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 Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  The man at Jones Library told me where to find the homestead, not much of a place, he said, and indeed I had passed it on the way into town without knowing it. I thought I would have felt it in my chest or sensed it to my right. I thought it would have been largely marked. I followed the man’s instructions and walked from the library down along the shops back toward Boston a mile. Her house is not very much like what you would think. Though it is big it is not grand, and there is a large tree in front that takes the view. A side door is greeted by concrete steps, the cheap sort, and the driveway has been paved. There is a historical marker, but it is small, and so the first thing a young man realizes when he visits the home of Emily Dickinson is that the world is, in fact, not as in love with her as he is. I wanted to gather the leaves, you know, clean up the place. And I was looking all about the house, before making my approach, when I saw this thing that was not her but only in my mind was her, swing open the side door and set a foot quickly on the step. She met my eyes and went white, whiter than she already was, anyway, and like a wind she fled back into the house. The door closed as if it were on a spring. For a second I could not move. I wrote in my journal that evening: “I saw Emily Dickinson step out of a screen door and look at me with dark eyes, those endless dark eyes like the mouth of a cave, like pitch night set so lovely twice beneath her furrowed brow, her pale white skin gathering at the red of her lips, her long thin neck coming perfectly from her white dress flowing so gently and clean around her waist, down around her knees then slipping a tickle across her ankles. And then she went back into the house and it scared me to walk around the place.” Penny says it is when they are in their twenties that people lose their minds. She says this is what happened to her mother. And when we talk about it, I think of myself in Amherst, so confident at the thing I saw, and at once confident there was nothing there because Emily is dead. I stopped imagining her immediately. I never told anybody about this because nothing like this happened anymore, so there was no need, and what’s more I couldn’t bear to find out that I was going crazy, that I was indeed seeing things. I blamed it on loneliness of the biochemical sort. When a person has no other persons he invents them because he was not designed to be alone, because it isn’t good for a person to be alone.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  Matt may be a braces-wearing mite, a classic ninth-grader in his first year wandering the halls of the high school, but he is also a true athlete getting almost everything possible out of his developing body. He pushes hard. He transcends pain. He shows up for more. He has the ferocity on the mat to realize his potential, and Jay taps into that, because that is what Jay needs—what they both need, really, if either one of them is going to do something great. This is, of course, the other way in which Jay stands in possession of the elite athlete’s conceit. To Jay, Matt McDonough is only doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing: working his ass off to get better, and thus to avoid wasting the wrestling talent he has brought with him to this point. Matt, the son of the former Uni versity of Iowa wrestler Mike McDonough, wants to capitalize on his experience, not squander it, and Jay recognizes that drive in his young teammate. He loves Matt’s approach, because it is the same as his. He remains baffled every time one of his teammates fails to see the equation in precisely those terms. Even if he understands on an intellectual level that people just aren’t hard-wired the same way as he is, emotionally, physically—as a wrestler, that is—he can’t make peace with it. Absent peace, he creates a distance between himself and the teammates around him who just don’t get it. As the winter continues, Jay will become more distant in the wrestling room, communicating with and engaging the coaches more often than his teammates, slowly submerging himself in the underworld of his own goals and the things he needs to do to achieve them. He remains friendly and by all appearances open, but his frustration comes to the surface more often—he’s more prone than ever to barking out at teammates for lagging behind on sprint drills and the like—and he tends to clear out of the room faster and faster at its conclusion. He wrestles against coaches like Jason Haag and CJ McDonald partly out of a practical need and partly because he is already ascending to that higher level of athletic performance, a world of far more complicated thought patterns and much, much harder pushes against the body’s willingness to be extended beyond its supposed limitations. Jay needs to be wrestling against people who know how to anticipate his moves; he needs to work on new attacks and new countermeasures. And he needs to wrestle against the kind of athletes, like Jason and CJ and Curt Hynek, who went on to the college level and wrestled there. This is the season for reaching higher, and there may not be a high school teammate at Linn-Mar who can really process what that entails. The coaches know what it takes to win, and how it feels to lose.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I had been to the same place, Pevsner in hand, on an architectural drive with my tutor. The end whose beginning Charles had witnessed over sixty years before was near at hand: the roof had fallen in, the stained-glass windows were boarded up, a barbed-wire fence surrounded the site and red and white signs said ‘Danger—Falling Masonry’. ‘And I also wanted to find out how you were.’ After a silence he said: ‘Are you coming to see me again?’ ‘Of course, I’d love to—there’s so much I want to talk to you about.’ ‘Don’t come tomorrow.’ ‘No, all right.’ ‘You’re pretty interested in my story, then, are you?’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Quite a tale, isn’t it?’ ‘It may be too much of a tale for me to tell …’ I said with pussyfooting kindness. ‘My dear, I think it would be a good thing,’ Charles pursued as if he had not heard (and perhaps he hadn’t), ‘if you went down to Stepney on Friday. Have a little parley with old Shillibeer at the Limehouse Boys’ Club. Friday’s the big night—it would save me telling you … so much. It’s a seven o’clock start, of course.’ ‘Er—yes, all right …’ I said. ‘And come and see me at the weekend? It’s lonely as bloody hell here’ (he whispered the last three words as if there had been ladies present). ‘My new man will have to meet you …’ Then the line went dead. He had simply, impractically, absent-mindedly, hung up. I lay back on my bed and thought about the many lives of Charles Nantwich—the schoolboy discovering black beauty, the frivolous undergraduate beagling, drinking and ragging, the dreaming District Commissioner in the Nuba Hills, the old man who had forgotten the functions and protocol of the telephone. When I suggested an evening in Limehouse to Phil he was less than enthusiastic. ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said. ‘I am going.’ ‘Oh, right. I think I’ll stay in, though.’ He looked worried by the idea. ‘I’d have to get back here to be on duty—so I couldn’t drink or anything.’ We were in his little attic room at the hotel again, and he licked me and fiddled with my nipples as though to make me forget that this fractional disobedience was taking place. ‘I probably won’t be there very long.’ I said. Although we had been together a lot in the previous week I had privately told him nothing about the Nantwich affair. ‘I’ve just got to talk to some old man about something—I don’t imagine there’ll be much to it.’ Phil stayed silent.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  It was clear that his sickness, whatever it was, hadn’t kept him from the brawls I suspected he enjoyed; above his left eye, now, there was a wound just a day or two old, the skin still split. I tried to delay, settling in a bit, arranging my things, but his presence was too much for me, I went to him and touched him and he put his hand on my neck and pushed me down, then unbuttoned his fly and fished himself out, still clutching my iPod in his other hand. It was only when I stood up again and took his arm, tugging him toward the bed, that he laid the device aside and made himself more fully available to me. But he was still detached, he kept glancing at the television, and when I asked him what was wrong he just shrugged and answered that he had already had sex that afternoon, which seemed like a breach of contract, though I suppose I had no real basis for complaint. I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn’t welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived. Mitko was right next to me, naked now and stretched out with his arms behind his head, but he didn’t touch me or respond to my touch, his cock lay half-hard against his stomach. He was granting me access but he wasn’t really present, and finally I fell back beside him, my eyes closed, and concentrated on his warmth where our bodies touched as I brought myself off. I woke early the next morning and went for a walk on my own. The sun was just rising, the wind was chill and fresh and laced with salt. Mitko had told me that the hotel was close to the sea, and as I turned from our street into the main plaza, I gasped at the horizon of water framed grandly by the pillars at the entrance of the Sea Garden. I quickly got lost in this large park, wandering paths that seemed to lead toward the water only to veer away. I loved the silence of the morning, and also the solitude that seemed part of the design of the place, or rather the rhythm it established of solitude and conviviality, the narrow, wooded paths giving out suddenly onto plazas with benches gathered at observatory points over the sea, which was endless and gray and pierced ceaselessly by gulls.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He had met a girl, he said, and when we did speak he spoke about her, he told me every word they said to each other, every gesture they made. As he cataloged his feelings I tried to meet him as I always had in his words, but I couldn’t now, they were like a territory he receded into and that excluded me. He told me about every victory and frustration, the teasing games she played, how she made him wait for everything he wanted, and how even her delays delighted him, so long as he was sure that they would end. But increasingly as the weeks passed K. was frustrated by a delay beyond their control, by his mother’s vigilance, her denial of the privacy they craved. She was always watching them, K. said, she insisted his door remain open, they could be interrupted at any time; and they couldn’t go to her house, either, her father was even more strict, there they couldn’t even kiss; and it was winter now, even if they could find a suitable place outside, secluded, romantic, it was impossible, it was bitterly cold. If they had cars it would be different, he said, when you have a car you always have privacy, but we didn’t have cars, we were still too young to drive. It was after this inventory of impossibilities that he told me he thought I could help him, if I didn’t mind, as of course I didn’t; I was grateful he would ask me for help, it would bring us closer again, I thought. I would do anything for him, I said, and what he asked was nothing, just that I come to his house and be present, simply be there with him and his girlfriend in his room. His mother wouldn’t be so vigilant then, they would have some uninterrupted time, and if they weren’t quite alone it would be the next best thing. I was his best friend, he said. And she wouldn’t mind either, the girl he said now that he loved; he had told her everything about me and she wanted to meet me, he said, she understood why I had to be there, she wanted it as much as he did. Please, he said again, though I had already agreed, the repetition a kind of courtesy; of course I would help him, I said, in this as in everything.