding was boring. There were all these people I hardly knew drinking too much and acting stupid. They wanted me to make a speech like Dave did.” (Dave was Tom’s fifteen-year-old son from his previous marriage.) “But I was too tired. I was sick the night before and couldn’t sleep. But my mom was too busy partying with Tom to check in with me like she usually does.” In a mixture of concern laced with irritation, Billy’s mother told me about her son’s increasing sullenness and withdrawals. “Billy is ten going on eleven. He’s too old to play the kinds of games we used to play. Anyway, I don’t have the time for that anymore. Tom and I agree that Billy needs to be more independent.” That Billy didn’t agree with this assessment of the state of things was all too clear. “She changed since he came,” he said sadly, referring to his mother and Tom. “She acts silly and laughs a lot and she even sits on his lap,” he said in disgust. “When I talk to her she’s always saying ‘Wait just a sec, hon’”—this said in a syrupy sweet falsetto voice—“and she’s on the phone with him again. He calls from work more than anyone I know. My dad never called from work. He does his work, not play kissy face over the phone!” Billy’s story shows us another way in which changed parent and child relationships can shape a child’s personality through the postdivorce years. Like Paula, Billy lost his mother’s devoted attention immediately after the divorce. But Paula’s mother disappeared because she had to go to work to support the family. Billy’s mother did not go back to work. Her devotion to her child in part reflected her dissatisfaction with her marriage. As she moved into a happier marriage, she expected her son to change with her—invoking the trickle- down theory of happiness that so many people believe in and which I questioned earlier. But Billy did not have the capacity to change.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  These new centers could establish special playgroups for young children providing an oasis of pleasant contact with peers to help offset their sense of isolation. In my experience, it’s not necessarily helpful to tell a child that she needs to “express her feelings” or that she’s not the cause of her parents’ divorce. But it does reduce a child’s anxiety to understand the changes happening in her life and to help her think of ways to actively deal with those changes. In these circumstances, a playgroup leader can be especially helpful in imparting information calmly and slowly. An intervention like this lasting several weeks will not prevent children from running into difficulties in the postdivorce family (and it will certainly not affect their anxieties when they reach adulthood), but it can give them a larger framework for understanding their situation—and it could go far in lessening their loneliness and suffering. Moreover, teachers working with children at this time can be trained to spot problems such as uncontrolled aggression, speech disturbances, or depression and to refer the family for expert help before the problems become chronic. Groups for adolescents are not easy to set up at the time of the breakup despite the fact that they would be very useful. It takes considerable skill to get teenagers into group settings at the time of the breakup. Once they get going, however, groups can provide an excellent vehicle for clarifying divorce, ventilating anger at parents, dealing with issues of morality, and discussing the adolescents’ fears that their own future relationships might fail. Groups are also a good way to diminish or even abort the early acting out and sexual behavior that is rampant in this age group. Group leaders who gain the respect and empathy of young people have an opportunity to help them understand the impact of seeing parents with new lovers or their anxiety at becoming the too close confidant of one parent—and how to deal with these issues. For the CourtsTHE COURTS, BY virtue of their centrality to the divorce process, have been leaders in setting our national policies and priorities. Many judges are sensitive people who have great compassion and sympathy for children. But with all due respect, our rigid court structure may be the wrong forum for making decisions about parents and children at the time of divorce. Judges have no special training to help them deal with families in crisis. They are charged with safeguarding the best interests of children without knowledge about the needs of children at different developmental stages. Few have been exposed to studies on the impacts of divorce on children and what helps or hinders their adjustment. Moreover, the courts are hard pressed for time and staff. This frustration with our current system is widely shared among judges.