Longing

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 Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  I felt its quick little claws on my finger, while my parents were praying. I did not recognize my mother when she came to visit once, and I cried for Margaret, my big-nosed Nanny. Sent to my Grandmother's in North Holland, I remember gulping my oatmeal so I could see the blue fish painted on the bottom of the bowl ... and holding onto my Grandfather's sandy thumb as we walked along the deep grey sea. But I did live with my parents, in Utrecht, Deventer and Amsterdam. I thought all new clothes smelled like the Salvation Army. Mama made a rag-doll for me out of a pink dress I had outgrown, but by then I was too old to play with dolls. . For God's sake, I was sent to an Art School in Korea so I could "learn the language and culture of the homeland" I lived in a dorm with ondol heating under the orange vinyl floor I was eleven. I did not see my mother for three years, and when she came, they wouldn't let me go to meet her at Kimpo Airport. I got boils. I still have scars. I came to live on their little farm in Friesland but I was fifteen and it was not my home. I didn't peel tulip bulbs like the other daughters. I biked an hour to the city and drew portraits of people on the sidewalk. They paid me guilders. I wrote letters to far-away friends, and left for America when I was eighteen. Now I wish they would send me that doll, but they sent me a Delft blue porcelain vase, which arrived shattered like my childhood, so I threw it away, along with my parents and their God. Humans Are Free Beingsby Frances L. Frances L. grew up in the Children of God, a neo-Christian cult. She escaped as a teenager and speaks strongly here about adjustment and identity issues for children leaving cults. She wrote this after several years out of the cult, as she was starting college. Since then, Frances has successfully obtained a graduate professional degree. The other day somebody told me, "Nobody owes it to you to understand you." In that light, having been born and raised in a cult, I am hesitant to write about what it feels like to live in the outside world. Yet I would not be writing this if I did not expect somebody to understand. If people outside cults expect a person who grew up in a cult to adjust, then it would be helpful if they would try to understand the difficulties and dilemmas. When I ran away from the cult, it was not like one fine day I was sitting there and it dawned on me that because I'd decided the cult was wrong I could get up and walk out. Leaving the cult was the biggest, most fearsome thing I could ever have dreamed of doing.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘With her going the city took on an unnerving strangeness for him’ writes Arnauti. ‘Wherever his memory of her turned a familiar corner she recreated herself swiftly, vividly, and superimposed those haunted eyes and hands on the streets and squares. Old conversations leaped up and hit him among the polished table-tops of cafés where once they had sat, gazing like drunkards into each other’s eyes. Sometimes she appeared walking a few paces ahead of him in the dark street. She would stop to adjust the strap of a sandal and he would overtake her with beating heart — only to find it was someone else. Particular doors seemed just about to admit her. He would sit and watch them doggedly. At other times he was suddenly seized by the irresistible conviction that she was about to arrive on a particular train, and he hurried to the station and breasted the crowd of passengers like a man fording a river. Or he might sit in the stuffy waiting-room of the airport after midnight watching the departures and arrivals, in case she were coming back to surprise him. In this way she controlled his imagination and taught him how feeble reason was; and he carried the consciousness of her going heavily about with him — like a dead baby from which one could not bring oneself to part.’ The night after Justine went away there was a freak thunderstorm of tremendous intensity. I had been wandering about in the rain for hours, a prey not only to feelings which I could not control but also to remorse for what I imagined Nessim must be feeling. Frankly, I hardly dared to go back to the empty flat, lest I should be tempted along the path Pursewarden had already taken so easily, with so little premeditation. Passing Rue Fuad for the seventh time, coatless and hatless in that blinding downpour, I happened to catch sight of the light in Clea’s high window and on an impulse rang the bell. The front door opened with a whine and I stepped into the silence of the building from the dark street with its booming of rain in gutters and the splash of overflowing manholes. She opened the door to me and at a glance took in my condition. I was made to enter, peel off my sodden clothes and put on the blue dressing-gown. The little electric fire was a blessing, and Clea set about making me hot coffee.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  With a column on the march memory becomes an industry, manufacturing dreams which common ills unite in a community of ideas based on privation. He knew that the quiet man there was thinking of the rose found in her bed on the day of the Games. Another could not forget the man with the torn ear. The wry scholar pressed into service felt as dulled by battle as a chamberpot at a symposium. And the very fat man who retained the curious personal odour of a baby: the joker, whose sallies kept the vanguard in a roar? He was thinking of a new depilatory from Egypt, of a bed trade-marked Heracles for softness, of white doves with clipped wings fluttering round a banqueting table. All his life he had been greeted at the brothel door by shouts of laughter and a hail of slippers. There were others who dreamed of less common pleasures — hair dusty with white lead, or else schoolboys in naked ranks marching two abreast at dawn to the school of the Harpmaster, through falling snow as thick as meal. At vulgar country Dionysia they carried amid roars the giant leather phallus, but once initiated took the proffered salt and the phallus in trembling silence. Their dreams proliferated in him, and hearing them he opened memory to his consciousness royally, prodigally, as one might open a major artery. It was strange to move to Justine’s side in that brindled autumn moonlight across such an unwholesome tide of memories: he felt his physical body displacing them by its sheer weight and density. Balthazar had moved to give him room and he was continuing to talk to his wife in low tones. (They drank the wine solemnly and sprinkled the lees on their garments. The generals had just told them they would never get through, never find the city.) And he remembered so vividly how Justine, after making love, would sit cross-legged on the bed and begin to lay out the little pack of Tarot cards which were always kept on the shelf among the books — as if to compute the degree of good fortune left them after this latest plunge into the icy underground river of passion which she could neither subdue nor slake. (‘Minds dismembered by their sexual part’ Balthazar had said once, ‘never find peace until old age and failing powers persuade them that silence and quietness are not hostile.’) Was all the discordance of their lives a measure of the anxiety which they had inherited from the city or the age? ‘Oh my God’ he almost said. ‘Why don’t we leave this city, Justine, and seek an atmosphere less impregnated with the sense of deracination and failure?’ The words of the old poet came into his mind, pressed down like the pedal of a piano, to boil and reverberate around the frail hope which the thought had raised from its dark sleep.*

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘I cannot remember. You know many of Justine’s lovers remained her friends; but more often I think you could say that her truest friends were never lovers. The town is always ready to gossip.’ But I was thinking of a passage in Moeurs where Justine comes to meet him with a man who is her lover. Arnauti writes: ‘She embraced this man, her lover, so warmly in front of me, kissing him on the mouth and eyes, his cheeks, even his hands, that I was puzzled. Then it shot through me with a thrill that it was really me she was kissing in her imagination.’ Balthazar said quietly: ‘Thank God I have been spared an undue interest in love. At least the invert escapes this fearful struggle to give oneself to another. Lying with one’s own kind, enjoying an experience, one can still keep free the part of one’s mind which dwells in Plato, or gardening, or the differential calculus. Sex has left the body and entered the imagination now; that is why Arnauti suffered so much with Justine, because she preyed upon all that he might have kept separate — his artist-hood if you like. He is when all is said and done a sort of minor Antony, and she a Cleo. You can read all about it in Shakespeare. And then, as far as Alexandria is concerned, you can understand why this is really a city of incest — I mean that here the cult of Serapis was founded. For this etiolation of the heart and reins in love-making must make one turn inwards upon one’s sister. The lover mirrors himself like Narcissus in his own family: there is no exit from the predicament.’ All this was not very comprehensible to me, yet vaguely I felt a sort of correspondence between the associations he employed; and certainly much of what he said seemed to — not explain, but to offer a frame to the picture of Justine — the dark, vehement creature in whose direct and energetic handwriting I had first read this quotation from Laforgue: ‘Je n’ai pas une jeune fille qui saurait me goûter. Ah! oui, une garde-malade! Une garde-malade pour l’amour de l’art, ne donnant ses baisers qu’à des mourants, des gens in extremis.…’ Under this she wrote: ‘Often quoted by A and at last discovered by accident in Laforgue.’ ‘Have you fallen out of love with Melissa?’ said Balthazar suddenly. ‘I do not know her. I have only seen her. Forgive me. I have hurt you.’

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  Six o’clock. The shuffling of white-robed figures from the station yards. The shops filling and emptying like lungs in the Rue des Soeurs. The pale lengthening rays of the afternoon sun smear the long curves of the Esplanade, and the dazzled pigeons, like rings of scattered paper, climb above the minarets to take the last rays of the waning light on their wings. Ringing of silver on the money-changers’ counters. The iron grille outside the bank still too hot to touch. Clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages carrying civil servants in red flowerpots towards the cafés on the sea-front. This is the hour least easy to bear, when from my balcony I catch an unexpected glimpse of her walking idly towards the town in her white sandals, still half asleep. Justine! The city unwrinkles like an old tortoise and peers about it. For a moment it relinquishes the torn rags of the flesh, while from some hidden alley by the slaughter-house, above the moans and screams of the cattle, comes the nasal chipping of a Damascus love-song; shrill quartertones, like a sinus being ground to powder. Now tired men throw back the shutters of their balconies and step blinking into the pale hot light — etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams. I have become one of these poor clerks of the conscience, a citizen of Alexandria. She passes below my window, smiling as if at some private satisfaction, softly fanning her cheeks with the little reed fan. It is a smile which I shall probably never see again for in company she only laughs, showing those magnificent white teeth. But this sad yet quick smile is full of a quality which one does not think she owns — the power of mischief. You would have said that she was of a more tragic cast of character and lacked common humour. Only the obstinate memory of this smile is to make me doubt it in the days to come. * * * * *

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She remembers being alone a lot, playing by herself under the desk in the bedroom she shared with her three younger brothers. She used to make little people out of paper and play family with them. They were the big family she hoped she would have one day, a family with many children who love and protect her and one another. The space under the desk was their home and she covered it with a blanket and hid there so she could play her imaginary games without interruptions. “There was one scene I used to play again and again,” she tells me. “It was the girl’s birthday and none of the family members would say ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. They ignored her, insulted and attacked her. It was the worst day of her life and she would sit in the corner of the house and cry silently.” The scene always ended with a transformation: suddenly, in one minute, everything changed. The rejected girl discovered that it was all a mistake, a way for the family to hide a big surprise party that they had planned for her. “She realizes that it was just a trick,” Eve says in a childish tone, and I know she