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The old man took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine. I was interested to see what effect this would have on Phil, who was washing in a thorough, slightly over-hearty way; but though he glanced shyly at what was going on, his own simple little cock remained unstirred. A couple of Cypriot men, who talked loudly and securely in Greek, old friends with thick moustaches and frames rectangular with muscle, shampooed flossily opposite me; and some greyer specimens, voyeurs who came only for the showers, mooned hungrily at the other end of the room. I was quite brisk, and followed his Lordship out to the drying area. He had a rough old towel, the grey of institutional laundering. He gathered it into a knot and dabbed at himself with it, breathing in a manner that was nearly a whistle, and seemed always about to become a well-known Mozartian tune. I paced around drying myself, then tied my towel round my waist in a kind of Polynesian skirt and couldn’t resist saying to him, with a step forwards and a bid for his attention: ‘Are you feeling better now?’ ‘Hello, hello,’ he said, not at all taken aback. ‘Goodness me …’ he looked around as if something interesting had just started happening somewhere else. ‘I was surprised to see you swimming so soon after your … accident.’ ‘Like to swim you know,’ he said promptly. ‘Floating around in lovely, lovely water.’ I waited for some recognition of the drift of my remarks. He wouldn’t really look at me, though. ‘Do you know, I’ve been swimming here for over forty years? Oh yes—up and down. I expect I’ve swum right round the globe by now—if you added it all together, you know. Splish-splosh, flippety-flop!’ I identified already the abstracted tone with which he produced these inane jingling phrases, as if to prevent objections being made by filling up the space and time with nonsense. Yet somehow, at this stage, I wasn’t going to let him escape. ‘I was there, you know,’ I remarked factually, ‘in Kensington Gardens, when you were taken ill.’ He looked at me with a suddenly summoned attentiveness. ‘I’m quite over all that nasty business now,’ he said patiently. ‘In fact,’ I pursued, ‘it was I who looked after you, you know …’ This seemed to knock him rather, and he started to shamble off into the changing-room and then to think better of it, coming back to me in a sideways manner.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Nor could I find anywhere else the closeness I had taken for granted: the friends I turned to were scared off by the need I felt for them, and soon the best I could hope for was their indifference. It was then that I retreated into the uneasy solitude from which I’ve never entirely emerged. Only once did I let myself imagine I had found again the closeness I had lost, and this memory too returned as I walked through a part of Mladost I had never seen. The blokove had grown sparse, there were larger plots of wasteland between them and also abandoned hulks of construction, huge concrete frames rising up like excavated ruins or ships rotting at sea. Every surface was covered with graffiti, mindless obscenities or slogans or art of a strangely childlike incompetence, affecting in its incompetence; and though the area must have been inhabited, this graffiti was the only evidence I had seen for some time of living human presence, the graffiti and also, where branches overhung the concrete, adhesive puddles like tar where fruit had ripened and fallen and been trodden to pulp, drawing large black birds that clawed and pried at it and rose up clamoring at my approach. It was like a land of ravens, if that’s what they were, of ravens and of dogs, which are everywhere in Sofia but were rougher and more numerous here; they were battered, vicious things, more desperate than the dogs where I lived. A few made as if to lunge when I startled them, bracing themselves and snarling in a way that would usually have alarmed me but that now I took in stride, ready to meet them, ready myself to lunge should it come to that; I was eager for it, even, and maybe this eagerness was what kept them in check. There were dogs of all types and a range of sizes, though it was clear a certain bulk was necessary for survival, and most were muscular and medium-sized, with bullish features and square jaws, solid dogs with a brutal elegance that appealed to me, as did their short coats, mottled and tawny, so that as they slept they looked like fawns curled in the unmown grasses.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They slept four or five or six to a room, and they slept in shifts, they were treated like dirt, and they scraped such sustenance as they could off the filthy, unyielding Paris stones. The French called them lazy because they appeared to spend most of their time sitting around, drinking tea, in their cafes. But they were not lazy. They were mostly unable to find work, and their rooms were freezing. (f rench students spent most of their time in cafes, too, for the same reason, but no one called them lazy.) The Arab cafes were warm and cheap, and they were together there. They TAKE ME TO THE WATER could not, in the main, aff ord the French cafes, nor in the main, were they welcome there. And, though they spoke French, and had been, in a sense, produced by France, they were not at home in Paris, no more at home than I, though for a different reason. They remembered, as it were, an opu lence, opulence of taste, touch, water, sun, which I had barely dreamed of, and they had not come to France to stay. One day they were going home, and they knew exactly where home was. They, thus, held something within them