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  1 These numbers are terrifying. But like all massive social change, what’s happening is affecting us in ways that we have yet to understand. For people like me who work with divorcing families all the time, these abstract numbers have real faces. When I think about people I know so well, including the “children” you’ve met in this book, I can relate to the millions of children and adults who suffer with loneliness and to all the teenagers who say, “I don’t want a life like either of my parents.” I can empathize with the countless young men and women who despair of ever finding a lasting relationship and who, with a brave toss of the head, say, “Hey, if you don’t get married then you can’t get divorced.” It’s only later, or sometimes when they think I’m not listening, that they add softly, “but I don’t want to grow old alone.” I am especially worried about how our divorce culture has changed childhood itself. A million new children a year are added to our march of marital failure. As they explain so eloquently, they lose the carefree play of childhood as well as the comforting arms and lap of a loving parent who is always rushing off because life in the postdivorce family is so incredibly difficult to manage. We must take very seriously the complaint of children like Karen who declare, “The day my parents divorced is the day my childhood ended.” Many years ago the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson taught us that childhood and society are vitally connected. But we have not yet come to terms with the changes ushered in by our divorce culture. Childhood is different, adolescence is different, and adulthood is different. Without our noticing, we have created a new class of young children who take care of themselves, along with a whole generation of overburdened parents who have no time to enjoy the pleasures of parenting. So much has happened so fast, we cannot hold it all in our minds. It’s simply overwhelming. But we must not forget a very important other side to all these changes. Because of our divorce culture, adults today have a greater sense of freedom. The importance of sex and play in adult life is widely accepted. We are not locked into our early mistakes and forced to stay in wretched, lifelong relationships. The change in women—their very identity and freer role in society—is part of our divorce culture. Indeed, two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women despite the high price they pay in economic and parenting burdens afterward. People want and expect a lot more out of marriage than did earlier generations. Although the divorce rate in second and third marriages is sky-high, many second marriages are much happier than the ones left behind.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Brenda’s story is an example of how divorce does not rescue children from chaotic families when the adults are unable or unwilling to change their lifestyles. I first met Brenda when she was ten years old and had written a satirical story about her parents’ divorce for the school newspaper. After the breakup, she was entirely unparented. Sometimes she went to school, but if she felt like it, she stayed home. Her mother and father drank as much as before and each had a series of lovers. Brenda never knew where she’d sleep at night because she wasn’t sure which house would have more strangers in it. Both of Brenda’s parents had multiple sexual relationships that they did not hide from the child. Brenda’s father was a famous television executive who married five times and hit each of his wives. Brenda’s mother owned a travel agency so she could take off on trips whenever she liked. Money was not a concern in this family, but no household help was arranged to provide for the little girl’s care when her parents were otherwise occupied. After the divorce Brenda saw her mother maybe twice a week. Her father came to visit her sporadically, depending on who he was with at the time. Money for food was left on the kitchen table at both houses so Brenda could buy her own food and clothes and other things she wanted. She was never hit. She was ignored. It was as if she had disappeared along with the terminated marriage. Because neither parent took responsibility for the child after the breakup, divorce put Brenda at more risk. Living in a highly charged sexual environment with no help in growing up, she became a call girl at an early age and commanded several hundred dollars a night. She snorted cocaine. When I saw her at age thirty-one, she had just moved into a small apartment in Oakland, by herself. For our visit, we both sat on boxes. And then I noticed that she had unpacked only one item—a framed photograph of herself as a little girl, standing with her mother and father, all smiling and happy. This is all that remained of the intact family, with Brenda struggling in her mind to hold on to some unity, some sense of affection, some hope. Even though her parents had in effect abandoned her, she, like Carol, talked about them with a longing that was utterly heartbreaking.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The Loneliness of the Youngest Children of DivorceWHEN I ASKED Paula-the-Adult to tell me the memories of Paula-the-Child, she said, “I remember that I was in trouble and I remember anger. I was always angry with somebody. I don’t think the divorce itself really affected me. What affected me was that my mom wasn’t around. I missed that we were not a regular family. I had nobody to talk to. I didn’t have any guidance. I know that Mom turned herself inside out to support us and I’ll always be grateful to her, but I remember her as absent. There were times when Mom would come home late from work and I’d need help with something for school. She’d get really uptight because she’d have an exam the next day and she needed to study. She’d tell me I’d have to do the best I could on my own for my school project because she needed to study. Then she’d lock herself in the bathroom. I remember sitting on the floor outside the bathroom door, listening to her turn the