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 The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Now, who needs a knife-grinder in our house? To sharpen what? What knives? ‘She would come through the gate once, but my heart would pound no less than ten times before that, I’m not lying. And then, when her hour came and the hands showed noon, it even wouldn’t stop pounding until, almost without tapping, almost noiselessly, her shoes would come even with my window, their black suede bows held tightly by steel buckles. ‘Sometimes she would get mischievous, pausing at the second window and tapping the glass with her toe. That same instant I would be at the window, but the shoe would be gone, the black silk blocking the light would be gone—I’d go and open the door for her. ‘No one knew of our liaison, I assure you of that, though it never happens. Her husband didn’t know, her acquaintances didn’t know. In the old house where I had that basement, people knew, of course, they saw that some woman visited me, but they didn’t know her name.’ ‘But who is she?’ asked Ivan, intrigued in the highest degree by this love story. The guest made a gesture signifying that he would never tell that to anyone, and went on with his story. Ivan learned that the master and the unknown woman loved each other so deeply that they became completely inseparable. Ivan could clearly picture to himself the two rooms in the basement of the house, where it was always twilight because of the lilacs and the fence. The worn red furniture, the bureau, the clock on it which struck every half hour, and books, books, from the painted floor to the sooty ceiling, and the stove. Ivan learned that his guest and his secret wife, from the very first days of their liaison, had come to the conclusion that fate itself had thrown them together at the corner of Tverskaya and that lane, and that they had been made for each other for all time. Ivan learned from the guest’s story how the lovers would spend the day. She would come, and put on an apron first thing, and in the narrow front hall where stood that same sink of which the poor patient was for some reason so proud, would light the kerosene stove on the wooden table, prepare lunch, and set it out on the oval table in the first room. When the May storms came and water rushed noisily through the gateway past the near-sighted windows, threatening to flood their last refuge, the lovers would light the stove and bake potatoes in it. Steam rose from the potatoes, the black potato skins dirtied their fingers.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  If it is true that cowardice is the most grievous vice, then the dog at least is not guilty of it. Storms were the only thing the brave dog feared. Well, he who loves must share the lot of the one he loves.’ ‘What is he saying?’ asked Margarita, and her perfectly calm face clouded over with compassion. ‘He says one and the same thing,’ Woland replied. ‘He says that even the moon gives him no peace, and that his is a bad job. That is what he always says when he is not asleep, and when he sleeps, he dreams one and the same thing: there is a path of moonlight, and he wants to walk down it and talk with the prisoner Ha-Nozri, because, as he insists, he never finished what he was saying that time, long ago, on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan. But, alas, for some reason he never manages to get on to this path, and no one comes to him. Then there’s no help for it, he must talk to himself. However, one does need some diversity, and to his talk about the moon he often adds that of all things in the world, he most hates his immortality and his unheard-of fame. He maintains that he would willingly exchange his lot for that of the ragged tramp Matthew Levi.’ ‘Twelve thousand moons for one moon long ago, isn’t that too much?’ asked Margarita. ‘Repeating the story with Frieda?’ said Woland. ‘But don’t trouble yourself here, Margarita. Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.’ ‘Let him go!’ Margarita suddenly cried piercingly, as she had cried once as a witch, and at this cry a stone fell somewhere in the mountains and tumbled down the ledges into the abyss, filling the mountains with rumbling. But Margarita could not have said whether it was the rumbling of its fall or the rumbling of satanic laughter. In any case, Woland was laughing as he glanced at Margarita and said: ‘Don’t shout in the mountains, he’s accustomed to avalanches anyway, and it won’t rouse him. You don’t need to ask for him, Margarita, because the one he so yearns to talk with has already asked for him.’ Here Woland turned to the master and said: ‘Well, now you can finish your novel with one phrase!’ The master seemed to have been expecting this, as he stood motionless and looked at the seated procurator. He cupped his hands to his mouth and cried out so that the echo leaped over the unpeopled and unforested mountains: ‘You’re free! You’re free! He’s waiting for you!’ The mountains turned the master’s voice to thunder, and by this same thunder they were destroyed. The accursed rocky walls collapsed.