which they would never surrender to France. But on my side of the ocean, or so it seemed to me then, we had surrendered every thing, or had had everything taken away, and there was no place for us to go: we were home. The Arabs were together in Paris, but the American blacks were alone. The Algerian poverty was absolute, their stratagems grim, their personali ties, for me, unreadable, their present bloody and their future certain to be more so: and yet, after all, their situation was far more coherent than mine. I will not say that I envied them, for I didn't, and the directness of their hun ger, or hungers, intimidated me; but I respected them, and as I began to dis cern what their history had made of them, I began to suspect, somewhat painfully, what my history had made of me. The French were still hopel essly slugging it out in Indo China when I first arrived in France, and I was living in Paris when Dien Bien Phu fell. The Algerian rug-sellers and peanut vendors on the streets of Paris then had obviously not the remotest connection with this most crucial of the French re verses; and yet the attitude of the police, which had always been menacing, began to be yet more snide and vindictive.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I’d have a shower, lads,’ said Bill professionally. Watching the lads undress I felt, as perhaps Bill always felt too, not only randy curiosity but a real pang of exclusion, in every way outside their world. The shower was a perfunctory business and soon Alastair was back by us, towelling himself with surprising unselfconsciousness for a sixteen-year-old. I realised why it was, when, after tucking his long-skinned dick into cheap red knickers, and pulling on a grey jersey and those baggy, splotch-bleached jeans which look as though a circle of kids have jacked off all over them, he said to Bill: ‘I got to go and see my girlfriend.’ Bill grinned at him wretchedly. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he said. 7At my prep school the prefects (for some errant Wykehamical reason) were called Librarians. The appellation seemed to imply that in the care of books lay the roots of leadership—though, by and large, there was nothing bookish about the Librarians themselves. They were chosen on grounds of aptitude for particular tasks, and were known officially by the name of their responsibility. So there were the Chapel Librarian, the Hall Librarian, the Garden Librarian and even, more charmingly, the Running and the Cricket Librarians. My aptitude, from the tropically early onslaught of puberty forwards, had been so narrowly, though abundantly, for playing with myself and others, that it was only in my last term, as a shooting, tumid thirteen-year-old, that I achieved official status, and was appointed Swimming-Pool Librarian. My parents were evidently relieved that I was not entirely lost (urged absurdly to read Trollope I had stuck fast on Rider Haggard) and my father, in a letter to me, made one of his rare witticisms: ‘Delighted to hear that you’re to be Swimming-Pool Librarian. You must tell me what sort of books they have in the Swimming-Pool Library.’

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And this is a discovery which not only brings to an end the alienation of the American from himself, but which also makes clear to him, tor the first time, the extent of his involvement in the life of Europe. Equal in Paris 0 N THE 19TH OF DECEMBER, in 1949 , when I had been living in Paris for a little over a year, I was arrested as a receiver of stolen goods and spent eight days in prison. My arrest came about through an American tourist whom I had met twice in New York, who had been given my name and address and told to look me up. I was then living on the top floor of a ludicrously grim hotel on the rue du Bac, one of those enormous dark, cold, and hideous establishments in which Paris abounds that seem to breathe forth, in their air less, humid, stone-cold halls, the weak light, scurrying cham bermaids, and creaking stairs, an odor of gentility long long dead. The place was run by an ancient Frenchman dressed in an elegant black suit which was green with age, who cannot properly be described as bewildered or even as being in a state of shock, since he had really stopped breathing around 1910. There he sat at his desk in the weirdly lit, fantastically fur nished lobby, day in and day out, greeting each one of his extremely im poverished and louche lodgers with a stately in clination of the head that he had no doubt been taught in some impossibly remote time was the proper way for a pro prietaire to greet his guests. If it had not been for his daugh ter, an extremely hardheaded tricotettse-t he inclination of her head was chiiling and abrupt, like the downbeat of an ax the hotel would certainly have gone bankrupt long before. It was said that this old man had not gone farther than the door of his hotel for thirty years, which was not at all difficult to believe. He looked as though the daylight would have killed him. I did not, of course, spend much of my time in this palace. The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafes. This made it rather difficult to look me up, for as soon as I was out of bed I hopefully took note book and fountain pen off to the upstairs room of the Flore, where I consumed rather a lot of coffee and, as evening ap proached, rather a lot of alcohol, but did not get much writing done.