pages in her textbook.” Although Paula’s material needs for food and shelter were taken care of, she felt abandoned. Years later, Paula and other children who are very young when their parents divorce remember one thing most: a vast, unsoothable sense of loneliness. They’re angry about being left so much to themselves. They know that their parents were overwhelmed by their own changed circumstances, but that’s not grounds for forgiveness. Those who shuttled back and forth between two homes complain of going from mommy’s sitter to daddy’s sitter without spending enough time with either parent. Little children who cannot comprehend their parents’ dilemmas conclude that they’re left alone because they aren’t important, particularly valued, or interesting to any adult. They blame themselves for being naughty to explain why their mothers go away. They blame their mothers for being faithless. When they’re older, they tend to linger at their playmates’ homes, hoping that they’ll be invited to stay for supper or maybe for the evening. Some have the very secret fantasy that they’ll be invited to join the other child’s family. Children at very young ages learn to be sensitive to their parents’ moods. In some of our heartbreaking videos of families going through a divorce, a toddler can be seen climbing onto her mother’s lap and stroking her cheek to comfort her. While grateful for attention, children learn not to expect or demand it. Some resourceful children learn to entertain themselves by watching many hours of television, but others are too little or too sad and sit listlessly, waiting for the parent to return or to get her attention. Others turn to animals for companionship and reciprocity of unconditional love.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  was talking to another juror, so I didn’t see you, but I heard you ask if this was grand jury room number two. Your voice made me turn around. I was so pleased when you took the empty seat beside me. You’ve never been on a grand jury be fore, have you?” “No.” From what I’d learned in training, he was leading me into a fantasy he’d already begun. All I had to do was pay at tention and pick up his clues. “So you didn’t know that once you sat down, that would be your seat for the whole month?” “No. But.. . when I saw you next to me, I was glad.” “Why is that?” Bill asked. “Because ... because of how wonderful you smelled. I kept breathing it in, hoping you wouldn’t notice.” “I wish you’d told me. Is that why you stayed and talked to me during the break?” he asked. “Yes. I wanted to get closer to that smell.” “I hope I’m not disturbing you, at home like this. I mean, it was kind of sneaky how I got your number—telling you each jury member should have another member’s number in case you couldn’t get through to the bailiff.” “Isn’t that why you’re calling? To tell me we don’t have to show up for jury duty tomorrow or something?” I asked. “No. Is it all right I called?” he asked. “Yes.” “Your boyfriend isn’t there, is he?” “No, he’s away.” “He travels often, doesn’t he?” I hesitated. “Yes.” The introduction of a boyfriend con fused me. “And leaves you lonely?” “Yes, he leaves me lonely,” I answered.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  531 Unlike the heroically self-con fi dent Romantic self, the Modernist self is helpless and vulnerable—like the title fi gure in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Exemplifying the Modernist self, Josef K feels radical subjectivity in a dreamlike world and a wrenching sense of dislocation. As shown by the novels of Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the Modernist self can be lonely, suicidal, or both. The outbreak of World War I accentuated Kafka’s personal sense of isolation. Politically, Jewish Czechs had no place to go. Kafka couldn’t qualify for the army and could scarcely have found his identity by fi ghting for Austria and Germany against Russia and the Serbs. When the Czechs formed their fi rst republic in 1918, they were virulently anti-Semitic. Though he never went to war, Kafka resembles, in some ways, Septimus Smith, the suicidal war veteran in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Though highly regarded by the company that hired him, Septimus feels suicidally traumatized by the war. Like Septimus, Kafka was highly regarded by his company but unable to take any solace in marriage and so alienated from bourgeois respectability that he felt drawn to suicide. As an isolated character, Josef shows no real interest in women, but at times an aggressive lust breaks through his respectability. He shows no interest in or concern for his mother or his girlfriend, Elsa. But some of his encounters with women are clearly erotic. The sexual passages in this novel underscore its Freudian theme—exploration of the unconscious. Though Josef is outwardly very proper, he pesters a woman who lives next door to him. Ostensibly to apologize for the disturbance made in her room by the men who came to arrest him, he gets himself invited into her room late at night. Though she says she’s sure he hasn’t committed any “serious” crime, his treatment of her is hardly proper. As he fi nally leaves the room, he seizes and kisses her like a thirsty animal—or a vampire. Kafka wrote the novel to liberate his own psyche—to portray his dreamlike inner life. The story of Josef resembles a nightmare from which one cannot awake.