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Something seemed to pass between us, a subtle rearranging of air. The frank, unapologetic way she held my gaze. But she jarred back to attention when the screen door of the restaurant banged open. Out came a hefty man, already shouting. Shooing them like dogs. The girls grabbed the bag of bread and the chicken and took off running. The man stopped and watched them for a minute. Wiping his large hands on his apron, his chest moving with effort. By then the girls were a block away, their hair streaming behind them like flags, and a black school bus heaved past and slowed, and the three of them disappeared inside. —The sight of them; the gruesomely fetal quality of the chicken, the cherry of the girl’s single nipple. All of it was so garish, and maybe that’s why I kept thinking of them. I couldn’t put it together. Why these girls needed food from the dumpster. Who had been driving the bus, what kind of people would paint it that color. I’d seen that they were dear to one another, the girls, that they’d passed into a familial contract—they were sure of what they were together. The long night that stretched ahead, my mother out with Sal, suddenly seemed unbearable. —That was the first time I ever saw Suzanne—her black hair marking her, even at a distance, as different, her smile at me direct and assessing. I couldn’t explain it to myself, the wrench I got from looking at her. She seemed as strange and raw as those flowers that bloom in lurid explosion once every five years, the gaudy, prickling tease that was almost the same thing as beauty. And what had the girl seen when she looked at me? I used the bathroom inside the restaurant. Keep truckin’ , scrawled with a marker. Tess Pyle eats dick! The accompanying illustrations had been crossed out. All the silly, cryptic marks of humans who were resigned to being held in a place, shunted through the perfunctory order of things. Who wanted to make some small protest. The saddest: Fuck, written in pencil. While I washed my hands, drying them with a stiff towel, I studied myself in the mirror over the sink. For a moment, I tried to see myself through the eyes of the girl with the black hair, or even the boy in the cowboy hat, studying my features for a vibration under the skin. The effort was visible in my face, and I felt ashamed. No wonder the boy had seemed disgusted: he must have seen the longing in me. Seen how my face was blatant with need, like an orphan’s empty dish. And that was the difference between me and the black-haired girl—her face answered all its own questions. I didn’t want to know these things about myself. I splashed water on my face, cold water, like Connie had once told me to do.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  By now it was easy to establish that these two had fallen victim to the same gang, headed by that mysterious magician. But to Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless the investigator paid great attention. The door of Ivanushka’s room no. 117 opened towards evening on Friday, and into the room came a young, round-faced, calm and mild-mannered man, who looked quite unlike an investigator and yet was one of the best in Moscow. He saw lying on the bed a pale and pinched young man, in whose eyes one could read a lack of interest in what went on around him, whose eyes looked now somewhere into the distance, over his surroundings, now into the young man himself. The investigator gently introduced himself and said he had stopped at Ivan Nikolaevich’s to talk over the events at the Patriarch’s Ponds two days ago. Oh, how triumphant Ivan would have been if the investigator had come to him earlier—say, on Wednesday night, when Ivan had striven so violently and passionately to make his story about the Patriarch’s Ponds heard! Now his dream of helping to catch the consultant had come true, there was no longer any need to run after anyone, they had come to him on their own, precisely to hear his story about what had happened on Wednesday evening. But, alas, Ivanushka had changed completely in the time that had passed since the moment of Berlioz’s death: he was ready to answer all of the investigator’s questions willingly and politely, but indifference could be sensed both in Ivan’s eyes and in his intonation. The poet was no longer concerned with Berlioz’s fate. Before the investigator’s arrival, Ivanushka lay dozing, and certain visions passed before him. Thus, he saw a city, strange, incomprehensible, non-existent, with marble masses, eroded colonnades, roofs gleaming in the sun, with the black, gloomy and merciless Antonia Tower, with the palace on the western hill sunk almost up to its rooftops in the tropical greenery of the garden, with bronze statues blazing in the sunset above this greenery, and he saw armour-clad Roman centuries moving along under the walls of the ancient city. As he dozed, there appeared before Ivan a man, motionless in an armchair, clean-shaven, with a harried yellow face, a man in a white mantle with red lining, gazing hatefully into the luxurious and alien garden. Ivan also saw a treeless yellow hill with empty cross-barred posts. And what had happened at the Patriarch’s Ponds no longer interested the poet Ivan Homeless. ‘Tell me, Ivan Nikolaevich, how far were you from the turnstile yourself when Berlioz tumbled under the tram-car?’ A barely noticeable, indifferent smile touched Ivan’s lips for some reason, and he replied: ‘I was far away.’ ‘And the checkered one was right by the turnstile?’ ‘No, he was sitting on a little bench nearby.’ ‘You clearly recall that he did not go up to the turnstile at the moment when Berlioz fell?’ ‘I recall.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  16. Elizabeth Ann Seton: Convert and Caretaker Elizabeth’s Conversion and Charity Work Elizabeth and her daughter went to live with the Filicchi family. It was the Filicchis who, seeing Elizabeth’s piety and charisma, believed she could be a light for the nascent Catholic Church in America—if she could be convinced to convert. It was the humble parish church in Livorno that inspired Elizabeth. She had a strong emotional reaction to the moment of transubstantiation, when Catholics believe the Eucharist is transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Having been taught all her life the Protestant doctrine that the moment is symbolic rather than literal, she was fascinated by the idea of such extraordinary access to the divine and the community unity she perceived around the mass. She was also increasingly drawn to the Virgin Mary, whose veneration was not as strong in the Episcopalian tradition she had grown up in. Back in New York, Elizabeth lived on one floor of a small home outside of town, taking in boarders downstairs. For several years, she agonized over the question of conversion. She was open about her spiritual struggles, and her family worried that the Filicchis had preyed on her grief and loneliness. To support her children, she was reluctantly persuaded to partner with a couple who planned to open a school, though the work did not interest her. Finally, her decision to convert came to her through an emotional revelation: She attended a service at Trinity and felt a strong aversion to the symbolic Eucharist that was offered. An enthusiastic convert, she refashioned her life around her new faith. Her family rented small rooms near the Catholic parish, St. Peter’s, so that she could go to mass every morning and twice on Sundays. Plans for the school were in disarray when her partners pulled out, and she turned to quietly evangelizing the young Setons who attended her prayer circle. Elizabeth turned to a Baltimore priest, Louis William Dubourg, who was in New York raising funds for a new Catholic school. He convinced her to join him in Baltimore and open a school for girls. Baltimore was then the center of Catholic life in the young United States, and many of the 121

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Margarita Nikolaevna finally got tired of listening to this mysterious palaver about a head stolen from a coffin, and she was glad it was time for her to get off. A few minutes later Margarita Nikolaevna was sitting on one of the benches under the Kremlin wall, settling herself in such a way that she could see the Manège. 4 Margarita squinted in the bright sunlight, remembered her last night’s dream, remembered how, exactly a year ago to the day and the hour, she had sat next to him on this same bench. And in just the same way as then, her black handbag lay beside her on the bench. He was not beside her this day, but Margarita Nikolaevna mentally conversed with him all the same: ‘If you’ve been exiled, why don’t you send me word of yourself? People do send word. Have you stopped loving me? No, for some reason I don’t believe that. It means you were exiled and died . . . Release me, then, I beg you, give me freedom to live, finally, to breathe the air! . . .’ Margarita Nikolaevna answered for him herself: ‘You are free . . . am I holding you?’ Then she objected to him: ‘No, what kind of answer is that? No, go from my memory, then I’ll be free . . .’ People walked past Margarita Nikolaevna. Some man gave the well-dressed woman a sidelong glance, attracted by her beauty and her solitude. He coughed and sat down at the end of the same bench that Margarita Nikolaevna was sitting on. Plucking up his courage, he began: ‘Definitely nice weather today . . .’ But Margarita gave him such a dark look that he got up and left. ‘There, for example,’ Margarita said mentally to him who possessed her. ‘Why, in fact, did I chase that man away? I’m bored, and there’s nothing bad about this Lovelace, unless it’s the stupid word “definitely” . . . Why am I sitting alone under the wall like an owl? Why am I excluded from life?’ She became thoroughly sad and downcast. But here suddenly the same morning wave of expectation and excitement pushed at her chest. ‘Yes, it will happen!’ The wave pushed her a second time, and now she realized that it was a wave of sound. Through the noise of the city there came ever more distinctly the approaching beat of a drum and the sounds of slightly off-key trumpets. The first to appear was a mounted policeman riding slowly past the garden fence, with three more following on foot. Then a slowly rolling truck with the musicians. After that, a new, open hearse moving slowly, a coffin on it all covered with wreaths, and at the corners of the platform four standing persons—three men and one woman.