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When I got back to the flat I was half expecting Phil to be there, and remembered as I slouched sulkily and randily around the kitchen taking a glass of Scotch in great hot nips that he had arranged a couple of nights ‘off’ to see some South African friends, and, tomorrow, to go to a leaving party at the ‘Embassy’. In the sitting-room, remote control in hand, I tripped from channel to channel on the TV, trying to find something attractive in the personnel of various sitcoms and panel games. Abandoning that forlorn pursuit, I put on the beginning of Act Three of Siegfried and conducted it wildly, with great tuggings at the cellos and stabbings at the horns, but without, after five minutes or so, having made myself feel the faintest interest in it. It was in a reluctant mood that I finally settled down at my writing-desk to read Charles’s precious document. When I untied it I found it to be, unlike anything else of his I had seen, an elegant fair copy, from which a compositor could easily have set type. Although it would have been allowed, I did not keep a journal over those six months. From the start I saw that what I wanted to say, although ‘hereafter, in a better world than this’ it might find other readers and do its good, would have brought nothing but scorn and salacity at the time. And later, long after the start, when I thought writing might earn some slight remission of my solitude and pent-up thoughts, I shunned it, mistrusted it like one of those friends to whom one is drawn and drawn again and yet each time comes away cheapened, wasted or over-indulged. My journal has always, since my childhood, been my close, silent and retentive friend, so close that when I lied to it I suffered inwardly from its mute reproach. Now, though, it seemed to hold out the invitation to something shameful—self-pity, and, worse, the exposure of my narrow, treadmill circuit of memories and longings. There was too my catastrophic change of station. I had fallen, and though my fall was brought about by a conspiracy, by a calculated spasm of malevolence, its effect on me at first was like that of some terrible physical accident, after which no ordinary thoughtless action could be the same again. The fall had its beginning in that very fast, dazed and escorted plunge from the dock after the sentence had been given, down and down the stone stairs from the courtroom to the cells. I had the illusion—so active is the faculty of metaphor at moments of crisis—of being flung, chained, into water: of a need to hold my breath. In a sense I kept on holding it for half a year.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  "No," she replied with a straight face. When we returned to our adjoining rooms, where th e connecting door had been thrown open, her answer to my question provided her sisters with good material for teasing her : "Sister was the only one who didn't hear the sirens. My, how funny!" the smaller sister said, following the other's lead. "Me, I woke up right away, and heard Sister's loud snoring." "That's right. I heard her too. She was snoring so loud that I could hardly hear the sirens." "That's what you say, but you can't prove it." Because I was present, Sonoko was blushing deeply and putting up a bold front. "If you tell such lies, you'll be sorry later." I had only one sister. Ever since childhood I had longed for a lively family with many sisters. To my ears this half-joking, noisy quarrel among the sisters sounded as a most splendid and genuine reflection of worldly happiness. It also reawakened my anguish. The sole subject of conversation during breakfast was last night's air-raid warning, which was the first since early March. Since there had been only the warning signal and the signal of an actual attack had not sounded after all, everyone calmed down and concluded that nothing much could have happened. As for me, it made no difference either way. I told myself that even if my house had burned to the ground while I was away, even if my mother, father, brother, and sister had all been killed, that would be quite all right with me. At the time this did not seem a particularly cold-blooded thought. In those days our powers of imagination had been made the poorer by the fact that the most fantastic event which we could imagine might actually happen any moment as a matter of course. It was far easier to imagine the annihilation of one's entire family than to picture things that now belonged to a distant, impossible past, say an array of bottles of imported liquors in a Ginza shopwindow, or the sight of neon signs flickering in the night sky over the Ginza. As a result our imagination confined itself to easier paths. Imagination like this, which follows the path of least resistance, has no connection with coldness of heart, no matter how cruel it may appear. It is nothing but a product of a lazy, tepid mind.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But what was she? Her thoughts slipping back to her child- hood, would find many things in her past that perplexed her. She had never been quite like the other small children, she had always been lonely and discontented, she had always been trying to be some one else — that was why she had dressed herself up as young Nelson. Remembering those days she would think of her father, and would wonder if now, as then, he could help her. Supposing she should ask him to explain about Martin? Her father was wise, and had infinite patience — yet somehow she instinctively dreaded to ask him. Alone — it was terrible to feel so much alone — to feel oneself different from other people. At one time she had rather enjoyed this distinction — she had rather enjoyed dressing up as young Nelson. Yet had she enjoyed it? Or had it been done as some sort of inadequate, childish protest? But if so against what had she been protesting when she strutted about the house, masquerading? In those days she had wanted to be a boy—had that been the meaning of the pitiful young Nelson? And what about now? She had wanted Martin to treat her as a man, had expected it of him. . . . The questions to which she could find no answers, would pile themselves up and up in the darkness; oppressing, stifling by sheer weight of num- bers, until she would feel them getting her under; ‘1 don’t know - oh, God, I don’t know!’ she would mutter, tossing as though to fling off those questions. Then one night towards dawn she could bear it no longer; her dread must give place to her need of consolation. She would ask her father to explain her to herself; she would tell him her THE WELL OF LONELINESS TIT

