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 Incendiaries (2018)

  A pickup truck fishtailed to the curb, and Isabel hurried in. 11. JOHN LEAL He’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. PHOEBE I’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. I found wine; I poured two large portions, then a third, in case Julian wanted his own.

• 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 Girls & Sex (2016)

  When we’d first met, midway through her sophomore year, Megan pulled out her period tracker app, where she had logged hookups that included intercourse. She’d had twelve partners, she said—though, if anyone asked, she reduced it to a more socially acceptable five. She preferred to remain “blissfully ignorant” of how many hookups had included only oral sex. “Giving a guy a blow job is something I don’t really consider a big deal,” she said. “Like, this one guy, when I go to his frat he’ll say, ‘Hey, Megan, do you want to come see my room?’ And I’ll give him a blow job and we’ll make out. I told him, ‘I like this casual thing we have going.’ He’s like, ‘I know, me too.’ I don’t even have his phone number.” It was clear to me what he was getting out of that arrangement, I told Megan, but what was she getting? She shrugged. “I guess I could ask that every time I have sex. ‘What am I getting out of it?’ Guys tell me I’m really good at blow jobs, probably because I have a lot of practice. I really like kissing him. It’s exciting, it’s an adrenaline rush. And it’s like, at least I’ll have company. At least he’ll appreciate me, even if it’s for that fifteen minutes. I’ll have someone to hang out with, and make out with, and make me feel special.” When the Fun Stops Holly needed a guy. That’s what one of her sorority sisters thought. So she asked her boyfriend to introduce Holly to his frat brother Robert. The four of them would go out to lunch, they’d go on double dates. Holly thought Robert was sweet, but she wasn’t especially interested in him, either romantically or sexually. Still, simply by virtue of being thrown together so much, they got to know each other, and one night, at a party at his frat, they began making out on the dance floor. A little while later, she “found herself” in his room, doing “everything but intercourse.” She had a wonderful time. “Oral sex both ways,” she said, “which was a big deal for me.” Robert walked her back to her dorm afterward. Even though she was hammered, she said he was a “gentleman and didn’t take advantage of that and have sex with me.”

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  I kept listening. Often, at parties, I could be found in the kitchen, a back porch, eliciting still more troubles. If people cried, I held damp hands. With the squash recruit, too; the ball-pit poet, the flautist; Tim, then Phil, it wasn’t lust. Plain lust, I’d have respected. Instead, I craved the postcoital talks, the truths told in bed. I ate pain. I swilled tears. If I could take enough in, I’d have no space left to fit my own. In turn, I couldn’t walk five minutes through Noxhurst without hearing a dozen hellos. Faces lit up if I walked into a room, the liking a light I could refract, giving it back. Phoebe, oh, I love that girl, people said, but it’s possible they all just loved the reflected selves. (Here’s a story she used to tell: once, I drank a bottle of my mother’s perfume while she was out of town. I was little, still too young to believe such a long absence could be revoked. So, I chased down what I did have, the love I’d lost distilled in scent. It worked, though, my mother would explain, laughing. When Haejin opened her eyes, I was there. I’d rushed to the hospital. They’d pumped the child’s stomach. I didn’t leave Haejin with anyone else for years.) Will, at first, was like the others. I was at a party again, dancing, when I spotted him. He stood next to the alcohol, his face a stranger’s. By this point, a month since I’d come to Edwards, I thought I’d met all the partiers. He held his plastic cup to his mouth a long while, his solitude obvious. It pulled me in. I shifted into his line of vision, but he kept looking past me, into the crowd of bodies. He lifted his drink again. Fine, I thought. I had a half-cup full of punch. Foam sloshed, poison-red. Still dancing, I moved close to him. I tipped the cup, letting punch spill down his leg.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  In turn, I couldn’t walk five minutes through Noxhurst without hearing a dozen hellos. Faces lit up if I walked into a room, the liking a light I could refract, giving it back. Phoebe, oh, I love that girl, people said, but it’s possible they all just loved the reflected selves. (Here’s a story she used to tell: once, I drank a bottle of my mother’s perfume while she was out of town. I was little, still too young to believe such a long absence could be revoked. So, I chased down what I did have, the love I’d lost distilled in scent. It worked, though, my mother would explain, laughing. When Haejin opened her eyes, I was there. I’d rushed to the hospital. They’d pumped the child’s stomach. I didn’t leave Haejin with anyone else for years.) Will, at first, was like the others. I was at a party again, dancing, when I spotted him. He stood next to the alcohol, his face a stranger’s. By this point, a month since I’d come to Edwards, I thought I’d met all the partiers. He held his plastic cup to his mouth a long while, his solitude obvious. It pulled me in. I shifted into his line of vision, but he kept looking past me, into the crowd of bodies. He lifted his drink again. Fine, I thought. I had a half-cup full of punch. Foam sloshed, poison-red. Still dancing, I moved close to him. I tipped the cup, letting punch spill down his leg. 13. WILL I’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.