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  510 Lecture 74: Joseph Conrad Great Expectations, Marlow tells his story to listeners that he can see and hear. In his report on savage customs, Kurtz writes at length about what should be done for the African natives but undercuts his own grandiloquence at the end with the blunt exclamation: “Exterminate all the brutes!” When he at last reaches Kurtz, Marlow fi nds that he has become insatiably hungry for ivory and power, that he has “taken a high seat among the devils of the land.” In lying to Kurtz’s intended about his last words, Marlow implicitly confi rms that no one else can know “your own reality.” Kurtz’s fi nal words—“The horror! The horror!”—may be read as his own commentary on man’s capacity to delude himself, to sabotage his own noblest ideals, and to undo the work of civilization even as he claims to be spreading it. But Marlow considers the task of telling the whole truth about Kurtz to be virtually impossible. He tells Kurtz’s intended that his fi nal words were her name. In the middle of telling the story, he says, “we live, as we dream, alone.” Marlow’s words on the isolation of the self might be taken as the creed of Modernism. Modernism challenges the authority of all assumptions and conventions that traditionally regulate our lives and bind us together. It treats the individual as a creature of radical subjectivity caught up in a sense of unreality or absurdity. We’ll see more of this condition in the works of Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. By telling a story about a “civilized” man who discovers his own barbarity while cut off from the support systems of his culture, Conrad initiates us into the world of Modernism. ■ Conrad, Collected Letters , edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. ———, Heart of Darkness, 3 rd ed., edited by Robert Kimbrough. Essential Reading 511 Najder, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity. ———, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. 1. In one of the essays included in Robert Kimbrough’s edition of the Heart of Darkness, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe argues that Conrad’s novel proves him “a thoroughgoing racist.” Given the passages that Achebe quotes to support his point, do you agree with him? 2. How does Conrad treat women in this story? Questions to Consider Supplementary Reading

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  I re-enter like a bat into hell. There’s a sensation down there of making it through the Sacred Gates of Labia. There’s a Brazilian chick on page sixty-four with a deep, golden tan. She’s so plump. So nice and plump. Like rotisserie chicken. She looks like what the Fleshlight feels like. Oh, yeah: Looks like what the Fleshlight feels like. She’s squeezing her nipples in her fingers. The heels of her palms are plunging into her tit flesh. Wow! I’m getting it. It’s gliding smoothly over my shaft while the Brazilian is graciously opening her pussy with her fastidiously manicured fingers in the next frame down. I plunge the thing over my dick to the hilt. Oh, yeah! Let the games begin! Pfft. Pfft. Pfft. Hey, it . . . the thing is hissing. I loosen the rear cap and plunge again. PFFT! PFFT! PFFT! It’s hissing even louder. I take off the end completely, whether or not the fake pussy juice drips on my pants that are now bunched around the heels of my boots. The rotisserie Brazil ian is so soft and plump, it’s gonna be an easy ride home from here. I’m admiring her lovely full lips when it occurs to me that this thing feels like getting a blow job—only no teeth. But sexy as the Brazilian is, I need Virgin Cutie from page nine to finish. I’m flipping back to her spread, pumping like a deranged plumber. There she is: holding her breasts up to her mouth, licking her nubile nipple. I’m pounding the squish out of the thing till it’s bouncing off my nuts. Virgin Cutie is smil ing, showing off the underside of her tongue while she licks her upper lip, showing off her labia, sphincter, and juggs. I get it! Finally, after years of writing this stuff, I get the whole pornography thing. See, anyone can do this. You don’t gotta be a stud, you don’t gotta be rich. You can be any fuck-up in the goddamn universe, alone in your room and horny, pounding the bejeezus away at something that won’t scold you for leav ing the toilet seat up. For just a moment, I’m lost in a sensation of bouncy, wet, somewhat virgin flesh, and boom! As Woody Allen would say, there’s no such thing as the wrong kind of or gasm. Even the worst ones are right on the money. Then it’s over. I’m cold. The thing is dripping everywhere ... and I have the urge to cuddle. The thing is quite unappeal ing right about now. I think about my sweetheart with her mid-January nasal drip, blowing her nose, but warm and hug gable under a half dozen duvets. Virgin Cutie is still smiling the exact same smile from her frozen home on page nine. “Hey, Joe!” Stephanie yells from outside my door. “Want anything from the fucking store?” “Nah,” I wheeze absentmindedly. “Just a hot shower.” WENDY BECKER Backstage Boys

