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 Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  the same. The fact is that all this while I had depended on the provisions which I had brought with me from Bombay. I was very uneasy even in the new rooms. I would continually think of my home and country. My mother’s love always hunted me. At night the tears would stream down my cheeks, and home memories of all sorts made sleep out of the question. It was impossible to share my misery with anyone. And even if I could have done so, where was the use? I knew of nothing that would soothe me. Everything was strange-the people, their ways, and even their dwellings. I was a complete novice in the matter of English etiquette and continually had to be on my guard. There was the additional inconvenience of the vegetarian vow. Even the dishes that I could eat were tasteless and insipid. I thus found myself between Scylla and Charybdis. England I could not bear, but to return to India was not to be thought of. Now that I had come, I must finish the three years, said the inner voice. 16.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Alex shook her head. “You wanna know everything they say about you, we can sit here all day and I still won’t be done.” Her eyes had gone cold, calculating. “What the fuck does it matter to you? You’re not exactly working for commission.” “I just get sick of being the object of so much gossip. It’s ostensibly a form of attention, but it actually makes me feel slighted and ignored. Because what people are really paying attention to are their own fantasies, their own needs, their own ideas about who or what I should be in relation to them. They have no idea what the Calyx means to me, why I do this, what keeps me going. And they don’t care.” “How could they ever get to know you? You’re a very private lady. You have a huge fan club of adoring little baby dykes, but you keep ’em away with the color of your money and your Snow Queen attitude. The ninjas and cat-ladies you got workin’ for you are a buncha hard-core bodyguards.” “I have to be very careful to protect my privacy. Because you know what happens when women find out something about me that doesn’t agree with their fantasies, their projections? They get angry. And there’s nothing more dangerous than a disappointed fan. If you have enough of them you’ll never be safe.” “You’re soundin’ kind of paranoid. Makes me wonder how come you invited me up to lunch like we were just small-town neighbors.” “I do get lonely. And once you’ve seen a whole warehouse full of women fucking and sucking every night for a year of two, it gets old. The individual acquires a new kind of satisfaction. But you’re right, trust is an issue. That’s why we’re talking about whether or not the Calyx of Isis is going to provide a venue for your fantasy. Because I’m not sure I trust you.” “Well, I’ll just have to teach you to trust me.” “How do you plan to do that ?” Tyre stood as Alex came around the table toward her. She was used to butch women assuming she was their natural prey. And equally used to fending off their moves, even while a part of her admired their self-assurance, their deviant and defiant beauty. But Alex wanted something else. Just as she wanted to test Roxanne’s mettle before giving her rings, she was testing Tyre before giving her the task of setting up this gang-bang. She would stop dead in her tracks if Tyre told her to, but she would also take her fantasy out the door. If it ever happened, Tyre wouldn’t be invited. They circled the table, Alex stalking her, until Tyre suddenly reversed direction and speeded up. Alex jumped away from her and the table, and Tyre backed slowly into the kitchenette. “Those boots have steel toes?” she asked Alex. “Sure.”

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis, restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a fine November day ... fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God! What a place! He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came, would he care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room. Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor, of course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley's own parlour. He followed blindly after the servant ... he never noticed things, or had contact with his surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cézanne. "It's very pleasant up here," he said, with his queer smile, as if it hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. "You are wise to get to the top." "Yes, I think so," she said. Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up. Now she and Michaelis sat on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers ... other people were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in his success. "But why are you such a lonely bird?" Connie asked him; and again he looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look. "Some birds _are_ that way," he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar irony; "but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?" Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: "Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!" "Am I altogether a lonely bird?" he asked, with his queer grin of a smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned, or afraid. "Why?" she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. "You are, aren't you?" She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost lose her balance. "Oh, you're quite right!" he said, turning his head away, and looking sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her power to see him detached from herself.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  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. 