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  The order of it was impeccable. First Wendy, then Benjamin, then Elena carried her plate to the table and returned to the refrigerator in search of a beverage. After a long, fruitless investigation, Wendy settled on pasteurized, homogenized, vitamin D–enriched milk. As Wendy held out the milk carton for her father, who accepted it and poured himself a glass—it would sit next to the scotch-on-the-rocks—Elena concluded that her daughter and husband each looked into the refrigerator in the same way. Hopefully. While she and Paul recognized what limited offerings were concealed there. The sleet or slush or whatever it was against the kitchen windows. Elena couldn’t see beyond the driveway, where a light on the house threw a dim glow against the sheets of precipitation. No one in New Canaan would really want to stay home on a Friday night in heavy snow. No one would want to stay home with their children. The party would go on. And the turkey was no longer moist. This conclusion was unavoidable. Above all, she and Benjamin agreed on the necessity of moist turkey. This was an area where progress had certainly delivered miracles. And yet this moist quality seemed to last through the first serving only. One had to guard against dryness in leftovers. One had to reheat gravy. And Elena had failed here. She knew that if she ever suffered a real and debilitating mental illness, its onset would not be the result of a failed marriage or because of twentieth-century spiritual impoverishment; it would be caused instead by these details, by a pen mark on the designer pantsuit she’d bought for the holidays, by the slight warp in her Paul Simon album, or by the acrid taste of old ice cubes. These small things led to a bottomless pit of loneliness beside which even Cambodia paled. She rose again from the table and flung her napkin on the chair. The dog struggled up immediately after her, betting on plate-clearing. She patted the flat spot on his head, where he might have had a brain, before locating the leftover cranberry sauce in the Frigidaire. Wendy and Benjamin greeted the bowl of jelly with smiles, with mouths full. The dog trotted back to his spot. Elena circulated the jelly, but it was too late. Wendy was almost done with her turkey. Benjamin was concentrating mostly on his scotch. So there it was. There were automatic appliances of every kind now—washers and dryers, dishwashers and ice-makers, juicers and electric grills. There were moon shots. But still there was the conundrum of day-old turkey. Twenty minutes now without a syllable of conversation. It stunned Elena as she was corralling a half-dozen peas against a mound of stuffing. She had felt the obligation to create conversation for years, perhaps for a lifetime.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘Don’t be always under my feet now, Miss Stephen. Don’t follow me about and don’t be always staring. I ’ates being watched — you run up to the nursery, the base- ment’s no place for young ladies.’ After which such rebuffs were of frequent occurrence, if Stephen went anywhere near her. Miserable enigma! Stephen’s mind groped about it like a little blind mole that is always in darkness. She was utterly con- founded, while her love grew the stronger for so much hard pruning, and she tried to woo Collins by offerings of bull’s-eyes and chocolate drops, which the maid took because she liked them. Nor was Collins so blameworthy as she appeared, for she, in her turn, was the puppet of emotion. The new footman was tall and exceedingly handsome. He had looked upon Collins with eyes of approval. He had said: ‘Stop that damned kid THE WELL OF LONELINESS 23 hanging around you; if you don’t she'll go blabbing about us.’ And now Stephen knew very deep desolation because there was no one in whom to confide. She shrank from telling even her father — he might not understand, he might smile, he might tease her — if he teased her, however gently, she knew that she could not keep back her tears. Even Nelson had suddenly be- come quite remote. What was the good of trying to be Nelson? What was the good of dressing up any more — what was the good of pretending? She turned from her food, growing pasty and languid; until, thoroughly alarmed, Anna sent for the doctor. He arrived, and prescribed a dose of Gregory powder, finding nothing much wrong with the patient. Stephen tossed off the foul brew without a murmur — it was almost as though she liked it! The end came abruptly as is often the way, and it came when the child was alone in the garden, still miserably puzzling over Collins, who had been avoiding her for days. Stephen had wan- dered to an old potting-shed, and there, whom should she see but Collins and the footman; they appeared to be talking very earnestly together, so earnestly that they failed to hear her. Then a really catastrophic thing happened, for Henry caught Collins roughly by the wrists, and he dragged her towards him, still handling her roughly, and he kissed her full on the lips. Stephen’s head felt suddenly hot and dizzy, she was filled with a blind, uncomprehending rage; she wanted to cry out, but her voice failed completely, so that all she could do was to splutter. But the very next moment she had seized a broken Hower-pot and had hurled it hard and straight at the footman. It struck him in the face, cutting open his cheek, down which the blood trickled slowly. He stood as though stunned, gently mopping the cut, while Collins stared dumbly at Stephen. Neither of them spoke, they were feeling too guilty—they were also too much as- tonished.