is telling me about how as a child she hoped it would all end up being a mistake, how she wished everything would change one day. The wish for transformation was an important part of her childhood fantasy. She dreamed of how she was going to transform her ugliness into beauty, her desperation into hope, her helplessness into power, hate into love, and everything that felt dead into life. And it happened. The little girl was transformed into a beautiful, powerful, and successful woman. She created the family she’d always wanted. But when her daughter was twelve years old, she suddenly felt empty, as if she were dying inside. “And then I met Josh,” she says. She is silent for a moment, turns, and gazes out the window. “He takes care of me as if I were a little girl,” she says quietly, as if talking to herself. “He takes care of me the way no one ever did, the way I imagine my mother took care of her mother.” I follow Eve’s associations and walk with her into her family history, into the bedroom where her sick grandmother lay, Eve’s mother, Sara, then twelve years old, lying next to her. I note that this is the exact age of Eve’s daughter when her affair with Josh began. Eve’s grandmother had been sick with liver cancer for two years. She went through radiation treatment and chemotherapy and was in a short remission, and then the cancer came back. She suffered through more rounds of chemo but only became sicker and sicker.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  There is something touching about the way he describes himself sitting next to his mother and listening to her talking. I feel his love, his longing, his loneliness, as well as his acceptance of being invisible. He is the one who is there, but it’s as if he doesn’t exist, as if he is the dead child, and his dead sister is the one who is still alive inside his mother. We sit in silence for a long minute and I realize that in my silence I might become Jon’s neglectful mother, of whom he asks nothing. Very often and without awareness, the therapist joins the patient’s childhood scenario, taking the role of one of their caretakers. Childhood attachments shape the therapeutic relationship in the same way that they form other relationships outside therapy. Those who expect to be loved often make sure others love them, while those who expect to be neglected might evoke neglect. Our goal as therapists is to examine those patterns; to ask ourselves in what ways our patients relive their early relationships with us, to question who we become to them, and to process those old attachments while creating new, different ones. As with his mother, Jon doesn’t ask me for much. He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I have a baby now, and I know how hard it is. Since Jenny was born, I constantly think about my parents. They had five kids. One of them died, can you imagine? They had to take care of three young children and a baby in the aftermath of her death. No one can do that,” he concludes. “Mom was broken. So yes. She ignored me.” Jon isn’t angry with his mother simply because, even after she died, he still longs for her. The more neglectful she was, the more his need and longing for her increased. As a child, he had no other source of security. He tried to see her as “good” because he preferred to have a neglectful mother than no mother at all. I realize that it is easier for him to identify with his mother and with her loss than to imagine himself as a child and recognize his own pain. Unconsciously, however, he keeps repeating the pattern of neglect: fighting his unsatisfied needs and worrying about all the other ways the world might reject him. Jon searches the room. Suddenly he points at my desk and says, “I think I forgot Jenny’s pacifier here last week.” “Yes,” I say as I look at my desk and recall placing it there so I would remember to give it back to him. Jon seems unsatisfied with my one-word answer, as if he was expecting a different one. It is the first time I see him a little disappointed. “Tell me more,” I respond to the expression on his face.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The pages of Arnauti run through my mind as I watch her and talk to her. ‘A face famished by the inward light of her terrors. In the darkness long after I am asleep she wakes to ponder on something I have said about our relationship. I am always waking to find her busy with something, preoccupied; sitting before the mirror naked, smoking a cigarette, and tapping with her bare foot on the expensive carpet.’ It is strange that I should always see Justine in the context of this bedroom which she could never have known before Nessim gave it to her. It is always here that I see her undergoing those dreadful intimacies of which he writes. ‘There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self — because she does not know where to find it.’ How often, lying beside her, I have debated these observations which, to the ordinary reader, might pass unnoticed in the general flux and reflux of ideas in Moeurs. She does not slide from kisses into sleep — a door into a private garden — as Melissa does. In the warm bronze light her pale skin looks paler — the red eatable flowers growing in the cheeks where the light sinks and is held fast. She will throw back her dress to unroll her stocking and show you the dark cicatrice above the knee, lodged between the twin dimples of the suspender. It is indescribable the feeling I have when I see this wound — like a character out of the book — and recall its singular origin. In the mirror the dark head, younger and more graceful now than the original it has outlived, gives back a vestigial image of a young Justine — like the calcimined imprint of a fern in chalk: the youth she believes she has lost. I cannot believe that she existed so thoroughly in some other room; that the idol hung elsewhere, in another setting. Somehow I always see her walking up the long staircase, crossing the gallery with its putti and ferns, and then entering the low doorway into this most private of rooms. Fatma, the black Ethiopian maid, follows her. Invariably Justine sinks on to the bed and holds out her ringed fingers as with an air of mild hallucination the negress draws them off the long fingers and places them in a small casket on the dressing-table. The night on which Pursewarden and I dined alone with her we were invited back to the great house, and after examining the great cold reception rooms Justine suddenly turned and led the way upstairs, in search of an ambience which might persuade my friend whom she greatly admired and feared, to relax.