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.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Paul wondered if the two of them, Libbets and Davenport, had already collaborated in some afternoon sexual experiment. Even Libbets, in her secure and privately educated skull must have known how Davenport fucked him up. —Flame on, he said. —Huh? Libbets said. —Awesome sleet and rain, Paul said. Far out. Let’s do some reef. Neither sleet nor rain will stay this courier. What’s on the idiot box? —Lost in Space, Libbets said. Star Trek at seven. —Moisture, moisture, Davenport said from his station. Moooiiiistuuuuure. It was from this episode, this Lost in Space episode. —Yeah, yeah, Paul said. Or remember that one where there were the guys with glittering, plastic bowlers. Zachary Smith was ... Davenport rolled a joint as carefully as if it were bomb disposal. —Howdy, there, he said. You, young knight. Can you check on the mead? Can you sally forth and secure us some more mead? —In the pantry, Libbets said. She pointed. Paul trudged disconsolately out into the foyer, past the living room where a portrait of the Caseys—Libbets was the youngest of the six, seated in her father’s lap—occupied most of a wall. He stood in the dark. —No, that way, Libbets said, leaning out into the hall, slumped against the doorjamb. Take a right, through there. —Just looking, Paul said. Got my “just looking” button on. The pantry was long, empty, spotless. The banality of this kind of housekeeping made Paul uncomfortable. The place begged for the release of cockroaches or lab rats. It begged for finger-painted floors, tie-dyed curtains, for graffiti and noise pollution. Paul was a third term, an unwelcome geometrical element. Davenport hadn’t even greeted him. And supernumerary was a feeling he knew as well as he knew that parched baby blue of Connecticut summer skies. Blundering in the kitchen, he felt sure that it would always be this way, this blunt little diorama of a life with its cessation of miracles would never change—except that it would get worse. Davenport wasn’t satisfied with his own charm. He wanted to inhabit his friends, to neutralize them. He wanted Paul’s socks and Paul’s records and Paul’s homework assignments and even Paul’s nuclear family with its 2.2 children and its five basic food groups and its pristine genetics. They were the best of friends, Davenport and Paul. This was what friendship was like. Paul formulated his plan. He removed the cold six-pack of Heinekens from the refrigerator. He trudged out of the kitchen. —Frankie opens them with his teeth, Libbets giggled, back in the library. This wasn’t news. It was part of Davenport’s arsenal of entertainments. Paul had tried the same trick on a couple of occasions, with painful results.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  EZ kneaded her hands and arms, restoring the circulation. She gave herself over to the leather gloves, let the long, powerful fingers dig into her shoulders and stroke her face. Kay said, “You are something so fine. A pretty girl. I never had me such a pretty girl. It’s like wakin’ up and finding out you’re sleepin’ in a pile of money, got your picture on the TV ’cause you’re the Lord’s anointed. You know what anointed means, don’t you, sweetheart? It means you just gonna pour that cream all over me, honey. Cream and honey. Yeah, the tears too. Let ’em run like a river, the bitter with the sweet. It’s life, that’s all, just life. And sex. A lot of it. More’n you ever had but not more than you deserve. Running down your leg, drippin’ off your ass. Run like a river but you can’t run away from me pretty girl. I got—got—got you. Got you good, good girl.” During the delirious, galloping fuck that followed, Roxanne forgot that Kay could reach up and grab her heart, or turn her inside out. She lost all fear and fucked back hard enough to feel the pull in the small of her back. They moved like a reciprocating engine, sparks in her gut triggering expansion, shoving Kay’s cam-shaft hand back to her shoulder, the piston-rod arm returning smoothly, setting off a new explosion. “Nearly up to the elbow,” she heard Alex say. “Holy cunt.” Subtle pain began to play within her nipples. EZ was manipulating them, using her fingers like feathers and then like clamps. A sensation that began sweetly built into agony. She screamed, lost in the pain, and her overwrought body responded by losing control. “I didn’t tell you to piss on me, did I?” Kay hissed at her. EZ administered a few stinging slaps. “Think you can let go anytime you feel like it?” she demanded. “What are you, some kind of animal? An animal wouldn’t even do that. Look at yourself. Pissing on the floor.” Kay ran her free hand along the wet, naked thighs and pressed it into Roxanne’s mouth. “Lick it off,” she said. “Lick up your own piss.” Roxanne fought her rising sense of injustice and complied. Her reward was another hit of amyl, and one of EZ’s cruelest kisses. She cried aloud into the savage mouth while Kay opened and closed her hand, rotated her fist, and made her piss again. The kiss left her mouth bleeding a little, and the taste of iron made her queasy. She suddenly wanted to quit. What was happening? Why was she doing this? It was crazy. She was bleeding. Maybe her ass was bleeding. Where was Alex? She felt utterly lonely. “I’m going to throw up,” she thought, and must have said it.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  anything else she wished. Certain of the rent-rolls would be paid over to her, should her own income prove insufficient. All things must be done in a way that was seemly — no undue haste, no sus- picion of a breach between mother and daughter: ‘ For the sake of your father I ask this of you, not for your sake or mine, but for his. Do you consent to this, Stephen? ’ And Stephen answered: ‘ Yes, I consent.’ Then Anna said: ‘I'd like you to leave me now — I feel tired and I want to be alone for a little — but presently I shall send for Puddle to discuss her living with ycu in the future.’ So Stephen got up, and she went away, leaving Anna Gordon alone. 2 As THoucH drawn there by some strong natal instinct, Stephen went straight to her father’s study; and she sat in the old arm- chair that had survived him; then she buried her face in her hands. All the loneliness that had gone before was as nothing to this new loneliness of spirit. An immense desolation swept down upon her, an immense need to cry out and claim understanding for herself, an immense need to find an answer to the riddle of her unwanted being. All around her were grey and crumbling ruins, and under those ruins her love lay bleeding; shamefully wounded by Angela Crossby, shamefully soiled and defiled by her mother —a piteous, suffering, defenceless thing, it lay bleeding under the ruins. She felt blind when she tried to look into the future, stupefied when she tried to look back on the past. She must go — she was going away from Morton: * From Morton — I’m going away from Morton,’ the words thudded drearily in her brain: ‘I’m going away from Morton.’ | The grave, comely house would not know her any more, nor the garden where she had heard the cuckoo with the dawning understanding of a child, nor the lakes where she had kissed Angela Crossby for the first time — full on the lips as a lover. The good, sweet-smelling meadows with their placid cattle, she was THE WELL OF LONELINESS 231 going to leave them; and the hills that protected poor, unhappy lovers — the merciful hills; and the lanes with their sleepy dog- roses at evening; and the little, old township of Upton-on-Severn with its battle-scarred church and its yellowish river; that was where she had first seen Angela Crossby. . . .

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She could take from Morton whatever she needed, the horses, and anything else she wished. Certain of the rent-rolls would be paid over to her, should her own income prove insufficient. All things must be done in a way that was seemly—no undue haste, no suspicion of a breach between mother and daughter: ‘For the sake of your father I ask this of you, not for your sake or mine, but for his. Do you consent to this, Stephen?’ And Stephen answered: ‘Yes, I consent.’ Then Anna said: ‘I’d like you to leave me now—I feel tired and I want to be alone for a little—but presently I shall send for Puddle to discuss her living with you in the future.’ So Stephen got up, and she went away, leaving Anna Gordon alone. 2 As though drawn there by some strong natal instinct, Stephen went straight to her father’s study; and she sat in the old arm-chair that had survived him; then she buried her face in her hands. All the loneliness that had gone before was as nothing to this new loneliness of spirit. An immense desolation swept down upon her, an immense need to cry out and claim understanding for herself, an immense need to find an answer to the riddle of her unwanted being. All around her were grey and crumbling ruins, and under those ruins her love lay bleeding; shamefully wounded by Angela Crossby, shamefully soiled and defiled by her mother—a piteous, suffering, defenceless thing, it lay bleeding under the ruins. She felt blind when she tried to look into the future, stupefied when she tried to look back on the past. She must go—she was going away from Morton: ‘From Morton—I’m going away from Morton,’ the words thudded drearily in her brain: ‘I’m going away from Morton.’ The grave, comely house would not know her any more, nor the garden where she had heard the cuckoo with the dawning understanding of a child, nor the lakes where she had kissed Angela Crossby for the first time—full on the lips as a lover. The good, sweet-smelling meadows with their placid cattle, she was going to leave them; and the hills that protected poor, unhappy lovers—the merciful hills; and the lanes with their sleepy dog-roses at evening; and the little, old township of Upton-on-Severn with its battle-scarred church and its yellowish river; that was where she had first seen Angela Crossby. . . . The spring would come sweeping across Castle Morton, bringing strong, clean winds to the open common.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "But you wouldn't bother me," she pleaded. "I'd rather not go to the hut at all, if I am going to be in the way." He looked at her with his keen blue eyes. He seemed kindly, but distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome, if even he looked thin and ill. A cough troubled him. "You have a cough," she said. "Nothing--a cold! The last pneumonia left me with a cough, but it's nothing." He kept distant from her, and would not come any nearer. She went fairly often to the hut, in the morning or in the afternoon, but he was never there. No doubt he avoided her on purpose. He wanted to keep his own privacy. He had made the hut tidy, put the little table and chair near the fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs, and put the tools and traps away as far as possible, effacing himself. Outside, by the clearing, he had built a low little roof of boughs and straw, a shelter for the birds, and under it stood the five coops. And, one day when she came, she found two brown hens sitting alert and fierce in the coops, sitting on pheasants' eggs, and fluffed out so proud and deep in all the heat of the pondering female blood. This almost broke Connie's heart. She, herself, was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors. Then