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Tuey soon settled down to their more prosaic days very much as quite ordinary people will do. Each of them now had her sep- arate tasks — Stephen her writing, and Mary the household, the paying of bills, the filing of receipts, the answering of unimpor- tant letters. But for her there were long hours of idleness, since Pauline and Pierre were almost too perfect — they would smile and manage the house their own way, which it must be admitted was better than Mary’s. As for the letters, there were not very many; and as for the bills, there was plenty of money — being spared the struggle to make two ends meet, she was also de- prived of the innocent pleasure of scheming to provide little happy surprises, little extra comforts for the person she loved, which in youth can add a real zest to existence. Then Stephen had found her typing too slow, so was sending the work to a woman in Passy; obsessed by a longing to finish her book, she would tolerate neither let nor hindrance. And because of their curious isolation, there were times when Mary would feel very lonely. For whom did she know? She had no friends in Paris except the kind Mademoiselle Duphot and Julie. Once a week, it is true, she could go and see Buisson, for Stephen continued to keep up her fencing; and occasionally Brockett would come strolling in, but his interest was centred entirely in Stephen; if she should be working, as was often the case, he would not waste very much time over Mary. Stephen often called her into the study, comforted by the girl’s loving presence. “Come and sit with me, sweetheart, I like you in here.’ But quite soon she would seem to forget all about her. ‘What . . . what?’ she would mutter, frowning a little. ‘Don’t speak to me just for a minute, Mary. Go and have your luncheon, there’s a good child; PI come when I’ve finished this bit — you go on!’ But Mary’s meal might be eaten alone; for meals had become an annoyance to Stephen. Of course there was David, the grateful, the devoted. Mary could always talk to David, but since he could never answer her 392 THE WELL OF LONELINESS

• From Delta of Venus (1977)

  Perhaps if he had taken up her challenges and played the games that she liked to play, perhaps then she might have felt his presence with more of a physical impact. But Lilith’s husband did not know the preludes to sensual desire, did not know any of the stimulants that certain jungle natures require, and so, instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle teasing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into his mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation—indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert. When she stormed and when her temperature rose, her husband was nowhere to be seen. He was like some bland sky looking down at her and waiting for her storm to spend itself. If he, like an equally primitive animal, had appeared at the other end of this desert, facing her with the same electric tension of hair, skin, and eyes, if he had appeared with the same jungle body, treading heavily and wanting some pretext to leap out, embrace in fury, feel the warmth and strength of his opponent, then they might have rolled down together and the bitings might have become of another sort, and the bout might have turned into an embrace, and the hair-pulling might have brought their mouths together, their teeth together, their tongues together. And out of the fury their genitals might have rubbed against each other, drawing sparks, and the two bodies would have had to enter each other to end this formidable tension. And so tonight he sat back with this expression in his eyes, and she sat under the lamp furiously painting some object as if after she had painted it, she would devour it whole. Then he said, “You know, that was not sugar that I brought you and that you took for dinner. It was Spanish fly, a powder that makes one passionate.” Lilith was astounded. “And you gave me that to take?” “Yes, I wanted to see how it would affect you, I thought it might be very pleasant for both of us.” “Oh, Billy,” she said, “what a trick to play on me. And I promised Mabel that we’d go to the movies together. I can’t disappoint her. She’s been shut in at home for a week. Suppose it begins to affect me at the movies.” “Well, if you promised, you must go. But I’ll be waiting up for you.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  The Professor.... Out of all those words—that torrential, tortured flow relating the interludes of his life—those few word-jammed “interviews,” what had the Professor revealed? A craving for love, of course. Yet... and yet he had had it, had it in the malenurse whose name suddenly eluded me. But he had sought out, instead, as if in a dream, the fleeting contacts with the “angels,” who couldnt—or wouldnt—love him back—had sought them out knowing that, like a dream, they would fly away from him. And so he, also, had inherited that pervading suspicion; and he had fled toward desire, away from “love.”