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Together, Doug and I explore the anatomy of his passion, and I come to understand what needs are met in his tumultuous relationship with Naomi. For him, sex is a place of emotional nourishment and a sanctuary. It is love incarnate. Through sex he reaches an egoless oblivion that makes him feel at one with the world. Passion grants Doug ultimate relief from the unbearable aloneness of being. “It’s like I’m gone; it washes everything out. That kind of absolute focus, total attention, somehow releases me from myself. I stop thinking, the sensation washes up my spine, through my brain, and out. But there’s no observing of what’s going on.” Lovemaking is all-encompassing. With Naomi, Doug is able to maintain this high-octane, transcendent sex. In part, this is because erotically they are made of the same cloth. But, more important, the very structure of their affair, and of all affairs, lends itself to passion. Affairs are risky, dangerous, and labile, all elements that fuel excitement. In the self-contained universe of adulterous love you are secluded from the rest of the world, and your bond is strengthened by the secrecy that surrounds it. Never exposed to broad daylight, the spell of the other is preserved. There’s no need to worry that your friends won’t like him, since nobody knows about him. Affairs unfold in the margins of our lives, and are luxuriously free of the dental appointments, taxes, and bills. Then there are barriers to overcome. To see each other, you have to make an effort, sometimes a huge one. There are hoops to jump through, schedules to juggle, locations to secure, excuses to invent. And all that unflagging zeal repeatedly affirms the lovers’ importance to each other. Seen in this light, Doug’s transgression was an attempt to recapture what he once had with his wife and could not live without: a sense of importance, a relief from loneliness, and a feeling of robustness. You Can Go Home Again By the time the affair ends, Doug’s marriage is down to the bare bones. Doug and Zoë are cordial, respectful, even occasionally affectionate, but emotionally they have flatlined. They have grown accustomed to vagueness regarding his repeated absences. His overtures are few and far between, and he is distracted. He is afraid of unintentionally disclosing something with a slip of the tongue; his secrecy is taking up more and more acreage in their marriage, leaving him with few subjects he can freely discuss with Zoë: the kids, the president, and the weather.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He said, "Yeah", in an ambiguous murmur; and after a moment mentioned some business things he hoped I'd look after for him. He fiddled in his breast pocket for a fat roll of notes and tossed it into my lap. I didn't like to count them while I was with him, but I felt a surge of undeserved good luck, whatever was involved. I'd been ignoring the money problem, burning up my good but sparse teaching-fees in drink and wasting my small reserves on romantic unnecessaries like my lobelia shirt—I had sort of decided that after the weekend I would make a decision to decide what to do. Then it turned out we weren't even to spend tonight together; and as he was leaving the next morning I was unexpectedly bereft. I wandered back to my room feeling wild and lonely. An envelope with beautiful, imaginative writing on had been slipped under my door, and lay on the threadbare rug. I tidied away an ashtray, a crusted coffee-mug, a bottle of milk precipitated into caramel grounds beneath faintly blue water—all out of respect to my letter and the capricious hint it gave of a finer life I could be living. I had no real idea who had sent it; I hoped it might be an invitation—someone's offer to look after me for an hour or two. But hardly anyone knew where I lived. I was dying to see Cherif again, but doubted if his writing, which I had never seen, could possibly be so rococo. Marcel's, I knew, was loopy and backward-leaning. And then my first idea came back, against my better judgement: that it was from Luc. Something he was too scared to say to me face to face—a kind of Valentine in a fancy script, or its opposite, the astounding note that said everything must end. It was from Paul Echevin, and I adjusted after a moment to the pleasure of that. Did I want to earn a bit of money by helping him out at the Museum? Sometimes it would be Helene's job of reading a novel in the hall and occasionally selling a ticket or a postcard; mainly it would be paperwork, checking references, proof-reading the English text of the Orst catalogue that he really must get finished before the coming summer, that was so many years overdue.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Only by sight," he said, "from school. I think he is a very kind young man and not a happy one. Sibylle . . . " I waited. "Sibylle is a friend of his. I don't really know him." He gathered up his notebook, in which he was yet to write a word, and clutched together the coloured pens. His mother came in. He rose and after a few exchanges did his duty of showing me to the door, but as if it were something he hoped he wouldn't always have to do. Chapter 5 I had arrived without knowing how on the street where the Orst Museum was, and sat down, suddenly exhausted, on a bench opposite. The quiet out here was subtly different from the quiet of the middle of town, the little brick squares where for a full quarter of an hour no car would pass and nothing alter beyond the pulling-to of a shutter, or a dog trotting along with an intermittent sense of purpose. Here the stillness was as deep, the grand brick houses equally steeped in silence and discretion, their windows silver-black above the stumpy limes. But you felt