• From Wild (2012)

  Without a word, he took a box of condoms from the Safeway bag and ripped it open. When he stood, he reached for my hand and pulled me up too. I let him lead me across the sand to the gathering of boulders that formed a cove and we circled back into it, to what passed for private on a public beach—a cranny among the dark rocks in the broad light of day. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was into, having sex outside. I’m sure there’s a woman on the planet who’d choose the outdoors over even the most slipshod and temporary quarters, but I haven’t met her, though I decided for this day that the protection of the rocks would suffice. After all, over the course of the past couple of months, I’d done everything else outside. We took each other’s clothes off and I reclined with my bare rump against a sloped boulder, wrapping my legs around Jonathan until he turned me over and I gripped the rock. Alongside the remnants of honey, there was the mineral scent of salt and sand and the reedy scent of moss and plankton. It wasn’t long before I forgot about being outside, before I couldn’t even remember the honey, or whether he’d asked me a single question or not. There wasn’t much to say as we made the long drive back to Ashland. I was so tired from sex and lack of sleep, from sand and sun and honey, that I could hardly speak anyway. We were quiet and peaceful together, blasting Neil Young all the way to the hostel, where, without ceremony, we ended our twenty-two-hour date. “Thanks for everything,” I said, kissing him. It was past dark already, nine o’clock on a Sunday night, the town quieter than it had been the night before, hunkered down and settled in, half the tourists gone home. “Your address,” he said, handing me a scrap of paper and a pen. I wrote down Lisa’s, feeling a mounting sense of something that wasn’t quite sorrow, wasn’t quite regret, and wasn’t quite longing, but was a mix of them all. It had been an indisputably good time, but now I felt empty. Like there was something I didn’t even know I wanted until I didn’t get it. I handed him the scrap of paper. “Don’t forget your purse,” he said, picking up my little red stove bag. “Bye,” I said, taking it from him and reaching for the door. “Not so fast,” he said, pulling me toward him. He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘Later, when we went abroad: at the Adlon, the pollen of the spotlights playing upon the Spanish dancers fuming in the smoke of a thousand cigarettes; by the dark waters of Buda, her tears dropping hotly among the quietly flowing dead leaves; riding on the gaunt Spanish plains, the silence pock-marked by the sound of our horses’ hooves: by the Mediterranean lying on some forgotten reef. It was never her betrayals that upset me — for with Justine the question of male pride in possession became somehow secondary. I was bewitched by the illusion that I could really come to know her; but I see now that she was not really a woman but the incarnation of Woman admitting no ties in the society we inhabited. “I hunt everywhere for a life that is worth living. Perhaps if I could die or go mad it would provide a focus for all the feelings I have which find no proper outlet. The doctor I loved told me I was a nymphomaniac — but there is no gluttony or self-indulgence in my pleasure, Jacob. It is purely wasted from that point of view. The waste, my dear, the waste! You speak of taking pleasure sadly, like the puritans do. Even there you are unjust to me. I take it tragically, and if my medical friends want a compound word to describe the heartless creature I seem, why they will have to admit that what I lack of heart I make up in soul. That is where the trouble lies.” These are not, you see, the sort of distinctions of which women are usually capable. It was as if somehow her world lacked a dimension, and love had become turned inwards into a kind of idolatry. At first I mistook this for a devastating and self-consuming egotism, for she seemed so ignorant of the little prescribed loyalties which constitute the foundations of affection between men and women. This sounds pompous, but never mind. But now, remembering the panics and exaltations which she endured, I wonder whether I was right. I am thinking of those tiresome dramas — scenes in furnished bedrooms, with Justine turning on the taps to drown the noise of her own crying. Walking up and down, hugging her arms in her armpits, muttering to herself, she seemed to smoulder like a tar-barrel on the point of explosion. My indifferent health and poor nerves — but above all my European sense of humour — seemed at such times to goad her beyond endurance. Suffering, let us say, from some imagined slight at a dinner-party she would patrol the strip of carpet at the foot of the bed like a panther. If I fell asleep she might become enraged and shake my by the shoulders, crying: “Get up, Jacob, I am suffering, can’t you see?” When I declined to take part in this charade she would perhaps break something upon the dressing-table in order to have an excuse to ring the bell. How many fearful faces of night-maids have I not seen confronted by this wild figure saying with a terrifying politeness: “Oblige me by clearing up the dressing-table. I have clumsily broken something.” Then she would sit smoking cigarette after cigarette. “I know exactly what this is” I told her once. “I expect that every time you are unfaithful to me and consumed by guilt you would like to provoke me to beat you up and give a sort of remission for your sins. My dear, I simply refuse to pander to your satisfactions. You must carry your own burdens. You are trying hard to get me to use a stockwhip on you. But I only pity you.” This, I must confess, made her very thoughtful for a moment and involuntarily her hands strayed to touch the smooth surface of the legs she had so carefully shaved that afternoon.…