... Invading the dreams of others who search in you not what there really is but what they want to find.... Neil... the lost searched father trapped in sexual masquerade.... And all, all, all the others for whom one exists as an aspect, merely, of those unfulfilled dreams. Their lives—their days-long, years-long, life-long dreaming—continuing long after youve exited into someone else’s dream—having witnessed only a bare pinpoint of their lives, which will go on without you: continuing, those dreams, those terribly lonely nightmares, made tolerable, out of despair, only by their very recurrence.... And how will I be remembered, if at all, by those hundreds and hundreds of nightpeople in that long goodbye that life turns into? And when I remember those lives—when I remember with longing and terror—when I wonder, in awe—will there be time enough? When I’ll be haunted by memories of those searching faces, will there be time enough for my own reality? I have merely breezed through other lives (like an emotionally uninvolved tourist! something accuses me as I remember all those I have fled from—but I reject the accusation), avoiding myself behind a mask as real as those which, now, soon, outside, in the streets, I will face. And is that why I—and others—have come to New Orleans, sensing the masked ritual of Shrove Tuesday?—is that why I sit here talking to this man, with his words turning lights into the darkest parts of me?... And my own reality? Behind my mask, the thin mask of compassion, eventually what? I felt a strange longing—a violent, unfocused craving, as if my heart were screaming.... What can be the meaning of this furious unhappiness? My God but Im lonely! I thought that suddenly, and I looked startled at this man in bed with me, and hes staring back as if he had in a secret way shared in the disturbing revery of other faces; the faces which we attempt unsuccessfully to erase with new ones: which continue to haunt us as if in judgment for nothing really given, nothing really shared.... The dark, dark city.... The city of night of the soul. And in that moment I realized in astonishment that, no, I was not a part of Jeremy’s dream. It was my own reality which he is bringing out.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Not even her (now former) friends stood by her. “They’d say, ‘I wasn’t there, so I can’t judge if it was true or not.’ And I’d be like, ‘Why aren’t you just taking my side? I thought we were friends!’” Josh, unsurprisingly, called her a liar, too. He did contact her directly once, via text, early on. “Are you telling people I raped you?” he asked. She texted back that she was not. He never got in touch again. “Obviously no guy is going to admit to that,” she said. “I don’t expect him to. I don’t expect him to ever apologize. Why would he? In his eyes he didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not like he took me to a dark alley to rape me. He just really wanted to have sex, and I said no, and it hurt his pride.” One of the only people to stick by Maddie was Josh’s former girlfriend—or hookup buddy, or whatever she was: the one Maddie said he’d treated badly. “She believed me without question,” Maddie said. “That stuff with him pushing on my shoulders? He did that kind of thing to her, too. And there have been two other girls who told me he’s done similar stuff to them. But mine was the only time it turned into this huge mess.” Maddie shook her head and sighed. “I think he’ll get in trouble at some point, though.” Christmas break came, and Maddie hoped that, with it, the incident would be forgotten; it wasn’t. As December turned to January and classes resumed, the gossip spiraled out of control: Maddie was pregnant! Maddie had had an abortion! She withdrew from school and stopped going online or checking texts. Eventually, she enrolled here, at the community college. At least one of her female classmates, she has discovered, was there for the same reason. What Yes Means

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The clientele was a bit tacky, all those black and brown boys and drags who’d attracted me at Riis Park, but they were the best dancers, the sharpest dressers, the most generous lovers. Many of my old friends didn’t interest me much because they wouldn’t let me talk about Sean anymore. Only Maria and Lou indulged me. For me, the Stonewall was a place where I could watch people in the inner, darker room, sit along the wall and feel at once alone and comforted. I liked to watch a giant black man who’d twirl and slice the air dangerously with his out-flung arms and pointed toes, a flailing death machine of a ballerina. I was so glad I’d bothered to acquire a nice body, since it gave me something to offer every night to a different man—the graying high-school principal, the Puerto Rican hairburner, the death machine. I went to bed with anyone who wanted me. One night I talked with a woman who explained to me she’d had her sex changed. “My husband doesn’t even suspect I was once a guy. We live in a huge housing development. We even have our own shopping center, can you believe. One day at the mall I saw another post-op also passing. She’s never told her old man neither. Anyway, we’re best girlfriends, we watch the soaps together. But sometimes I get lonely for gay guys. You gay guys do know how to have fun.” A man I’d met at a bar invited me to the house he’d rented in Cherry Grove on Fire Island. The house had a name, “The Wicked Witch’s Ding-Dong,” and the instant we arrived my host put on a silk caftan and mixed cocktails in the blender out of crème de menthe and milk. He made a cognac icebox pie with a graham cracker crust and started his famous key lime chicken basted in rum, but then he began to drink