a freshness, the nearness of a larger sky, to which the line of windmills at the street's end blindly opened their arms. I watched a couple of tourists arrive at the Museum and recognized their mood of achievement, of having come out quite far, almost into the country. In the Museum's dark, polish-scented hall I paid my admission fee, and bought a booklet, vainly feeling that the girl student at the desk should know that at other times I came here free, with the director, long after she had gone home. I laid a claim to it, somehow, because of the unexpected understanding I believed existed between Paul Echevin and me. It would have been pleasant if he had suddenly come down the stairs and spotted me; but I slightly dreaded it too, in case the greeting was cool and the girl student more in his confidence than I was. She sat behind the modest display of postcards with the defiant air of an intelligent person wasting time for a good cause. What hours, weeks, of nothing must happen in this hall, as the autumn came on. As I turned away she picked up a fat paperback and continued to read.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I saw five rooms in all, but chose without hesitation. The others were such vessels of loneliness, or else too pinned and stifled with rules and considerations for someone who had finally left home. I had a horror of lying there, forbidden to smoke, listening to the cistern filling overhead. It was usually a housewife, garrulous and noncommittal, who would let me in and take me up, observing resentfully as I felt the bed or opened the hanging cupboard. In two of the houses other pallid lodgers were caught on their way between bedroom and lavatory and given a warning. I hardly saw Cherif as a welcome regular in such a place, or the romance of my new life unfurling under such surveillance. The room I chose was so hidden away that it gave me the sensation of having entered, with dreamlike suddenness, into the secret inner life of the city. On the street it was a doctor's establishment, a bare white house with a brass plate polished almost flat. At the side a gated passage led through into a shallow courtyard: the doctor's residence backed on to a far older range of buildings—rough pink brick, steep roofs with the high-up doors and hoists of warehouse attics. Like a tiny Cambridge college, it had two stairways, one at either end, leading up to disused workshops, storerooms, and, on the second floor, two sets of rooms that were let. One had just been taken by some Spanish girls; the other, which was cheap but primitive, was mine; the old doctor (who still saw a few patients in his retirement) told me in French how pleased he was to have an Englishman there. All down one side of the room ran unusually deep cupboards, each with an enamel number, and a door that shut with a boom. I could only occupy them all by putting underpants in one, shoes in two, jerseys in number three; when number four was opened my leather jacket was revealed like a historic vestment in a cathedral treasury, flanked by the monstrances of my special bottles and jars. Each shelf had been neatly lined with old newspaper, held in place by drawing-pins; I turned my head sideways to scan the time-silvered sports news and antique auto-tests. The facing wall was a wooden partition, rough with nail-holes and nail-heads hammered in, that made me wonder what had been stored here, what work had been done here, and when it had come to an end. It seemed an encouraging setting for my own projects, the bits of writing I was going to take up again. Behind the partition was the sleeping area, choked by a high iron bedstead in which three people could have slept abreast. Outside, at the head of the stairs, was a little washroom, with a sink and a fragment of mirror, and a rudimentary shower that dripped and left a rusty stain.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But one of the gang saw me and, without missing a beat or saying a word to his fr iends, called my name and came down the steps, throwing one arm around me and asking where I'd been. He had let me know, some time before, that he wanted me to take him home-but I was surprised that he could be so open before his friends, who for their part seemed to find nothing astonishing in this encounter and disappeared, probably in search of other faggots. The boys who are left of that time and place are all my age or older. But many of them are dead, and I remember how some of them died-some in the streets, some in the Army, some on the needle, some in jail. Many years later, we man aged, without ever becoming friends-it was too late for that-to be friendly with one another. One of these men and I had a very brief, intense affair shortly before he died. He was on drugs and knew that he could not live long. "What a waste," he said, and he was right. One of them said, "My God, Jimmy, you were moving so fast in those years, you never stopped to talk to me." FREAKS AND AMERICAN IDEAL OF MANHOOD 82 3 I said, "That's right, baby; I didn't stop because I didn't want you to think that I was trying to seduce you." "Man," he said, indescribably, "why didn't you?" But the queer-not yet gay-world was an even more in timidating area of this hall of mirrors. I knew that I was in the hall and present at this company-but the mirrors threw back only brief and distorted fr agments of myself. In the first place, as I have said, there were very few black people in the Village in those years, and of that handful, I was decidedly the most improbable. Perhaps, as they say in the theater, I was a hard type to cast; yet I was eager, vulnerable, and lonely. I was terribly shy, but boys are shy. I am saying that I don't think I felt absolutely, irredeemably grotesque nothing that a friendly wave of the wand couldn't alter-but I was miserable. I moved through that world very quickly; I have described it as "my season in hell," for I was never able to make my peace with it. It wasn't only that I didn't wish to seem or sound like a woman, for it was this detail that most harshly first struck my eye and ear. I am sure that I was afraid that I already seemed and sounded too much like a woman.