• From The Girls (2016)

  One night I didn’t bother to change, showing up at the table in a voile halter top that showed my stomach. She didn’t say anything, plowing her spoon through her rice with a distracted air until she seemed suddenly to remember my presence. Darting a slanted look at me. “You’re getting so skinny,” she announced, gripping my wrist and letting it drop in jealous measurement. I shrugged and she didn’t bring it up again. —When I finally met him in person, Mitch Lewis was fatter than I expected someone famous to be. Swollen, like there was butter under his skin. His face was furred with sideburns, his feathered golden hair. He brought a case of root beer for the girls and six netted bags of oranges. Stale brownies with German-chocolate frosting, in individual frilled cups like Pilgrims’ bonnets. Nougat candy in bright pink tins. The dregs of gift baskets, I assumed. A carton of cigarettes. “He knows I like this kind,” Suzanne said, hugging the cigarettes to her chest. “He remembered.” They all spoke of Mitch with that possessiveness, like he was an idea more than an actual person. They’d preened and prepared for Mitch’s visit with girlish eagerness. “You can see the ocean from his hot tub,” Suzanne told me. “Mitch put lights up so the water is all glowy.” “His dick is really big,” Donna added. “And like, purple.” Donna was washing her armpits in the sink, and Suzanne rolled her eyes. “Whore’s bath,” she murmured, but she’d changed into a dress. Even Russell slicked back his hair with water, giving him a polished, urbane air. Russell introduced me to Mitch, saying, “Our little actress,” his hand at my back. Mitch studied me with a questioning, smug smile. Men did it so easily, that immediate parceling of value. And how they seemed to want you to collude on your own judgment. “I’m Mitch,” he said. As if I hadn’t already known. His skin was fresh looking and poreless in the way of wealthy overeaters. “Give Mitch a hug,” Russell said. Nudging me. “Mitch wants a hug, just like the rest of us. He could use a little love.” Mitch looked expectant, opening a present he’d already shaken and identified. Usually, I would have been eaten by shyness. Conscious of my body, some error I could make. But already I felt different. I was one of them, and that meant I could smile back at Mitch, stepping forward to let him mash himself against me. The long afternoon that followed: Mitch and Russell took turns playing guitar. Helen sitting on Mitch’s lap in a bikini top. She kept giggling and ducking her pigtailed head into his neck. Mitch was a much better musician than Russell, but I tried not to notice. I got stoned with a new and furious concentration, passing beyond the point of nervousness and into a blunted state. Smiling almost involuntarily, so my cheeks started to ache.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Like horses that bolt with barn sickness, forgetting their rider. “It sounds nice,” Tom said. I could tell my stories had charged him, a dreamy excitement in his features. Mesmerized by bedtime tales of other worlds. “You could hang out for a while,” I said. “If you wanted.” Tom brightened at the offer, gratitude making him shy. “Only if I’m not intruding,” he said, a blush clotting his cheeks. —I imagined Suzanne and the others would be happy with me for bringing this new person. Expanding the ranks, all the old tricks. A pie-faced admirer to raise his voice with ours and contribute to the food pool. But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapors of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl. The car crossed the bridge, passing through the shit-stench veil of the landfill. I could see the span of another distant highway, sided by water, and the marshy flats before the sudden drop into the valley, the ranch hidden in its hills. —By that time, the ranch I’d known was a place that no longer existed. The end had already arrived: each interaction its own elegy. But there was too much hopeful momentum in me to notice. The leap in me when Tom’s car had first turned down the ranch drive: it had been two weeks, not long at all, but the return was overwhelming. And only when I saw everything still there, still alive and strange and half-dreamy as ever, did I understand I’d worried it might be gone. The things I loved, the miraculous house—like the one in Gone with the Wind, I’d realized, coming upon it again. The silty rectangle of pool, half-full, with its teem of algae and exposed concrete: it could all pass back into my possession. As Tom and I walked from the car, I had a flash of hesitation, noticing how Tom’s jeans were too clean. Maybe the girls would tease him, maybe it had been a bad idea to invite him along. I told myself it would be fine. I watched him absorbing the scene—I read his expression as impressed, though he must have been noticing the disrepair, the junked-out skeletons of cars. The crispy package of a dead frog, drifting on the surface of the pool. But these were details that no longer seemed notable to me, like the sores on Nico’s legs that stuck with bits of gravel. My eyes were already habituated to the texture of decay, so I thought that I had passed back into the circle of light. 13Donna stopped when she caught sight of us. A nest of laundry in her arms, smelling like the dusty air. “Trou-ble,” she hooted. “Trouble,” a word from a long-forgotten world.