all the five coops were occupied by hens, three brown and a gray and a black. All alike, they clustered themselves down on the eggs in the soft nestling ponderosity of the female urge, the female nature, fluffing out feathers. And with brilliant eyes they watched Connie, as she crouched before them, and they gave short sharp clucks of anger and alarm, but chiefly of female anger at being approached. Connie found corn in the corn-bin in the hut. She offered it to the hens in her hand. They would not eat it. Only one hen pecked at her hand with a fierce little jab, so Connie was frightened. But she was pining to give them something, the brooding mothers who neither fed themselves nor drank. She brought water in a little tin, and was delighted when one of the hens drank. Now she came every day to the hens, they were the only things in the world that warmed her heart. Clifford's protestations made her go cold from head to foot. Mrs. Bolton's voice made her go cold, and the sound of the business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis affected her with the same sense of chill. She felt she would surely die if it lasted much longer.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "But you wouldn't bother me," she pleaded. "I'd rather not go to the hut at all, if I am going to be in the way." He looked at her with his keen blue eyes. He seemed kindly, but distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome, if even he looked thin and ill. A cough troubled him. "You have a cough," she said. "Nothing--a cold! The last pneumonia left me with a cough, but it's nothing." He kept distant from her, and would not come any nearer. She went fairly often to the hut, in the morning or in the afternoon, but he was never there. No doubt he avoided her on purpose. He wanted to keep his own privacy. He had made the hut tidy, put the little table and chair near the fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs, and put the tools and traps away as far as possible, effacing himself. Outside, by the clearing, he had built a low little roof of boughs and straw, a shelter for the birds, and under it stood the five coops. And, one day when she came, she found two brown hens sitting alert and fierce in the coops, sitting on pheasants' eggs, and fluffed out so proud and deep in all the heat of the pondering female blood. This almost broke Connie's heart. She, herself, was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors. Then all the five coops were occupied by hens, three brown and a gray and a black. All alike, they clustered themselves down on the eggs in the soft nestling ponderosity of the female urge, the female nature, fluffing out feathers. And with brilliant eyes they watched Connie, as she crouched before them, and they gave short sharp clucks of anger and alarm, but chiefly of female anger at being approached. Connie found corn in the corn-bin in the hut. She offered it to the hens in her hand. They would not eat it. Only one hen pecked at her hand with a fierce little jab, so Connie was frightened. But she was pining to give them something, the brooding mothers who neither fed themselves nor drank. She brought water in a little tin, and was delighted when one of the hens drank. Now she came every day to the hens, they were the only things in the world that warmed her heart. Clifford's protestations made her go cold from head to foot. Mrs. Bolton's voice made her go cold, and the sound of the business men who came. An occasional letter from Michaelis affected her with the same sense of chill. She felt she would surely die if it lasted much longer.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  He thought of his boyhood in Tevershall, and of his five or six years of married life. He thought of his wife, and always bitterly. She had seemed so brutal. But he had not seen her now since 1915, in the spring when he joined up. Yet there she was, not three miles away, and more brutal than ever. He hoped never to see her again while he lived. He thought of his life abroad, as a soldier. India, Egypt, then India again: the blind, thoughtless life with the horses: the Colonel who had loved him and whom he had loved: the several years that he had been an officer, a lieutenant with a very fair chance of being a captain. Then the death of the Colonel from pneumonia, and his own narrow escape from death: his damaged health: his deep restlessness: his leaving the army and coming back to England to be a working-man again. He was temporising with life. He had thought he would be safe, at least for a time, in this wood. There was no shooting as yet: he had to rear the pheasants. He would have no guns to serve. He would be alone, and apart from life, which was all he wanted. He had to have some sort of a background. And this was his native place. There was even his mother, though she had never meant very much to him. And he could go on in life, existing from day to day, without connection and without hope. For he did not know what to do with himself. He did not know what to do with himself. Since he had been an officer for some years, and had mixed among the other officers and civil servants, with their wives and families, he had lost all ambition to "get on." There was a toughness, a curious rubber-necked toughness and unlivingness about the middle and upper classes, as he had known them, which just left him feeling cold and different from them. So, he had come back to his own class. To find there, what he had forgotten during his absence of years, a pettiness and a vulgarity of manner extremely distasteful. He admitted now at last, how important manner was. He admitted, also, how important it was even _to pretend_ not to care about the halfpence and the small things of life. But among the common people there was no pretence. A penny more or less on the bacon was worse than a change in the Gospel. He could not stand it. And again, there was the wage-squabble. Having lived among the owning classes, he knew the utter futility of expecting any solution of the wage-squabble. There was no solution, short of death. The only thing was not to care, not to care about the wages.