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  And so it happened just as the maid had planned, and when the two women arrived at their destination, the maid was immediately mistaken for the princess and received into the castle of the prince with much joy and celebration. As for the true princess, she was obliged to act as the maid. She was locked in her former maid’s bedchamber, and forced to unpack her own possessions, which now belonged to the maid. The maid concluded this evil deed by sending out an order that all of the princess’s entourage immediately be sent back to their former kingdom. With her plan so very well carried out, the impostor princess lost no time in marrying the unsuspecting prince. But the true princess refused to serve her treacherous maid and, having no training or abilities for employment, could find no better position than tending to the royal geese in the courtyard. And that is how she came to be known as the “goose girl.” In this way, the prince and his bride lived happily together, but the goose girl, meanwhile, suffered a life of poverty and loneliness, where her only companions were the geese that she tended in the yard. One day the prince wished to go out riding and, finding his own horse away to be shod, he mounted the princess’s horse, Falada. Away they rode at a fair gallop, for Falada was a fine horse, until they came to the fork in the road where the maid had forced the princess to make the fateful vow or lose her life. As they passed this place, Falada slowed down to a trot, and murmured, “This is where the servant girl would have killed your true princess if she did not vow to keep her true identity a secret.” The prince was shocked by this announcement, but he remained silent and allowed the horse to continue on in the same direction to see what else he could learn. They traveled on a bit farther and, at another place in the road, the horse once again slowed down, saying, “This is where the servant girl forced your true princess to exchange clothing with her.” Again the prince held his tongue and gently urged the horse onward. When they came to the large stream where the ladies had bathed, Falada came to a stop, saying, “This is where the servant girl and your true princess bathed and caressed each other, causing your royal ring to slip from the princess’s neck and into the hands of her maid.”

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  "No," she replied with a straight face. When we returned to our adjoining rooms, where th e connecting door had been thrown open, her answer to my question provided her sisters with good material for teasing her : "Sister was the only one who didn't hear the sirens. My, how funny!" the smaller sister said, following the other's lead. "Me, I woke up right away, and heard Sister's loud snoring." "That's right. I heard her too. She was snoring so loud that I could hardly hear the sirens." "That's what you say, but you can't prove it." Because I was present, Sonoko was blushing deeply and putting up a bold front. "If you tell such lies, you'll be sorry later." I had only one sister. Ever since childhood I had longed for a lively family with many sisters. To my ears this half-joking, noisy quarrel among the sisters sounded as a most splendid and genuine reflection of worldly happiness. It also reawakened my anguish. The sole subject of conversation during breakfast was last night's air-raid warning, which was the first since early March. Since there had been only the warning signal and the signal of an actual attack had not sounded after all, everyone calmed down and concluded that nothing much could have happened. As for me, it made no difference either way. I told myself that even if my house had burned to the ground while I was away, even if my mother, father, brother, and sister had all been killed, that would be quite all right with me. At the time this did not seem a particularly cold-blooded thought. In those days our powers of imagination had been made the poorer by the fact that the most fantastic event which we could imagine might actually happen any moment as a matter of course. It was far easier to imagine the annihilation of one's entire family than to picture things that now belonged to a distant, impossible past, say an array of bottles of imported liquors in a Ginza shopwindow, or the sight of neon signs flickering in the night sky over the Ginza. As a result our imagination confined itself to easier paths. Imagination like this, which follows the path of least resistance, has no connection with coldness of heart, no matter how cruel it may appear. It is nothing but a product of a lazy, tepid mind.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  He borrowed nutmeg from a master at school, hoping to catch its buzz. He had smoked a Quaalude; he had overdosed on cold pills. Paul Hood, eater of morning glory seeds. Decipherer of obscure lyrics. He and his roommate had parakeets named Aragorn and Galadriel. He had pored over The Chronicles of Narnia and the pronouncements of Michael Valentine Smith. He had black-light posters and tapestries and he burned incense and wore wire- frame glasses and played military strategy games. He managed to keep one shirttail untucked at all times. His tweed jackets and khakis looked as though he had slept in them. He wore them again today. Top-Siders without socks. His shirttail stirred in the breeze, like a flag from the nation of the feckless and affluent. There was a rush along the Fulham Road! Stamford was a vast, flat expanse below I-95, below the train station. The public-housing projects, a number of circular buildings over to the left there, languished disconsolately on the skyline. Beyond them rose Stamford’s lone office tower. It was a gleaming rocket, sort of like the Fantastic Four’s pogo plane in its sleek