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Her folks divorced when she was eight and she had a pretty miserable childhood, lots of moving around, money worries, and a hard time making friends because of all the moves. She was a lonely kid just like me. We agreed that it was the unhappiest time of our lives. We both understood how to put on a cheery face for the world and feel different inside. So we decided it was better to be together and that we would be less lonely.” “Were you pretty optimistic at that time?” He looked forlorn. “I don’t know whether I ever loved her or whether she loved me. How in hell would anyone love me anyway? What did I know about finding a wife? I thought at the time that it probably wouldn’t last.” “Why did you think that it wouldn’t last?” “Because nothing in my life lasts,” he said grimly. Then he broke into a grin. “You haven’t noticed this little black cloud that follows me around?” He waved his arm at an imaginary cloud over his head. “It’s like the weather. If things look fair, just wait a minute. That’s how I live.” “What were you looking for in a wife?” Billy looked startled. “Come again?” “I just wondered what kind of person you thought would make you happy.” “I never thought much about that. I figured I didn’t know any movie stars that week,” he chuckled, “but a nice decent woman who wouldn’t cheat and who could make a place look like a home would do fine.” When a Child of Divorce Marries Another Child of Divorce I’ VE TALKED ABOUT how children of divorce have trouble handling conflict in marriage. They are terrified of arguments that might start them down the same path as their parents. When a child of divorce marries another child of divorce, these problems and anxieties are doubled. 2 Children of divorce are often drawn to one another via their common histories. In high school and as young adults they are kindred souls who can share complaints about their past, specifics about custody or visiting arrangements, and how they put up with parents’ problems. During adolescence especially, they hang out in packs, providing each other with the support and comfort they don’t get at home. They take care of each other with money, sympathy, and a place to crash. I have seen several ersatz families, some in elegant neighborhoods, where the young people have left home or been ejected or the parent has walked away. As these children mature, they are drawn together by common worries about the future, concern for and resentment of parents, and their pervasive loneliness. They desperately need to tell their story, but agemates who have not lived through divorce are not all that sympathetic. So they look for and find someone who can listen and understand . It’s natural that Billy and Debbie would find each other. Unfortunately, their union was in peril from the start.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “And leaves you lonely?” “Yes, he leaves me lonely,” I answered. “What do you do to keep yourself busy when he’s away?” “Watch a lot of old movies.” I answered before realizing that was exactly what I was do ing now that Paul was traveling and working late so often. “Do you cry at the end?” he asked. “Always.” “If I was with you and you started to cry, I would brush away your tears with my lips,” he whispered into the phone. I was strangely moved by the image. “No one has ever done that before,” I said, again telling the truth. “Are there other things no one has ever done to you that you’d like me to do?” Bill was taking shape in my mind. Not as a face, but as sen sations, colors. He was dark blue velvet. Heavy cream. A large bird flying through a moonless sky. “Yes. Are there things no one has done to you?” I asked. “No, I want to know about you,” he answered quickly. I must have taken a wrong step. “What do you want that your boyfriend doesn’t give you?” He put the focus back on me. A moment passed. I couldn’t think of what to say. “Alice?” he prompted, and she responded for me. “He never makes love to me long enough,” I answered fi nally. “I will,” he said. “Where should I start?” If only he’d talk about his fantasy. This was so difficult for me to do. And then I realized this was his fantasy: to please a woman, to please me. After that, it was easier. “We’d both be completely dressed, sitting on my couch. There’d be just one light on. And you’d kiss me. Keep on kiss ing me—” “So that you could almost come from the kiss?” he asked. “Yes,” I whispered, surprised that nothing about this make- believe conversation was repulsive or frightening. I was in my head where I’d been so many times before, only now there was another voice in my fantasy. “Alice, have you ever come from a kiss?” “No.” “That’s what I’m going to do to you now. I’m going to make you come from kissing you. Would you like that?” Bill asked. “If you kiss me for that long, your lips will be sore.” “I don’t care. I want to rub my lips on yours. Wet and slip pery. And so, so soft. Can you feel it?” “Yes,” I said, and I could. “I’m unbuttoning your blouse and pushing it off your shoulders so I can kiss your breasts. So I can suck on your nip ples,” he said. “Your lips are like feathers on my skin. Bill, are you hard?” I’d been trained to ask this question often to gauge whether the call was working; if a man wasn’t hard after a few minutes, something was wrong. “I’m very hard,” he said, and I segued into the next stage of the conversation.