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  13.WILLI’d felt, for months, as though I lived pushed up against glass walls. I couldn’t find a way in. Out on the sidewalk, alone, I watched the crowds reveling inside. With Phoebe, the walls lifted. Invitations spilled out; warmth, life. I also pledged a fraternity, Phi Epsilon, when I heard about its influential alumni, the class portraits lined with well-known faces. I wasn’t eating enough, but at parties, in the Phi Epsilon house, alcohol was plentiful. I drank more. Still, I kept my grades high. I barely slept; I wanted every prize. I intended to outdo all these people I lied to imitate, the lotus-eaters who sprawled on the lawn. I finished the last final exam, an evening class, then I stumbled home. I fell in bed. I planned to celebrate with Phoebe at the Colonial, but instead, when I opened my eyes again, I saw that mild light filled the room. It was late morning. I’d slept through the night. I called Phoebe: she was on the train, going to the airport. I came by your suite when I didn’t hear from you, she said. If Julian hadn’t left for Berlin, I’d have recruited him to pick the lock. I kept calling. I heard your phone from out on the landing. I should have just let you sleep, but I wanted to see you— I spent most of the break in ice-piled Noxhurst, working extra shifts at the restaurant. In late fall, Paul had finally given me a promotion; I couldn’t have left during the holiday rush. I thought, too, that I should save a little cash while I had the time. I helped see Michelangelo’s through New Year’s Eve, an upheaval of white-peach Bellinis and smashed flutes, banderoles and tricolored spumoni (a Conti tradition, I heard Paul tell a table), then I flew home to Carmenita. It was the first trip back since I’d started school. I’d anticipated the pleasure I’d see on my mother’s face, but then, almost as soon as the plane landed, I wanted to leave again. Outlines softened, salt in liquid; I felt how easily I could dissolve into the life I’d left behind. Ripped flip-flops still held the stain of old footprints. She asked me to attend church. I said I couldn’t; I offered to drive, past the graffiti-blotched traffic signs I didn’t need to consult. I let her out, then left in a rush to evade old friends who, still God-wild, pitied me. Radio stations I’d left preset hadn’t changed. Last spring, while she was being held captive in the hospital, I avoided the house. Instead, I’d taken to driving around town at night to look in at people’s lives. Intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like drowned statues.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  Do anything, he said. He didn’t look up from his book. I tapped his wrist, impatient, until he put the book down. Take a class, if you want. In, ah, the fine art of Sichuan cuisine. I flinched; noticing, he said, fast, No, it’s what I’d do if I, I love Sichuan food. Phoebe, forget it. I’m joking! Just come. If you don’t go, I won’t. It was fine. I let it pass, though I heard what he’d implied, the insult left unsaid, that he’d enroll in a cooking class if he didn’t have his own, real pursuits. Well, he had a point. I saw them spin, like tops: a lifetime’s stack of plates I hadn’t been allowed to wash, whirligig red-gold globes of fruit I hadn’t peeled. I still couldn’t cut an apple without nicking myself. When I tried, knives slipped. Dishes fell, goblin-bewitched. The logic behind this upbringing: if I didn’t learn how to be in a kitchen, no one could keep me there. It wasn’t a spell. It was a gift, one I had put to no use at all. – In the spring, I learned my grades might prohibit going to Beijing with Will. I let it be what happened; I failed. I’ll miss you, I said. I kissed his hairline. He turned away, his forehead pinched, high. I didn’t like causing him pain, but I couldn’t have tagged along. I kissed him, again. I didn’t stop until he turned back to me, still so trustful: like a child, finding solace with the person who’d hurt him in the first place. I took Will to his flight, then I returned, alone, to Noxhurst. The suite locked shut. Its silence rang like an alarm. I sat on the futon, at a loss. I didn’t have a friend in town. The June hours swelled, humid, dull, waiting to be filled. At parties, listless bodies held iced drinks to hot, moist skin. The college had no air-conditioning, and I kept thinking I should get a window unit. If I bought it, though, I’d be obliged to haul it home. I’d have to install it. I thought of the time a pigeon had flown into my suite, how it had crashed, flapped, rattling around, the trapped bird too panicked to find an exit. It dotted the living room white with shit. I was shrieking; Julian, too. Liesl ran to the landing, but Will stayed calm. He caught the pigeon with an upended trashcan. Sliding a flattened shoebox beneath the plastic lip, he carried it out. If Will were here, he’d have long since solved the air-conditioning problem. Instead, I sprawled on damp sheets. I listened to flash storms, too hot to sleep. Will’s fund in Beijing required most of his time; often, he couldn’t talk.