design. Or sort of like the Baxter Building. He could easily imagine them taking off from this impressive launchpad to battle Dr. Doom or Blaastar. —Flame on, Paul said. When the train arrived, he took up residence in one of the four-seaters, with his feet propped up across. There was the usual fracas when he realized again that he hadn’t availed himself of the ticket window in Stamford. The conductor invoked a surcharge. —Begging your pardon, Charles, Paul said. The conductor stared blankly at him. —The fault’s all mine, sir. May I please purchase my ticket to Grand Central at the higher price? Then he was thinking about school again. The Kittredge Cult—that was the name they had been given at St. Pete’s. He and his friends. They were Cultists. They had all opted to hide out in the dormitory of that name, one otherwise considered cheap, modern, and lifeless. For two years now, they had all lived there. What they had in common was that they were undistinguished. Paul could boast nonparticipation in any varsity sport. And he wasn’t a rock-and-roll musician or yearbook photographer like some nonathletes. And he was unattractive. And he hadn’t—unlike many of his fellow students—attended Greenwich Country Day or New Canaan Country Day or any of the other Country Days. The Cult was populated with just this sort of lost soul. The rest of the student body knew one another from summers on Nantucket or in Camden, or from tennis camp, or else they were related, or they were children of trustees or legacies or other prominent alumni. The Kittredge Cult was the remainder. To them, adolescence was nearly fatal. Surprise. To survive a sober afternoon was heroic. Only a state of witless inebriation was really sensible.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Urged on by a swarming combination of circumstances —the salt breeze that made my nostrils quiver, the strong summer sun that blazed down upon me and set my shoulders and chest to smarting, the absence of human form as far as the eye could reach—for the first time in my life I indulged in my "bad habit" out in the open, there beneath the blue sky. As its object I chose my own armpits. . . . My body was shaken with a strange grief. I was on fire with a loneliness as fiery as the sun. My swimming trunks, made of navy-blue wool, were glued unpleasantly to my stomach. I climbed down slowly off the rock, stepping into a trapped pool of water at the edge of the beach. In the water my feet looked like white, dead shells, and down through it I could plainly see the bottom, studded with shells and flickering with ripples. I knelt down in the water and surrendered myself to a wave that broke at this moment and came rushing toward me with a violent roar. It struck me in the chest, almost burying me in its crushing whitecap. . . . When the wave receded, my corruption had been washed away. Together with that receding wave, together with the countless living organisms it contained —microbes, seeds of marine plants, fish eggs—my myriad spermatozoa had been engulfed in the foaming sea and carried away. When autumn came and the new school-term began, Omi was not there. A notice of his expulsion had been posted on the bulletin board. All my classmates, without exception, immediately began chattering about Omi's misdeeds, acting like a populace after the death of a tyrant who had ruled over them: ". . . He borrowed ten yen from me and then wouldn't pay it back. . . . He laughed as he robbed me of my imported fountain pen. . . . He almost strangled me. . . ." One after another they recounted the harms he had done them, until I seemed to be the only one who had never experienced his wickedness. I was mad with jealousy. My despair, however, was slightly assuaged by the fact that no one knew definitely why he had been expelled. Even those clever students who are always in the know at every school could not suggest a reason credible enough to find general acceptance. When we asked the teachers they of course would simply smile and say it was because of "something bad." Only I, it appeared, had a secret conviction as to the nature of his "evil." I was sure that he had been participating in some vast conspiracy, which even he had not yet fully understood.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  As it drew near the beach something awakened and rose up within its green hood. The wave grew tall and, as far as the eye could reach, revealed the razor-keen blade of the sea's enormous ax, poised and ready to strike. Suddenly the dark-blue guillotine fell, sending up a white blood-splash. The body of the wave, seething and falling, pursued its severed head, and for a moment it reflected the pure blue of the sky, that same unearthly blue which is mirrored in the eyes of a person on the verge of death. . . . During the brief instant of the wave's attack, the groups of rocks, smooth and eroded, had concealed themselves in white froth, but now, gradually emerging from the sea, they glittered in the retreating remnants of the wave. From the top of the rock where I sat watching, I could see hermit-shells sidling crazily across the glittering rocks and crabs become motionless in the glare. All at once my feeling of solitude became mixed with memories of Omi. It was like this: My long-felt attraction toward the loneliness that filled Omi's life—loneliness born of the fact that life had enslaved him—had first made me want to possess the same quality; and now that I was experiencing, in this feeling of emptiness before the sea's repletion, a loneliness that outwardly resembled his, I wanted to savor it completely, through his very eyes. I would enact the double role of both Omi and myself. But in order to do so I first had to discover some point of similarity with him, however slight. In that way I would be able to become a standin for Omi and consciously act exactly as though I were joyfully overflowing with that same loneliness which was probably only unconscious in