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Nor, since this country is the issue of the entire globe and is also the most powerful nation currently to be found on it, arc we speaking only of this time and place. And it can be said that the mon umental struggles being waged in our time and not only in this place resemble, in awesome ways, the ancient struggle between those who insisted that the world was flat and those who apprehended that it was round. Of course, I cannot possibly imagine what it can be like to have both male and female sexual equipment. That's a load of family jewels to be hauling about, and it seems to me that it must make choice incessant or impossible-or, in terms un available to me , unnecessary. Yet, not to be fr ivolous concern ing what I know I cannot-or, more probably, dare n0t imagine, I hazard that the physically androgynous state must FREAKS AND AMERICAN IDEAL OF MANHOOD 8I 7 create an all-but-intolerable loneliness, since we all exist, after all, and crucially, in the eye of the beholder. We all react to and, to whatever extent, become what that eye sees. This judgment begins in the eyes of one's parents (the crucial, the definitive, the all-but-everlasting judgment), and so we move, in the vast and claustrophobic gallery of Others, on up or down the line, to the eye of one's enemy or one's friend or one's lover. It is virtually impossible to trust one's human value without the collaboration or corroboration of that eye-which is to say that no one can live without it. One can, of course, in struct that eye as to what to see, but this effort, which is nothing less than ruthless intimidation, is wounding and ex hausting: While it can keep humiliation at bay, it confirms the fact that humiliation is the central danger of one's life. And since one cannot risk love without risking humiliation, love becomes impossible. I hit the streets when I was about six or seven, like most black kids of my generation, running errands, doing odd jobs. This was in the black world-my turf-which means that I felt protected.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I often am very drunk," I admitted, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder and shaking him matily. I glanced aside to Edie, who was sculpting around herself for Alejo's benefit some imaginary bustier, and who topped it off with a sceptical coup d' il in my direction. "And to be absolutely honest, your sisters can make quite a lot of noise themselves." Oh, the ghastly give-and-take of life. One or two others were hovering, as if hopeful of an introduction to Agustin, whom Alejo had never before been able to persuade to come to this place: they were raising their eyebrows at him over Alejo's head while I clumsily tried to keep him with me. But I had had my turn. Alejo was kissing one of the newcomers and tugging his cousin away to meet him. After a blurred further hour of drinking and more than my ration of cigarettes, Edie and I found ourselves outside again with the two Spaniards. It was refreshingly cool, though they were wearing less and were less numbed by drink and paced about as we said goodbye. Alejo was going on to the Bar Biff with five or six others. He kissed Agustin with sensible fervour on both cheeks, which seemed to give his friends a licence to do the same; the boy stood there like a reluctant bride as his new acquaintance filed towards him. Then we three were alone—of course it was a night for him to be away from Alejo's. I was their escort . . . We rambled home under brilliant stars. I dimly recall one or two diversions to show them historic things, my voice echoing off the darkened houses, Agustin standing in a street-lamp's soft gleam, shivering and expressionless. Much later in my room, sitting with Agustin, Edie already in bed, flat out with drink and fatigue. The boy must think we're a couple, or he wouldn't have come up to see, and accepted a cup of whisky. My Uncle Wilfred's motto going through my mind: "You don't want girls around, spoiling everything"—not always true, that. Whole quarter-hours passing in two or three minutes. Agustin is worried about his cousin and the life he is leading—he doesn't disapprove, it's not like that, though if his aunt and uncle in Trujillo knew . . . I tell him it is all fine, I am talking up the overall excellence of Alejo's lifestyle and the things he likes to do, as if I had known the boy and taken an interest in his welfare for years: it seems to make me more trustworthy . . . Agustin is scared by stories he has heard—he speaks superstitiously of drugs, pornographic films, disappearances. Perhaps a friend of Alejo's has been kidnapped. For a while I concentrate on him so hard that I can't take in what he's saying.