those cocktails with the neighbors, Bill and “Dot.” We all sat on the small front porch, while the others evaluated each passing number. “She buys her polka-dot schmattes at F.A.O. Schwarz.” “That one told me she’s got an inner beauty, but she could die with the secret.” “Here’s Edwina—she lost her husband to that slut over on Tuna,” naming a boardwalk in the next community, the far classier Pines, where most of the renters were still heterosexuals . On and on they went, dishing every passerby. My host, drunk and belligerent by now, told me that the usual thing was for a guest to bring a quart of J&B scotch for the weekend. Shamefaced, I scuttled down to the liquor store and rushed back the requisite tribute. The burned chicken was served at midnight, but we were all too smashed to do anything except toy with the cinders. We went dancing at the disco, where by local law every group of men had to include at least one woman.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The camaraderie of founder’s night seemed doubly warm because we were all decorous and idle in a new way. At dances everyone was naturally devoted to his date, and at the weekday dinners a third of the members were missing and another third critically hung over. The rest read magazines, staged lackluster burping or farting contests, or threw bread. The house had been built by the first dean of music, and the dining room, with its minstrel gallery, had been the university’s original concert hall—Caruso had stood up there, right there, and sung, “Oh Ginnie whisky late burn air.” The shiny, very dark, and turbulently ornate woodwork made one think of hobbyists who do sculptural things with their own body wastes and keep their successes in jars. After the white wine and the red, we sang our way downstairs, underground, arm in arm. I suppose for the others there was something sad about such a gala evening without women, and obviously men alone don’t work up that glitter on their canines or press with the same suave, competitive leaning into the circle—alone they don’t even have the right excuse for joshing with each other. But for me, the tuxedos (which depersonalize waiters and lend distinction to friends), the banquet, and the toasts all permitted me for two minutes at a stretch to imagine we were a club of lovers—not the freaks at the toilets or those zombies endlessly laundering their genitals under the showers, but regular guys at ease in their skin, carelessly reaching a meaty hand back in a giant arc to scratch a shoulder blade, big panda eyes taking in the world, voices too loud for indoors. If I elaborated this fantasy it fell apart, since I knew a man stopped being desirable the moment he desired another. By three in the morning the President’s Punch had been delivered as the coup de grace to the few survivors. On every buttoned leather couch, unconscious men sprawled, as “totaled” as the cars they liked to wreck. Some of the brothers sat bolt upright, mouths open, ties and shoelaces undone. Their snoring bleated and gasped antiphonally from room to room. The lights on all four floors were blazing. I was the only one awake. No. There was one other person, another pledge, Mick, a guy who grinned too much and who talked about weapons and physical fitness with a creepy enthusiasm, as though everyone must agree that hacking through the ice to swim in Lake Michigan was a self-evident pleasure as was the prospect of parachuting out of a plane into enemy-occupied territory. Like certain religious fanatics who supply their own chorus of assent (“That’s right, by golly, Lord knows”), he murmured to himself all the affirmation he needed.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He looked me intently in the eye, and now I could see that he, too, must be homosexual. “But people don’t really change,” he said. “It’s useless to try. It’s more a question of adjusting, of learning to play the hand you’ve been dealt.” “Oh no,” I said, angry. “I am changing, I must change. I’d kill myself if I thought I was stuck with these cards, which frankly are lousy—and you know it.” His face folded shut, and he left after exchanging a few of the necessary banalities. I felt triumphant. I couldn’t get well. I stayed in the infirmary, first with one ailment, then another. I watched the snow fall. My foot healed, but I broke out in hives. The hives subsided, and I was wracked with diarrhea. My roommates came and went. One of them, who was in traction, turned the conversation one evening to girls, then more generally to sex, finally to men. I watched his erection grow under the sheet. My own pressed against my stomach like a ruler on a board, hour after hour through the slow routines of the hospital. After lights out, I hobbled over to his bed and sucked his cock, which was nearly black and looked like a horse’s, the same abundant foreskin. Finally I realized I’d never get well until I saw O’Reilly and settled things. One of my fraternity brothers, a guy with perfect teeth and the knack of appreciating everything, drove me and waited while I looked out at the snow filling O’Reilly’s garden and gathering like a rabbit muff over the folded hands of the gilt Kamakura Buddha. O’Reilly nodded simply, picked at a scab on his face, and said, “Yes, I agree, you’re right, our work isn’t going well. It’s best you find someone else.” And it was all over. His outrages against me, his unfulfilled promise to cure me—all the grievances I’d been hoarding were canceled like debts voided by a new government. He didn’t owe me anything, nor I him, and on the trip back I was lonely and bruised, and I envied my friend his broad shoulders, his steady hand on the wheel, his manliness, which was so pungent I could smell it, although I couldn’t make use of it. A few weeks later O’Reilly had a breakdown and was sent to the same hospital where his beloved Annie was already a patient. When I got well, I went to the union pool and stood under the showers. I’d become pale and scrawny after two months of being in the hospital. I met a man. He was in the shower across from me, tall, older, smooth-skinned, his face more olive than his body. I’d never seen him before. He smiled at me. His smile relaxed me, as though I’d just been restored to the human race.