• From Less (2017)

  He closes his eyes. In his “distant youth,” he often comforted his anxious mind with images of book covers, of author photographs, of newspaper clippings. These things he can now call easily to mind; they hold no comfort. Instead, his brain’s staff photographer produces a contact sheet of identical images: Javier pulling him toward the stone wall and kissing him. “This flight is overbooked, and we are looking for volunteers…” Overbooked again. But Arthur Less does not hear her, or else he cannot consider a second stay of execution, a second day of possibilities before he turns fifty. Perhaps it is all too much. Or else just enough. The piano piece ends, and the guests break into applause. From across the roofs comes either the echo of the applause or that of another party. A triangle of amber light catches one of Javier’s eyes and makes it gleam like glass. And all that goes through Less’s mind is the single thought: Ask me. With the married man smiling and touching Less’s red beard— Ask me —kissing him for perhaps half an hour longer, and here we have another man fallen under the spell of Less’s kiss, pushing him against the wall, unzipping his jacket, touching him passionately and whispering beautiful things but not the words that would change everything, for it is still possible to change everything, until Less tells him at last that it is time to go. Javier nods, walking him back into the green-striped room and standing beside him as he says his good-byes to the hostess, and to the other murder suspects, in his terrible French— Ask me —taking him to the front door and walking him downstairs as far as the street, all done in blue watercolors, blurred by the mist of rain, the carved stone porticos and wet satin streets— Ask me —and the poor Spaniard offers his own umbrella (refused) before smiling sadly—“I am sorry to see you go”—and waving good-bye. Ask me and I will stay. There is a call on Less’s phone, but he is preoccupied: already inside the plane, nodding to the beaky blond steward who greets him, as they always do, in the language not of the passenger, steward, or airport but of the plane itself (“Buonasera,” for it is Italian), bumping his awkward way down the aisle, assisting a tiny woman with her enormous overhead luggage, and finding his favorite seat: the rightmost, rearmost corner. No children to kick you from behind. Prison pillow, prison blanket. He removes his tight French shoes and slides them under the seat. Out the window: nighttime Charles de Gaulle, will-o’-the-wisps and men waving glowing wands. He closes the shade, then closes his eyes. He hears his neighbor sitting down roughly and speaking Italian, and he nearly understands it. Brief memory of swimming in a golf resort. Brief false memory of Dr. Ess. Brief real memory of rooftops and vanilla. “…welcome you on our flight from Paris to Marrakech…”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her words had given me a kind of jolt: they were not what I had been anticipating at all. Then I said, with a show of laughter: ‘Well, you know, I am hardly famous now. They were all rather long ago, those days.’ ‘Not so long,’ she said. ‘I remember seeing you at Camden Town, and another time at the Peckham Palace. That was with Agnes - how we laughed!’ Her voice sank a little. ‘It was just after that, that my troubles started ...’ I remembered the Peckham Palace very well, for Kitty and I had only played there once. It had been in the December before we opened at the Brit, so rather near to the start of my own troubles. I said, ‘To think of you sitting there, with Agnes beside you; and me upon the stage, with Kitty Butler ...’ She must have caught something in my tone, for she raised her eyes to mine and said: ‘And you don’t see Miss Butler at all, these days ... ?’ And when I shook my head, she looked knowing. ‘Well,’ she said then, ‘it’s something, ain’t it, to have been a star upon the stage!’ I sighed. ‘I suppose it is. But -’ I had thought of something else. ‘You oughtn’t to let Mrs Lethaby hear you say it. She, well, she don’t quite care for the music hall.’ She nodded. ‘I dare say.’ Then the clock upon the mantel struck the hour and, hearing it, she rose, and stubbed her fag out, and flapped her hand before her mouth to wave away the flavour of the smoke. ‘Lord, look at me!’ she cried. ‘I shall have Mrs Hooper after me.’ She reached for my empty coffee-cup, then picked up her tray and went to her scuttle of coal. Then she turned, and grew pink again. She said: ‘Will there be anything else, miss?’ We gazed at one another for the space of a couple of heart-beats. She still had the smudge of coal-dust at her brow. I shifted beneath the sheets, and felt again that slippery spot between my thighs - only now, it was slipperier than ever. I had been fucking Diana every night, almost, for a year and a half. Fucking had come to seem to me like shaking hands - you might do it, as a kind of courtesy, with anyone. But would Zena have come and let me kiss her, if I had called her to the bed? I cannot say. I did not call her. I only said: ‘Thank you, Zena; there’s nothing else, just now.’ And she picked up the scuttle, and went.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  A little fair-haired girl had appeared on the balcony beside him, and now gripped the rail and put her feet upon the bars. I said, ‘Where does the lady live - the sister they’ve gone to?’ and he pulled at his ear and looked thoughtful.‘Now, I did know, but have forgotten it ... I believe it was Bristol; or it may have been Bath...’‘Not London, then?’‘Oh no, certainly not London. Now, was it Brighton ... ?’I turned away from him, to gaze back up at Mrs Milne’s house - at the window of my old room, and at the balcony where I had liked, in summer-time, to sit. When I looked at the man again, he had his little girl in his arms, and the wind had caught her golden hair and made it flap about his cheeks: and I remembered them both, then, as the father and daughter that I had seen clapping their hands to the sound of a mandolin, on that balmy June evening, in the week I met Diana. They had lost their home and been given a new one. They had been visited by that charity-visitor with the romantic-sounding name.Florence! I did not know that I had remembered her. I had not thought of her at all, for a year and more.If only I might meet her, now! She found houses for the poor; she might find a house for me. She had been kind to me once - wouldn’t she be kind, if I appealed to her, a second time? I thought of her comely face, and her curling hair. I had lost Diana, I had lost Zena; and now I had lost Mrs Milne and Grace. In all of London she was the closest thing I had, at that moment, to a friend - and it was a friend just then that, above all else, I longed for.On the balcony above me, the man had turned away. Now I called him back: ‘Hey, mister!’ I walked closer to the wall of the tenement, and gazed up at him: he and his daughter leaned from the balcony rail - she looked like an angel on the ceiling of a church. I said, ‘You won’t know me; but I lived here once, with Mrs Milne. I am looking for a girl, who called on you when you moved in. She worked for the people that found you your flat.’He frowned. ‘A girl, you say?’‘A girl with curly hair. A plain-faced girl called Florence. Don’t you know who I mean? Don’t you have the name of the charity she worked for? It was run by a lady - a very clever-looking lady. The lady played the mandolin.’He had continued to frown, and to scratch at his head; but at this last detail he brightened. ‘That one,’ he said; ‘yes, I remember her.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The first blank lamps had begun to stiffen the damp paper background of Alexandria. The sea-wall with its lines of cafés swallowed in the spray glowed with a smudged and trembling phosphorescence. The wind blew dead south. Mareotis crouched among the reeds, stiff as a crouching sphinx. He was looking, he said, for the key to his watch — the beautiful gold pocket-watch which had been made in Munich. I thought afterwards that behind the urgency of his expression he masked the symbolic meaning that this watch had for him: signifying the unbound time which flowed through his body and mine, marked off for so many years now by this historic timepiece. Munich, Zagreb, the Carpathians.… The watch had belonged to his father. A tall Jew, dressed in furs, riding in a sledge. He had crossed into Poland lying in his mother’s arms, knowing only that the jewels she wore in that snowlit landscape were icy cold to the touch. The watch had ticked softly against his father’s body as well as his own — like time fermenting in them. It was wound by a small key in the shape of an ankh which he kept attached to a strip of black ribbon on his key-ring. ‘Today is Saturday’ he said hoarsely ‘in Alexandria.’ He spoke as if a different sort of time obtained here, and he was not wrong. ‘If I don’t find the key it will stop.’ In the last gleams of the wet dusk he tenderly drew the watch from its silk-lined waistcoat pocket. ‘I have until Monday evening. It will stop.’ Without the key it was useless to open the delicate golden leaf and expose the palpitating viscera of time itself stirring. ‘I have been over the ground three times. I must have dropped it between the café and the hospital.’ I would gladly have helped him, but night was falling fast; and after we had walked a short distance examining the interstices of the stones we were forced to give up the search. ‘Surely’ I said ‘you can have another key cut for it?’ He answered impatiently; ‘Yes. Of course. But you don’t understand. It belonged to this watch. It was part of it.’