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I am not a parasite. I don’t roll anybody, and I treat them all like human beings. This may be hard for you to imagine, but some of these folks are not sweet. They feel bad, and they are paying for a chance to make me feel like shit, too—after I’ve made them feel better. Sometimes I think they’re all that way, but really, most of them are not nasty, just freaked out about themselves. Sometimes I think I help some of them get over it by giving them a chance to really do it. I’m not claiming it’s healthy, but if they see me they don’t have to do it with anybody else. Keeps it under control, like. Whenever I think about this I think about Jackie, because what we did was none of this sick shit, I mean, we were lovers. She was always telling me, “I have to take care of you and teach you what’s what. If I slap you around a little, it’s to make you listen.” Sometimes I would slap her back. And after we fought we always made love, I couldn’t stand to let her stay mad at me. I had to make her touch me, be sweet to me, after she was mean. Nobody else loved me. If she didn’t, or if I thought she didn’t, I would go nuts and start breaking things. “There’s something wrong with you, you know that?” she would yell. I don’t know what, I don’t know when it went wrong, but I know it’s true. Maybe it started in group care. As soon as I learned how to read, I started getting chastised for being verbally aggressive. We had one teacher who kept taking me aside for long talks about the stabilizing and calming influences of manual labor. She gave me biographies of union organizers for holiday gifts. But I knew I wasn’t headed for the fucking proletariat. Nobody wants to be sent to the farms, the road crews, the decon teams, or the factories. But we need farmers and ditch-diggers and machinists very badly. It’s okay to grouse about that kind of work if you’re going to end up doing it. If you ain’t, you better pretend nothin’ could make you happier than throwing a shovel full of mud over your shoulder all day. It was like the future was chasing me. I learned as fast as I could.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And then she was odd about other things too; there were so many things that she didn’t like mentioned. In the end, they completely lost patience with her, and they left her alone with her fads and her fancies, disliking the check that her presence imposed, disliking to feel that they dare not allude to even the necessary functions of nature without being made to feel immodest. But at times Stephen hated her own isolation, and then she would make little awkward advances, while her eyes would grow rather apologetic, like the eyes of a dog who has been out of favour. She would try to appear quite at ease with her companions, as she joined in their light-hearted conversation. Strolling up to a group of young girls at a party, she would grin as though their small jokes amused her, or else listen gravely while they talked about clothes or some popular actor who had visited Malvern. As long as they refrained from too intimate details, she would fondly imagine that her interest passed muster. There she would stand with her strong arms folded, and her face somewhat strained in an effort of attention. While despising these girls, she yet longed to be like them—yes, indeed, at such moments she longed to be like them. It would suddenly strike her that they seemed very happy, very sure of themselves as they gossiped together. There was something so secure in their feminine conclaves, a secure sense of oneness, of mutual understanding; each in turn understood the other’s ambitions. They might have their jealousies, their quarrels even, but always she discerned, underneath, that sense of oneness. Poor Stephen! She could never impose upon them; they always saw through her as though she were a window. They knew well enough that she cared not so much as a jot about clothes and popular actors. Conversation would falter, then die down completely, her presence would dry up their springs of inspiration. She spoilt things while trying to make herself agreeable; they really liked her better when she was grumpy. Could Stephen have met men on equal terms, she would always have chosen them as her companions; she preferred them because of their blunt, open outlook, and with men she had much in common—sport for instance. But men found her too clever if she ventured to expand, and too dull if she suddenly subsided into shyness. In addition to this there was something about her that antagonized slightly, an unconscious presumption. Shy though she might be, they sensed this presumption; it annoyed them, it made them feel on the defensive.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Well," he said, "I don't know. What's the use of my generalising? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance." "But doesn't it make you sad?" "Why should it? Not a bit! I look at Charlie May, and the rest of the men who have affairs.... No, I don't envy them a bit! If fate sent me a woman I wanted, well and good. Since I don't know any woman I want, and never see one ... why, I presume I'm cold, and I really _like_ some women very much." "Do you like me?" "Very much! And you see there's no question of kissing between us, is there?" "None at all!" said Connie. "But oughtn't there to be?" "_Why_, in God's name? I like Clifford, but what would you say if I went and kissed him?" "But isn't there a difference?" "Where does it lie, as far as we're concerned? We're all intelligent human beings, and the male and female business is in abeyance. Just in abeyance. How would you like me to start acting up like a continental male at this moment, and parading the sex thing?" "I should hate it." "Well then! I tell you, if I'm really a male thing at all, I never run across the female of my species. And I don't miss her, I just _like_ women. Who's going to force me into loving, or pretending to love them, working