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  On the college campuses I visited, hooking up was considered the ticket to a social life, to enjoyment, empowerment, even to a potential relationship. The girls who opted out, especially freshmen, could be left bored and lonely on a Saturday (or a Friday or a Tuesday) night. What fun was that? Their objections were usually not moral: they didn’t think that girls who hooked up were “sloppy” or indiscriminate so much as that casual sex seemed emotionally hollow, potentially unsafe, and, sometimes, unhygienic. Becca, for instance, a freshman at an East Coast private school, had been nicknamed Grandma by her friends because she was often in bed by nine. She’d hooked up plenty of times when she was younger—making out with boys at the private Jewish middle school she attended, performing oral sex for the first time in ninth grade, losing her virginity at fifteen in a haze of weed and alcohol. Those experiences left her feeling lousy. Since early senior year, she’d had a steady boyfriend with whom she was in love; she remained committed to him even though he was at school in another state. “My friends have said, ‘Bec, you shouldn’t have a boyfriend when you’re in college!’” she told me. “So, last night I went to a party and two separate people told me this sophomore guy wanted to fuck me. I was like, ‘Great. He doesn’t want to get to know me but he wants to fuck me?’ I have found someone I genuinely love and I’m not going to let that go to hook up with random people. I mean, you want me to hook up with a bunch of guys and get mono? I don’t understand.” (Becca, it is worth mentioning, was the only girl I interviewed on her campus who was not sick with a nasty upper respiratory infection that students called the Sludge.) Similar to Sam, the high school girl who wouldn’t spend time alone with her male friends, Becca also felt that the hookup culture was an obstacle to platonic relationships. “Like, I was hanging out at a frat house recently after a ‘darty’ [daytime party],” she said. “Just hanging out and talking to the guys, and one of the brothers was not shy in expressing his confusion over why I would do that, since I wasn’t hooking up with anyone.”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The appeal of gay life for me was that it provided so many glancing contacts with other men. At the gym I was becoming an old hand, and now I was the one to show the new guys how to work the lat machine or do heavy squats without injuring the back, but I never knew their names. At the bar I would buy drinks for “friends” and they for me, but again we seldom knew each other’s names. If at the time we’d been called on to make a comment about this anonymity, we would have said it was “sad” or “pathetic,” but a second later we would have been smiling and feeling that surge of popularity as we walked down Christopher greeting one guy after another, adding another detail to the mental dossier we were compiling on each acquaintance (Oh, Blondy is with Spare Parts—I wonder if Spare Parts is keeping him. No one’s ever figured out till now how Blondy can afford so many new cashmere crewnecks on a dental hygienist’s salary. Oh, and there’s Mike the Barber with his ratpack. I wonder if Mike will say hi to me when he’s with that glam bunch—he did!). On Saturday afternoon while I was working out, a handsome stranger in a bomber jacket came in, walked slowly, arrogantly through the gym and locker room, came right up to me, shook my hand, introduced himself, asked me to pull up my T-shirt, which I stupidly did. He rubbed the back of his hand on my new washboard abs and said, “Nice. You’ll do. Here. Call me.” And he left. And I called the number on his printed trick card and went over, but the good part was just having been chosen like that at the gym. Sean looked sad and I said so. He smiled and stood. He swayed slightly and leaned on my shoulder as he passed me on the way to the window. He climbed out on the fire escape and pissed into the dark. “Did I say something wrong?” I called to him. He stepped back in and said, “It’s just—” “What?” Sean shrugged. “Oh, nothing.” “I’m strong. Don’t worry about hurting me.” “I just don’t see why you’re interested in me. All your friends sound like they’re so smart—I know Lou is. Besides, you’ve read a lot and you’re older.” “Why do you think I’m interested in you then?” “I don’t know.” He put his glass on the floor and smiled, but with an uneasy, baffled look in his eye, as though he were about to be hit. I came over and sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulders. He cleared his throat. “Do you think I’m intelligent?” “Of course.” “That guy Ted? He told me I was dense.” “Ted knew you were hung up on being intelligent, so he said you were dense. It was a way of holding you.” “Tell me your honest evaluation of me.”