• From The Girls (2016)

  He went to the main house every once in a while to get another beer from Russell’s stash, checking to make sure everyone did their chores. He and Suzanne were like the head counselors, keeping Donna and the others in line with a stray word or glance. Operating as satellite versions of Russell, though Guy’s deference was different from Suzanne’s. I think he stayed around because Russell was a way to get things he wanted—girls, drugs, a place to crash. He wasn’t in love with Russell, didn’t cower or pant in his presence—Guy was more like a sidekick, and all his blustery tales of adventure and hardship continued to star himself. He approached the fence, his beer and cigarette in the same hand, his jeans low on his hips. I knew he was watching me, and I concentrated on the hose, the warm fill of water in the trough. “The smoke keeps ’em away,” Guy said, and I turned as if I’d just noticed his presence. “The mosquitoes,” he said, holding out his cigarette. “Yeah,” I said, “sure. Thanks.” I took the cigarette over the fence, careful to keep the hose trained on the trough. “You seen Suzanne?” Already Guy assumed I’d know her movements. I was flattered to be the keeper of her whereabouts. “Some guy in San Rafael was selling his truck,” I said. “She went with Russell to look at it.” “Hm,” Guy said. Reaching to take his cigarette back. He seemed amused by my professionalism, though I’m sure he saw, too, the worship that hijacked my face whenever I spoke of Suzanne. My half-hitch step those times I hurried to her side. Maybe it confused him not to be the focus of all that desire—he was a handsome boy, used to the attention of girls. Girls who sucked in their stomachs when he put his hand down their jeans, girls who believed the jewelry he wore was the pretty evidence of his untapped emotional depths. “They’re probably at the free clinic,” Guy said. He mimed scratching his crotch, his cigarette waving around. He was trying to get me to snicker at Suzanne, collude in some way—I didn’t respond, beyond a grim smile. He tilted back on the heels of his cowboy boots. Studying me. “You can go on and help Roos,” he said in between the final slugs of his beer. “She’s in the kitchen.” I’d already finished my chores for the day, and working with Roos in the hot kitchen would be tedious, but I nodded with a martyr’s air. Roos had been married to a policeman in Corpus Christi, Suzanne had told me, which seemed about right. She floated around the border with the dreamy solicitude of beaten wives, and even my offer of help with the dishes was met with a mild cower. I scrubbed gelatinous fug from their biggest stew pot, the colorless scraps of food gumming up the sponge. Guy was punishing me in his petty fashion, but I didn’t care.