up the sex game?" "No, I'm not. But isn't something wrong?" "You may feel it, I don't." "Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more." "Has a man for a woman?" She pondered the other side of the question. "Not much," she said truthfully. "Then let's leave it all alone, and just be decent and simple, like proper human beings with one another. Be damned to the artificial sex-compulsion! I refuse it!" Connie knew he was right, really. Yet it left her feeling so forlorn, so forlorn and stray. Like a chip on a dreary pond, she felt. What was the point, of her or anything? It was her youth which rebelled. These men seemed so old and cold. Everything seemed old and cold. And Michaelis let one down so; he was no good. The men didn't want one; they just didn't really want a woman, even Michaelis didn't. And the bounders who pretended they did, and started working the sex game, they were worse than ever.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  I crouched to clean the gin I’d spilled. The glass had broken into several clean shards. Still, I wiped around the spot in case I missed a piece, and I thought of Phoebe, yes, but I was also recalling an earthquake I’d lived through when I was five, six. I’d squatted beneath the dining-room table while plates leaped from the shelves, white fragments like giant teeth gnashing toward us. With my mother’s arms around me, I felt how frightened she was, her breaths fast, but she’d sung to me, an upbeat Bizet tune with improvised English lyrics. She kept singing, heroic, to help me be less fearful, until the convulsions stopped. If I’d truly believed life began at minute zero— What is it? Leigh said. It’s nothing. I waited until she left, then I tried one last call. Phoebe’s father’s house was listed; he, too, had a landline. He picked up, to my surprise. I’d all but forgotten that dialing a phone could result in a live conversation. I asked for Phoebe. She’s at Edwards, he said. No, she isn’t, I almost said. Instead, I ended the call. I had no reason to trust him. He’d introduced them in the first place. When his office opened in the morning, I went to see Dean Pasch, the head of my hall. I waited; I looked out the window at a girl sporting a cowboy hat. She sat on the courtyard’s split-rail fence, talking with someone who, as I watched, pushed his hand beneath the back of her shirt. He moved up in slow circles. His forearm bulged from the girl’s spine, distending ribbed cloth until he exposed a tall swath of freckled skin. She should have stopped him. If I could forget about Phoebe, I’d spirit the girl away from here. To a ranch, I thought, out West, with no neighbors for miles. We’d raise a passel of freckled children, bringing them up on Plato, sunlight, and backyard peaches. I was called into Pasch’s office. I hadn’t seen him since the previous fall, when he’d helped with a hitch in my scholarship funding, but he saluted me by name. He asked what he might do for me. – The doorbell chimed the next morning. It’s Phoebe, I thought, pulling on clothes, but this time I opened the door to four people. The president of Edwards, Pasch, and two people I didn’t recognize. Federal agents, they said. Fitz and Hugh. They swept past me, into the hall. It sounded like a carnival act, topping the playbill: the famed traveling duo. With such names, they couldn’t be serious. The woman agent, Fitz or Hugh, said I should take a seat. If I kept standing, I’d obstruct the investigation. I hesitated. Sit down, she said.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Breakfast was served in the bedrooms; Clifford never appeared before lunch, and the dining-room was a little dreary. After coffee Michaelis, restless and ill-sitting soul, wondered what he should do. It was a fine November day ... fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God! What a place! He sent a servant to ask, could he be of any service to Lady Chatterley: he thought of driving into Sheffield. The answer came, would he care to go up to Lady Chatterley's sitting-room. Connie had a sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the central portion of the house. Clifford's rooms were on the ground floor, of course. Michaelis was flattered by being asked up to Lady Chatterley's own parlour. He followed blindly after the servant ... he never noticed things, or had contact with his surroundings. In her room he did glance vaguely round at the fine German reproductions of Renoir and Cézanne. "It's very pleasant up here," he said, with his queer smile, as if it hurt him to smile, showing his teeth. "You are wise to get to the top." "Yes, I think so," she said. Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up. Now she and Michaelis sat on opposite sides of the fire and talked. She asked him about himself, his mother and father, his brothers ... other people were always something of a wonder to her, and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling. Michaelis talked frankly about himself, quite frankly, without affectation, simply revealing his bitter, indifferent, stray-dog's soul, then showing a gleam of revengeful pride in his success. "But why are you such a lonely bird?" Connie asked him; and again he looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look. "Some birds _are_ that way," he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar irony; "but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?" Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: "Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!" "Am I altogether a lonely bird?" he asked, with his queer grin of a smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned, or afraid. "Why?" she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. "You are, aren't you?" She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost lose her balance. "Oh, you're quite right!" he said, turning his head away, and looking sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her power to see him detached from herself.