him, attaining at last to a realization of that daydream in which the pleasure I felt at the sight of Omi became the pleasure Omi himself was feeling. Ever since becoming obsessed with the picture of St. Sebastian, I had acquired the unconscious habit of crossing my hands over my head whenever I happened to be undressed. Mine was a frail body, without so much as a pale shadow of Sebastian's abundant beauty. But now once more I spontaneously fell into the pose. As I did so my eyes went to my armpits. And a mysterious sexual desire boiled up within me. . . . Summer had come and, with it, there in my armpits, the first sprouts of black thickets, not the equal of Omi's it is true, but undoubtedly there. Here then was the point of similarity with Omi that my purposes required. There is no doubt that Omi himself was involved in my sexual desire, but neither could it be denied that this desire was directed mainly toward my own armpits.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Like teenagers arriving for strip poker in thirteen layers. Hood wouldn’t convert to nudism—there were no nudist beaches in Fairfield County anyway—but he liked a game. It never did to compare your wife and your mistress, because your wife always won, the way the classics were better, the way the jazz standards had nuances no other songs had. Still, those pop ditties of the moment could sometimes get stuck in Hood’s head. Sometimes they articulated a whole season of trouble at the office. Sometimes they articulated the sorrow in a stalled marriage. His loneliness. Then the strings swelled in the bridge and those songs weren’t so bad after all. He and his wife were well suited to one another, really. For example: in the cessation of all intimate contact. They didn’t make love anymore. For almost two years, it hadn’t occurred to them. Family, what a flawed system of attachment! Stalin took children from their parents and raised them as wards of the state. Love, according to Mao’s little red book, was no excuse to procreate. These weren’t such terrible approaches to the problem. Here, in the Northeast, you ran off with your mistress yet still loved your wife. Because you hadn’t yet comforted your mistress in sickness and she hadn’t yet seen you cry over a blowout or strike your own son. And she hadn’t grown tired of your two poorly articulated philosophical positions (that a stint in the national service builds character and that no man should ever teach secondary school) or happened upon your concealed hatreds of certain ethnic groups. In time, though, she and your wife grew alike—maybe they even became friends. Then you fell for a new mistress. Elena had been shy and beautiful and stoic and brilliant. He knew this the way he knew that certain films were great because he had adored them when he was young. Now he might sleep through these same films on television, but he loved them still. Elena had been shy and brilliant and beautiful and impossible to talk to. At a party in 1956, where there had been a competent jazz band with a locally prominent drummer, a party where conversation had lurched and turned awkwardly and no one seemed to be setting their feet down exactly in time, where Benjie Hood was drinking away the remorse of romantic failure with Diana Olson—she was present in the room and dancing with some other guy—at a party while cold rain and snow pelted the greater Boston area, Hood had first plied his suit. Maybe it wasn’t that evening itself that he remembered now, maybe it was only the stories of that evening, but he hung on to those stories anyway. He told and retold them.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  And so it happened just as the maid had planned, and when the two women arrived at their destination, the maid was immediately mistaken for the princess and received into the castle of the prince with much joy and celebration. As for the true princess, she was obliged to act as the maid. She was locked in her former maid’s bedchamber, and forced to unpack her own possessions, which now belonged to the maid. The maid concluded this evil deed by sending out an order that all of the princess’s entourage immediately be sent back to their former kingdom. With her plan so very well carried out, the impostor princess lost no time in marrying the unsuspecting prince. But the true princess refused to serve her treacherous maid and, having no training or abilities for employment, could find no better position than tending to the royal geese in the courtyard. And that is how she came to be known as the “goose girl.” In this way, the prince and his bride lived happily together, but the goose girl, meanwhile, suffered a life of poverty and loneliness, where her only companions were the geese that she tended in the yard. One day the prince wished to go out riding and, finding his own horse away to be shod, he mounted the princess’s horse, Falada. Away they rode at a fair gallop, for Falada was a fine horse, until they came to the fork in the road where the maid had forced the princess to make the fateful vow or lose her life. As they passed this place, Falada slowed down to a trot, and murmured, “This is where the servant girl would have killed your true princess if she did not vow to keep her true identity a secret.” The prince was shocked by this announcement, but he remained silent and allowed the horse to continue on in the same direction to see what else he could learn. They traveled on a bit farther and, at another place in the road, the horse once again slowed down, saying, “This is where the servant girl forced your true princess to exchange clothing with her.” Again the prince held his tongue and gently urged the horse onward. When they came to the large stream where the ladies had bathed, Falada came to a stop, saying, “This is where the servant girl and your true princess bathed and caressed each other, causing your royal ring to slip from the princess’s neck and into the hands of her maid.”