• From The Girls (2016)

  His mouth was chapped a violent pink. Slightly coated, I imagined, with pot resin. “Getting a jacket.” “Ah.” He slapped the bread together and took a bite. He watched me while he chewed. “Looking good these days, Boyd,” he said, then swallowed hard. His assessment knocked me so off balance that I felt I had almost imagined it. Was I even supposed to say anything back? I’d already memorized the sentence. He turned then at a noise from the front door, a girl in a denim jacket, her shape muffled by the screen. Pamela, his girlfriend. They were a constant couple, porous with each other; wearing similar clothes, silently passing the newspaper back and forth on the couch or watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Picking lint off each other as if from their own selves. I had seen Pamela at the high school, those times I’d ridden my bike past the dun-colored building. The rectangles of half-dry grass, the low, wide steps where older girls were always sitting in poor-boy shirts, pinkies linked, palming packs of Kents. The whiff of death among them, the boyfriends in humid jungles. They were like adults, even in the way they flicked the ashes of their cigarettes with weary snaps of the wrist. “Hey, Evie,” Pamela said. It was easy for some girls to be nice. To remember your name. Pamela was beautiful, it was true, and I felt that submerged attraction to her that everyone felt for the beautiful. The sleeves of her jean jacket were bulked at her elbows, her eyes doped looking from liner. Her legs were tan and bare. My own legs were dotted with the pricks of mosquito bites I worried into open wounds, my calves hatched with pale hairs. “Babe,” Peter said with his mouth full, and loped over to give her a hug, burying his face in her neck. Pamela squealed and pushed him away. When she laughed, her snaggletooth flashed. “Beyond foul,” Connie whispered, entering the room. But I was quiet, trying to imagine how that would feel: to be so known to someone that you had become almost the same person. —We were upstairs, later, smoking weed Connie had stolen from Peter. Stuffing the space below the door with the fat twist of a towel. She kept having to pinch the rolling paper shut again with her fingers, the two of us smoking in our solemn, hothouse silence. I could see Peter’s car out the window, parked awry like he’d had to abandon it under great duress. I’d always been aware of Peter, in the way I liked any older boy at that age, their mere existence demanding attention. But my feelings were suddenly amplified and pressing, as exaggerated and inevitable as events seem in dreams. I stuffed myself on banalities of him, the T-shirts he wore in rotation, the tender skin where the back of his neck disappeared into his collar.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Alex Posner worming his hand down my shorts in his exploratory, detached fashion, jerking away roughly when we heard footsteps. None of it—the kissing, the clawing hand in my underwear, the raw jumpiness of a penis in my fist—seemed in any way kin to what I did alone, the spread of pressure, like stairs going up. I imagined Peter almost as a corrective to my own desires, whose compulsion sometimes frightened me. —I lay back on the thin tapestry covering Connie’s bed. She had a bad sunburn; I watched her rub cloudy skin loose from her shoulder and roll it into tiny gray balls. My faint revulsion was tempered by the thought of Peter, who lived in the same house as Connie, who breathed the same air. Who ate from the same utensils. They were conflated in an essential way, like two different species raised in the same laboratory. From downstairs, I heard Pamela’s tripping laugh. “When I get a boyfriend, I’m going to make him take me out to dinner,” Connie said with authority. “She doesn’t even mind Peter just brings her here to screw.” Peter never wore underwear, Connie had complained, and the fact grew in my mind, making me nauseous in a not unpleasant way. The sleepy crease of his eyes from his permanent high. Connie paled in comparison: I didn’t really believe that friendship could be an end in itself, not just the background fuzz to the dramatics of boys loving you or not loving you. Connie stood at the mirror and tried to harmonize with one of the sweet, sorrowful forty-fives we listened to with fanatic repetition. Songs that overheated my own righteous sadness, my imagined alignment with the tragic nature of the world. How I loved to wring myself out that way, stoking my feelings until they were unbearable. I wanted all of life to feel that frantic and pressurized with portent, so even colors and weather and tastes would be more saturated. That’s what the songs promised, what they trawled out of me. One song seemed to vibrate with a private echo, as if marked. The simple lines about a woman, about the shape of her back when she turns it on the man for the last time. The ashes she leaves in bed from her cigarettes. The song played once through, and Connie hopped up to flip the record. “Play it again,” I said. I tried to imagine myself in the same way the singer saw the woman: the dangle of her silver bracelet, tinged with green, the fall of her hair. But I only felt foolish, opening my eyes to the sight of Connie at the mirror, separating her eyelashes with a safety pin, her shorts wedged into her ass. It wasn’t the same to notice things about yourself. Only certain girls ever called forth that kind of attention. Like the girl I’d seen in the park.