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  As I opened the door of my room I could still see the imprint of Justine’s foot in the wet sand. Melissa was reading, and looking up at me she said with characteristic calm foreknowledge: ‘Something has happened — what is it?’ I could not tell her since I did not myself know. I took her face in my hands and examined it silently, with a care and attention, with a sadness and hunger I don’t ever remember feeling before. She said: ‘It is not me you are seeing, it is someone else.’ But in truth I was seeing Melissa for the first time. In some paradoxical way it was Justine who was now permitting me to see Melissa as she really was — and to recognize my love for her. Melissa smilingly reached for a cigarette and said: ‘You are falling in love with Justine’ and I answered as sincerely, as honestly, as painfully as I could: ‘No Melissa, it is worse than that’— though I could not for the life of me have explained how or why. When I thought of Justine I thought of some great freehand composition, a cartoon of a woman representing someone released from bondage in the male. ‘Where the carrion is’ she once quoted proudly from Boehme, speaking of her native city, ‘there the eagles will gather.’ Truly she looked and seemed an eagle at this moment. But Melissa was a sad painting from a winter landscape contained by dark sky; a window-box with a few flowering geraniums lying forgotten on the windowsill of a cement-factory.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  A thousand faces whose reverberating expressions I do not understand (‘We are all racing under sealed handicaps’ says a character in Pursewarden’s book), and out of them all there is one only I am burning to see, the black stern face of Justine. I must learn to see even myself in a new context, after reading those cold cruel words of Balthazar. How does a man look when he is ‘in love’? (The words in English should be uttered in a low bleating tone.) Peccavi! Imbecile! There I stand in my only decent suit, whose kneecaps are bagged and shiny with age, gazing fondly and short-sightedly around me for a glimpse of the woman who.… What does it matter? I do not need a Keats to photograph me. I do not suppose I am uglier than anyone else or less pleasant; and certainly my vanity is of a very general order — for how have I never stopped to ask myself for a second why Justine should turn aside to bestow her favours on me? What could I give her that she could not get elsewhere? Does she want my bookish talk and amateurish love-making — she with the whole bargain-basement of male Alexandria in her grasp? ‘A decoy!’ I find this very wounding to understand, to swallow, yet it has all the authority of curt fact. Moreover, it explains several things which have been for me up to now inexplicable — such as the legacy Pursewarden left me. It was his guilt, I think, for what he knew Justine was doing to Melissa: in ‘loving’ me. While she, for her part, was simply protecting him against the possible power of Nessim (how gentle and calm he looks in the candle-light). He once said with a small sigh ‘Nothing is easier to arrange in our city than a death or a disappearance.’

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  The thought crossed Clea’s mind: ‘The most dangerous thing in the world is a love founded on pity.’ But she dismissed it and allowed herself to see once more the image of this gentle, wise, undissimulating man breasting the torrent of Justine’s misfortunes and damming them up. Am I unjust in crediting her with another desire which such a solution would satisfy? (Namely, to be rid of Justine, free from the demands she made upon her heart and mind. She had stopped painting altogether.) The kindness of Nessim — the tall dark figure which drifted unresponsively around the corridors of society — needed some such task; how could a knight of the order born acquit himself if there were no castles and no desponding maidens weaving in them? Their preoccupations matched in everything — save the demand for love. ‘But the money is nothing’ she said; and here indeed she was speaking of what she knew to be precisely true of Nessim. He himself did not really care about the immense fortune which was his. But here one should add that he had already made a gesture which had touched and overwhelmed Justine. They met more than once, formally, like business partners, in the lounge of the Cecil Hotel to discuss the matter of this marriage with the detachment of Alexandrian brokers planning a cotton merger. This is the way of the city. We are mental people, and wordly, and have always made a clear distinction between the passional life and the life of the family. These distinctions are part of the whole complex of Mediterranean life, ancient and touchingly prosaic. ‘And lest an inequality of fortune should make your decision difficult’ said Nessim, flushing and lowering his head, ‘I propose to make you a birthday present which will enable you to think of yourself as a wholly independent person — simply as a woman, Justine. This hateful stuff which creeps into everyone’s thoughts in the city, poisoning everything! Let us be free of it before deciding anything.’ He passed across the table a slim green cheque with the words ‘Three Thousand Pounds’ written on it. She stared at it for a long time with surprise but did not touch it. ‘It has not offended you’ he said hastily at last, stammering in his anxiety. ‘No’ she said. ‘It is like everything you do. Only what can I do about not loving you?’ ‘You must, of course, never try to.’ ‘Then what sort of life could we make?’ Nessim looked at her with hot shy eyes and then lowered his glance to the table, as if under a cruel rebuke. ‘Tell me’ she said after a silence. ‘Please tell me. I cannot use your fortune and your position and give you nothing in exchange, Nessim.’ ‘If you would care to try’ he said gently, ‘we need not delude each other. Life isn’t very long. One owes it to oneself to try and find a means to happiness.’