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  A decade later in America, art became a national pastime, and museum-going a cheap weekend date, a sort of Sunday drive without the car, but in the mid-fifties my painters were far from acceptable. That was a time and place where there was little consumption of culture and no dissent, not in appearance, belief, or behavior. There were very few foreign movies, no amused stories in the press about the hijinks of the avant-garde. Everyone ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and people decided whether they were Democrats or Republicans. The three most heinous crimes known to man were Communism, heroin addiction, and homosexuality. Boys played sports, girls planned their trousseaus, parents and children alike read comic strips in the paper and shared a chuckle. Of course there were the motorcycle-riding, hell-raising, hooky-playing “hoods,” but our school didn’t have any of those. It felt, at least to me, like a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday, all stuffed in one oversized car and discussing the mileage they were getting and the next restroom stop they’d be making, a country where no one else was like me—or worse, where there was no question of talking about the self and its discontent, isolation, self-hatred, and burning ambition for sex and power. And yet here were these painters and potters and sculptors. Not just the odd, tormented weirdo I’d known before, the prissy teacher’s pet, the scrawny organ student sneaking into chapel to rehearse, the wimp lurking around after shop to make something pretty for his grandmother—no, here the freaks had banded together, they passed the communal wine cup in the movie’s flickering darkness, they snorted when the hero on the screen pledged to defend America and all it stands for. They seemed to have bought the right to eccentricity by working very hard. That was the American part. They’d wear layers and layers of sweaters, fleece-lined boots, hats and babushkas, mittens with the fingers missing, and they’d stamp their feet against the cold as they labored late into the night. The wind slipped in through rattling skylights and cold seeped up off stone floors; even at noon the sky never rivaled in brightness the humming neon tubes above them, while their vats of clay grew crystals and the nails they drove into boards seared cold into their naked fingers—but they worked on and on, staring at these big nightmare cakes they never finished icing. I didn’t have an appointment with Ivan or Paul. I was wearing nothing but khakis and a sports coat despite the freezing winter winds. I darted across Academy Row, skipping stylistic centuries as I left the fake gothic battlements of the boys’ school for the unadorned, 1930s modernism of the art school. No cars were moving down the road. Everything was silent. Rain had pockmarked the snow before last night’s freeze set in. In the studio building the radiators knocked slowly and constantly. In each cell someone was working.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Then a place opened off Times Square, near the Peppermint Lounge where the Twist had started, and we were up there dancing at the back on a small floor behind a Spanish metal grille strung with Christmas tree lights that began to twinkle the minute a suspected plainclothesman walked in; that was our signal to break apart. But that bar was closed down, too. Subway toilets, last cleaned and stocked with paper towels on the eve of World War I, were sudden descents into the filthy, thrilling tropics. On the way home from the office, my stomach sour from coffee, frustration, and boredom, I’d sway against strangers and read the subway ads for the tenth time. Because a novel—these words—is shared experience, a clumsy but sometimes funny conversation between two people in which one of them is doing all the talking, it will always be tighter and more luminous than that object called living. There is something so insipid about living that to do it at all requires heroism or stupidity, probably both. Living is all those days and years, the rushes; memory edits them; this page is the final print, music added. But for an instant imagine the process reversed, go with me back through the years, then be me, me all alone as I submit to the weight, the atmospheric pressure of youth, for when I was young I was exhausted by always bumping up against this big lummox I didn’t really know, myself. It was as though I’d been forced into solitary confinement with a stranger who had unaccountable tastes, aversions, rhythms. Come with me, then, up the concrete steps to the toilet door, place a dime in the box, turn the chrome handle, open the door a crack, and slip in. You’ll be surprised by how many silent men are standing around. This businessman has rested his expensive leather briefcase on the filthy sink and is leaning against a tile wall. On the floor a bum, reeking of sweet red wine, is sleeping it off, snoring loudly, a sound that draws a red line under the conspicuous silence. Both stalls, one doorless, the other with its door half open, house men sitting right on the porcelain (the seats have long since been stolen). Both occupants have dropped their pants to the damp floor but are leaning forward to conceal their erections. The mood of the room is a cheap alloy of tension and boredom. A train clatters in, you can hear the doors open and shut, then shoes ringing on the pavement in the cavernous station.