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  A week had passed, and no Telly. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I really didn’t have any friends. Didn’t fuck with bitches. I wanted to go out, but going out would only lead to something else—fucking—and I had promised Telly I wouldn’t do that to him, even though he was laid up somewhere with his wife. I threw myself on the bed, depressed as hell. This nigga had really gotten to me. Star Hamilton, sprung? Who would have thought such a thing? Another week passed, and still no word from Telly. I decided enough was enough. I didn’t give a damn about his wife. It was my turn, I thought as I dialed his number. My heart stopped when I heard the recording saying that his number had been disconnected. Now I was worrying. Telly had plenty of money to pay his cell bill. What the fuck is going on? I slipped on my Melissa sandals and headed out my door. If he wasn’t checkin’ for me, I damn sure was gonna check for him. I was going to find my dick. I pulled up on Parkdale, and wasn’t a soul in sight. His niggas and workers usually held court in front of the spot, but not today. I checked the other spot on Vance. Once again, no one was out. Pounding the steering wheel, I was mad as a mutha. I needed someone to talk to. Without Telly, I didn’t have a life. He had me sprung, and I didn’t want any other man besides him. But that didn’t cut off all my options. Brooklyn picked up on the first ring. Answered her door-bell on the second. I didn’t know what I was about to get myself into. Whatever it was, I blamed Telly. Where his tongue wouldn’t lick, another would. Her perfume was sweet when she embraced me. Her touch was soft, running through my hair. We didn’t speak. Didn’t have to. We both knew why I was there. She lowered the lights and blasted the music. Took my hand and led me to the couch. Massaged my temples even though I didn’t have a headache. Again, I closed my eyes, weakening under her touch. She stopped, and I opened them. Saw her standing in front of me, her pussy all in my face. “You all right, Star?” I watched as those words fell from her sexy little lips. “I’m cool,” I whispered, staring between her legs. “Good,” she said, pushing my body back and stripping me out of my clothes.

• From The Girls (2016)

  The barest of nods we’d give one another, tuned to the same unseen frequencies. —It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember my life before Suzanne and the others, but it had been limited and expected, objects and people occupying their temperate orbits. The yellow cake my mother made for birthdays, dense and chilly from the freezer. The girls at school eating lunch on the asphalt, sitting on their overturned backpacks. Since I’d met Suzanne, my life had come into sharp, mysterious relief, revealing a world beyond the known world, the hidden passage behind the bookcase. I’d catch myself eating an apple, and even the wet swallow of apple could incite gratitude in me. The arrangement of oak leaves overhead condensing with a hothouse clarity, clues to a riddle I hadn’t known you could try to solve. —I followed Suzanne past the motorcycles parked at the front of the main house, as big and heavy looking as cows. Men in denim vests sat on the nearby boulders, smoking cigarettes. The air was prickly from the llamas in their pen, the funny smell of hay and sweat and sunbaked shit. “Hey, bunnies,” one of the men called. Stretching so his belly strained pregnant against his shirt. Suzanne smiled back but pulled me along. “If you stand around too much, they’ll jump on you,” she said, though she was pushing her shoulders back to emphasize her breasts. When I cut a glance over my shoulder, the man flicked his tongue at me, quick as a snake. “Russell can help all kinds of people, though,” Suzanne said. “And you know, the pigs don’t mess with the motorcycle guys. That’s important.” “Why?” “Because,” she said, like it was obvious. “The cops hate Russell. They hate anyone who tries to free people from the system. But they stay away if those guys are here.” She shook her head. “The pigs are trapped, too, that’s the bullshit. Their fucking shiny black shoes.” I stoked my own righteous agreement: I was in league with truth. I followed her to the clearing beyond the house, toward the campfire hum of voices in chorus. The money was banded tightly in my pocket, and I kept starting to tell Suzanne I’d brought it, then losing my nerve, concerned it was too meager an offering. Finally I stopped her, touching her shoulder before we joined the others. “I can get more,” I said, flustered. I just wanted her to know the money existed, imagining I would be the one to give it to Russell. But Suzanne quickly corrected that idea. I tried not to mind how swiftly she took the bills from my hand, counting them with her eyes. I saw that she was surprised by the amount. “Good girl.” —The sun hit the tin outbuildings and broke up the smoke in the air. Someone had lit a joss stick that kept going out.