• From Wild (2012)

  Just behind that longing was the urge to call Paul. He was my ex-husband now, but he was still my best friend. As much as I’d pulled away from him in the years after my mother’s death, I’d also leaned hard into him. In the midst of my mostly silent agonizing over our marriage, we’d had good times, been, in oddly real ways, a happy couple. The vented metal box in the corner turned itself on again and I went to stand before it, letting the frigid air blow against my bare legs. I was dressed in the clothes I’d been wearing since I’d left Portland the night before, every last thing brand-new. It was my hiking outfit and in it I felt a bit foreign, like someone I hadn’t yet become. Wool socks beneath a pair of leather hiking boots with metal fasts. Navy blue shorts with important-looking pockets that closed with Velcro tabs. Underwear made of a special quick-dry fabric and a plain white T-shirt over a sports bra. They were among the many things I’d spent the winter and spring saving up my money to buy, working as many shifts as I could get at the restaurant where I waited tables. When I’d purchased them, they hadn’t felt foreign to me. In spite of my recent forays into edgy urban life, I was easily someone who could be described as outdoorsy. I had, after all, spent my teen years roughing it in the Minnesota northwoods. My family vacations had always involved some form of camping, and so had the trips I’d taken with Paul or alone or with friends. I’d slept in the back of my truck, camped out in parks and national forests more times than I could count. But now, here, having only these clothes at hand, I felt suddenly like a fraud. In the six months since I’d decided to hike the PCT, I’d had at least a dozen conversations in which I explained why this trip was a good idea and how well suited I was to the challenge. But now, alone in my room at White’s Motel, I knew there was no denying the fact that I was on shaky ground. “Perhaps you should try a shorter trip first,” Paul had suggested when I told him about my plan during one of our should-we-stay-together-or-get-divorced discussions several months before. “Why?” I’d asked with irritation. “Don’t you think I can hack it?” “It isn’t that,” he said. “It’s only that you’ve never gone backpacking, as far as I know.” “I’ve gone backpacking!” I’d said indignantly, though he was right: I hadn’t. In spite of all the things I’d done that struck me as related to backpacking, I’d never actually walked into the wilderness with a backpack on and spent the night. Not even once.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Being strong is associated with being hard, not being a leaky, needy baby . That split between the masculine and the feminine presented itself very early in our lives. As a young woman I recognized that when a man comes inside your body, it is potentially a way to console his sorrow, to hold his tears. Love was as intense as war, sex was as emotional as loss, and death was always in the air. Ben met his wife, Karen, when he was a soldier. “She used to wait for me at the bus station in Ramat Gan, and as I got off the bus we would hug each other, sometimes standing there hugging for thirty minutes, in the heat, unable to let go. Then we would go to my parents’ house, where my mother cooked a big lunch. We ate and then got right into bed. I was always so tired that I don’t know how I functioned. I remember waking up the next day, feeling Karen’s familiar body, hiding with her under the blankets, and feeling happy. She was my sanctuary. When I came home, I needed her.” Ben’s unit was praised for being an effective counterterrorism unit. They performed undercover operations in urban Arab territories and often disguised themselves by dressing up as locals. They gathered intelligence information and performed high-risk operations like hostage rescue, kidnapping, and targeted killing. The group was called Mista’arvim in Hebrew, a name that derived from the Arabic “Musta’arabi” (those who live among the Arabs), referring to Arabic-speaking Jews who were “like Arabs,” or culturally Arabic but not Muslims. Ben is not a big guy, and because of his green eyes, long blond hair, and delicate features, he was often chosen to be the one disguised as a woman when they walked into the Arab markets. Sitting in my office, he tells me about the new Netflix television show called Fauda. “Do you know what fauda means?” he asks. When I shake my head he explains, “That was the code word for being exposed. We shouted, ‘ Fauda, ’ which in Arabic means ‘a mess,’ to let others know that we needed to run, that we had been discovered. The guy who wrote the show and plays the lead role was a fighter in our unit,” he says, “and so much of it is based on real things that happened. I started watching it and found myself thinking, ‘What the fuck? This is insane.’” “And what is it that you watch and think is insane?” I ask. “I’ll tell you the truth,” Ben says. “It’s that word that you used in our first session: omnipotent. I asked you then what it meant, and you said, ‘It means someone who thinks they can do anything, who thinks they have endless power like a superhero, with no limitations.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My complexion, to be sure, was perfectly smooth and clear, and my teeth were very white; but these - in our family, at least - were counted unremarkable, for since we all passed our days in a miasma of simmering brine, we were all as bleached and blemishless as cuttlefish. No, girls like Alice were meant to dance upon a gilded stage, skirted in satin, hailed by cupids; and girls like me were made to sit in the gallery, dark and anonymous, and watch them. Or so, anyway, I thought then. The routine I have described - the routine of prising and bearding and cooking and serving, and Saturday-night visits to the music hall - is the one that I remember most from my girlhood ; but it was, of course, only a winter one. From May to August, when British natives must be left to spawn, the dredging smacks pull down their sails or put to sea in search of other quarry; and oyster-parlours all over England are obliged, in consequence, to change their menus or close their doors. The business that my father did between autumn and spring, though excellent enough, was not so good that he could afford to shut his shop throughout the summer and take a holiday; but, like many Whitstable families whose fortunes depended upon the sea and its bounty, there was a noticeable easing of our labours in the warmer months, a kind of shifting into a slower, looser, gayer key. The restaurant grew less busy. We served crab and plaice and turbot and herrings, rather than oysters, and the filleting was kinder work than the endless scrubbing and shelling of the winter months. We kept our windows raised, and the kitchen door thrown open; we were neither boiled alive by the steam of the cooking-pots, nor numbed and frozen by barrels of oyster-ice, as we were in winter, but gently cooled by the breezes, and soothed by the sound of fluttering canvas and ringing pulleys that drifted into our kitchen from Whitstable Bay. The summer in which I turned eighteen was a warm one, and grew warmer as the weeks advanced. For days at a time Father left the shop for Mother to run, and set up a cockle-and-whelk stall on the beach. Alice and I were free to visit the Canterbury Palace every night if we cared to; but just as no one that July wanted to eat fried fish and lobster soup in our stuffy Parlour, so the very thought of passing an hour or two in gloves and bonnet, beneath the flaring gasoliers of Tricky Reeves’s airless music hall, made us gasp and droop and prickle.