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  She shifted an arm, a one-sided shrug. The rotunda light whitened Phoebe’s features as in an overexposed photo, already turning this, us, into the past. I apologized; she interrupted, head shaking. I should go, she said. Will, I don’t think you’ve even tried to understand— I caught sight of Phoebe one more time, that spring. She was crossing the quadrangle with John Leal, lit up then extinguished in pools of light. I watched Phoebe laugh. She had on a jacket I didn’t recognize: his, perhaps. It hid her small frame. I turned left; I let them be. – In June, I moved south, to Manhattan, for a hedge-fund internship. I worked long hours, more than I had in Beijing, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I solicited extra projects. I couldn’t fill what little time alone I had. I required pills, or alcohol, often both, to fall asleep. Nights, I was in the habit of spilling the bottle of prescribed sedatives onto the bedside table to look at the pills scattered white, like dice. I’d made the novice mistake of living downtown, next to the fund. The Financial District emptied along with its office buildings. I drifted the streets in the milk heat of late mornings. Taxis blurred past, roof lights signaling isolation. One evening, as I walked home from the office, I saw a girl stumble, then fall. Leaning toward the curb, she threw up. I’d have kept walking, but she’d drawn people’s attention. Someone whistled, laughing. A group of loud men stopped to watch, swaying in place like a barbershop quartet. I bent down, telling the girl my name. I asked if she knew where she was going. I’m in a hotel, she said. It has a café called the Black Spotted Dog. The White Dog. I don’t know. It has no dogs. My girlfriends— She threw up again, gasping. Unsure what else to do, I held back the girl’s bob, thin curls clinging with sweat. She asked for water, her voice small. The tinted glass of a deli reflected our images. I went in. I bought a bottle of Evian. I handed it to the girl, and, still sitting, she tried a sip, spat it out, then poured the rest of the bottle on her head. Liquid gushed down the girl’s dress, splashed the tan slopes of slim legs. Holding the upended bottle, she wept. Exhausted, I helped the girl up. Lukewarm Evian rilled through my hands as in the baptismal rites I’d loved, and I recalled my mother’s smile rising from the lake, light striating the muddied blue. Phoebe pushing herself out of the pool, the wet flashing down in sheets. Medieval penitents so avid for holiness they’d swilled saints’ baths, a long tradition of lustral mania that led straight to the penitential cuts striping Phoebe’s back. Was this also faith’s aftereffect, the lingering taste for others’ histrionics? If so, I’d had enough. Where’s your hotel? I asked, about to hail a taxi.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  11.JOHN LEALHe’d heard the stories. While attending a freshman rooftop party, in defiance of the potential eleven-story fall, Phoebe had walked the ledge with both arms out, like an aerialist. She lived as if spotlit, each laugh evidential, loud. He asked around: she hadn’t told friends what she’d lost. But all this, he could use. The public fronts people held up showed him as much, if not more, as the factual selves. He often thought of a time his gulag had received an aid shipment, boxes of nail polish. It was the first time he saw the female prisoners energized. They traded food rations, clothes, to obtain the cosmetic; they painted their nails a vital red. Though frozen, starving, they still wished to feel desirable. In a lifetime, the average woman will eat her weight in lipstick. To covet is to begin to have. The ancients had believed the soul lived in the stomach, coeval with its appetite. The girl had walked the high-dive ledge as if she couldn’t die. 12.PHOEBEI’m still not telling it right, though, Phoebe said: all through my disciplined childhood, I fantasized about having the time to do nothing. Now that I had time, the hours felt like a wasteland. I crossed it, back and forth. Old ambitions flopped like stranded fish. Inside, the Phoebe I’d been still flailed. I hadn’t come to Edwards to attend all its parties, but I avoided being alone. While out, with friends, I could live as they did. Oh, people here tried to be polite; raised well, they had etiquette driving them; but I, desperation. If I asked the first question, then if I listened, head tilted, providing attention, they let me ask again. Punctilios forgotten, they prattled along. They’d tell me everything. Julian, for instance, had parents who hadn’t talked to him in months. In months, I said. What—why— They don’t believe sexual orientation exists, he said. So, they think I’m being selfish, that I’m staging a quick rebellion. I lived at a friend’s place once I graduated high school, to get away from them. If they were less Korean, they’d stop paying my tuition, but the only thing they’d find more humiliating than being saddled with a homosexual child is a homosexual, college-dropout child. His voice cracked, splitting open; but, just then, his friend Liesl Ruhl leaned down from the daybed where she’d been dozing. Face paint had bled lawn-green onto an outfit of white bridal tulle, lace rags tied with ribbon bits. Tattered leaves pinned a veil to Liesl’s head. She flicked Julian’s arm. I want a refill, she said. The drinks are in the kitchen, Liesl. But Julian— I stood. I’ll get it, I said. I need a drink, too.