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  On cold winter nights, lit like a pumpkin from within by the flame of liquor, I’d cruise the corner of Christopher and a back street called Gay (any chance of commemorating a plaque there now to my hungry ghost?). I’d memorize the shop windows and run around the corner to the neighborhood bar for another drink. It was the most venerable gay bar in town, its greasy ceiling caked with an inch of accumulated dust, its photos of sporting and theatrical celebrities strangely irrelevant to its clientele. The owners were nervous that their bar, too, would be closed by the police and they instituted curious rules: no more than three men could stand in a conversational group, women were given free drinks, and mixed couples were warmly welcomed whereas the doorman sent away one out of every two single men. On some evenings he’d insist that everyone turn his back to the bar and face the windows and street, as though we were in a display, merely pretending to drink and laugh while actually modeling the new line of hopsack pants or wheat jeans, saddle shoes or penny loafers, and surfer haircuts. I’d had my slightly curly hair relaxed by the same dangerous chemical blacks used to “conk” their hair at that time; once it was properly limp it hung over my eyes in a languid swag. My fatness abolished the space between my mother and me. She was a thousand miles away in Chicago, but the distance between us was fingernail thin. Like her, I juggled an inner melancholy and surface cheer. Like her, I was always on stage in a role calculated to please. The strangers I wanted to win over were all men—indifferent men whose fierce desires for each other crackled just above my head. I remembered when I was a boy, after my mother was divorced. It was my eighth birthday. She thought we should celebrate it in an Italian restaurant on Rush Street. She liked to go there because she could meet men at the bar. We split a dish of green noodles and she drank Chianti. She kept smiling at a man at the bar. When my birthday cake was brought in, it created an excuse for the man to come over to our table. My mother was quick to offer him a piece of cake, and he bought her another small straw-covered bottle of Chianti. They arranged to meet later. For a while, she went out with him, but one day he stopped returning her calls. “It’s because I’m too fat,” she said. “I don’t eat much. I eat like a bird. It’s my metabolism. Some people are cursed with a slow metabolism. I have to eat. If I don’t eat, I get weak and can’t work. God knows I have few enough pleasures. Eating is a consolation. But I eat like a bird. You see what I eat. Do I eat too much?” “No,” I said, “very little.”

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The house had been built by the first dean of music, and the dining room, with its minstrel gallery, had been the university’s original concert hall—Caruso had stood up there, right there, and sung, “Oh Ginnie whisky late burn air.” The shiny, very dark, and turbulently ornate woodwork made one think of hobbyists who do sculptural things with their own body wastes and keep their successes in jars. After the white wine and the red, we sang our way downstairs, underground, arm in arm. I suppose for the others there was something sad about such a gala evening without women, and obviously men alone don’t work up that glitter on their canines or press with the same suave, competitive leaning into the circle—alone they don’t even have the right excuse for joshing with each other. But for me, the tuxedos (which depersonalize waiters and lend distinction to friends), the banquet, and the toasts all permitted me for two minutes at a stretch to imagine we were a club of lovers—not the freaks at the toilets or those zombies endlessly laundering their genitals under the showers, but regular guys at ease in their skin, carelessly reaching a meaty hand back in a giant arc to scratch a shoulder blade, big panda eyes taking in the world, voices too loud for indoors. If I elaborated this fantasy it fell apart, since I knew a man stopped being desirable the moment he desired another. By three in the morning the President’s Punch had been delivered as the coup de grace to the few survivors. On every buttoned leather couch, unconscious men sprawled, as “totaled” as the cars they liked to wreck. Some of the brothers sat bolt upright, mouths open, ties and shoelaces undone. Their snoring bleated and gasped antiphonally from room to room. The lights on all four floors were blazing. I was the only one awake. No. There was one other person, another pledge, Mick, a guy who grinned too much and who talked about weapons and physical fitness with a creepy enthusiasm, as though everyone must agree that hacking through the ice to swim in Lake Michigan was a self-evident pleasure as was the prospect of parachuting out of a plane into enemy-occupied territory. Like certain religious fanatics who supply their own chorus of assent (“That’s right, by golly, Lord knows”), he murmured to himself all the affirmation he needed. Mick was from the South. Everything about him was glossy. Each hair on his head looked as though it had been individually dipped and twirled in hot mink oil. His prominent temples, his bony jaw, the machine-tooled grooves of his ears, his sealskin eyebrows all threw off highlights, and his big black eyes looked like the reservoirs of that lubrication, just as his shiny black nipples looked like the controls. He wasn’t “masculine” with the full pachydermal weight that word carried back then. He was more like a ferret—quick, intent. And a loner.