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Not if you cook them,” Suzanne shot back. “So cook them.” —Suzanne slept in a small outbuilding with a dirt floor, a bare twin mattress against each of the four walls. “Mostly girls crash here,” she said, “it depends. And Nico, sometimes, even though I don’t want him to. I want him to grow up free. But he likes me.” A square of stained silk was tacked above a mattress, a Mickey Mouse pillowcase on the bed. Suzanne passed me a rolled cigarette, the end wet with her saliva. Ash fell on her bare thigh, but she didn’t seem to notice. It was weed, but it was stronger than what Connie and I smoked, the dry refuse from Peter’s sock drawer. This was oily and dank, and the cloying smoke it produced didn’t dissipate quickly. I waited to start feeling differently. Connie would hate all this. Think this place was dirty and strange, that Guy was frightening—this knowledge made me proud. My thoughts were softening, the weed starting to surface. “Are you really sixteen?” Suzanne asked. I wanted to keep up the lie, but her gaze was too bright. “I’m fourteen,” I said. Suzanne didn’t seem surprised. “I’ll give you a ride home, if you want. You don’t have to stay.” I licked my lips—did she think I couldn’t handle this? Or maybe she thought I would embarrass her. “I don’t have to be anywhere,” I said. Suzanne opened her mouth to say something, then hesitated. “Really,” I said, starting to feel desperate. “It’s fine.” There was a moment, when Suzanne looked at me, when I was sure she’d send me home. Pack me back to my mother’s house like a truant. But then the look drained into something else, and she got to her feet. “You can borrow a dress,” she said. —There was a rack of clothes hanging and more spilling out of a garbage bag—torn denim. Paisley shirts, long skirts. The hems stuttering with loose stitching. The clothes weren’t nice, but the quantity and unfamiliarity stirred me. I’d always been jealous of girls who wore their sister’s hand-me-downs, like the uniform of a well-loved team. “This stuff is all yours?” “I share with the girls.” Suzanne seemed resigned to my presence: Maybe she’d seen that my desperation was bigger than any desire or ability she had to shoo me off. Or maybe the admiration was flattering, my wide eyes, greedy for the details of her. “Only Helen makes a fuss. We have to go get things back; she hides them under her pillow.” “Don’t you want some for yourself?” “Why?” She took a draw from the joint and held her breath. When she spoke, her voice was crackled. “I’m not on that kind of trip right now. Me me me. I love the other girls, you know. I like that we share. And they love me.” She watched me through the smoke. I felt shamed. For doubting Suzanne or thinking it was strange to share.

• From Trash (1988)

  I am the one she writes to, and if I have not heard from her then no one has. Sometimes I do not answer, I fall into Temple’s white-eyed memories, the silence of her flushed cheeks, her thin face and hot eyes. The wolf in my neck bares his teeth, stretches, lays one paw on the other, dreaming of fire and sparks raining down, myrtle leaves blackening in the heat. I fight the wolf, fight him with my love for Temple. I hug to myself the warmth and stillness of her porch, the certainty that she does not fear the wolf as I do, the wolf in her, the wolf who hides his teeth but watches, watches out of her eyes. Notes: Lupus: Any of various skin diseases; especially a chronic tuberculosis disease of the skin or mucous membranes; a particularly dangerous disease of metabolic origin—incurable but sometimes controlled by steroid drugs—which exhausts the energies of its victims and necessitates an extremely careful restricted life. Lupus: A wolf, from “eating into the substance of”; cancer. A Lesbian Appetite Biscuits. I dream about baking biscuits: sifting flour, baking powder, and salt together; measuring out shortening and buttermilk by eye; and rolling it all out with flour-dusted fingers. Beans. I dream about picking over beans, soaking them overnight, chopping pork fat, slicing onions, putting it all in a great iron pot to bubble for hour after hour until all the world smells of salt and heat and the sweat that used to pool on my mama’s neck. Greens. Mustard greens, collards, turnip greens, and poke—can’t find them anywhere in the shops up North. In the middle of the night I wake up desperate for the taste of greens, get up and find a twenty-four-hour deli that still has a can of spinach and half a pound of bacon. I fry the bacon, dump it in the spinach, bring the whole mess to a boil, and eat it with tears in my eyes. It doesn’t taste like anything I really wanted to have. When I find frozen collards in the Safeway, I buy five bags and store them away. Then all I have to do is persuade the butcher to let me have a pack of neck bones. Having those wrapped packages in the freezer reassures me almost as much as money in the bank. If I wake up with bad dreams there will at least be something I want to eat.

• From Trash (1988)

  They stole napkins, not one or two but a boxful at a time. Before we switched to sugar packets, they’d come in, unfold two or three napkins, open them like diapers, and fill them up with sugar before they left. Then they might take the knife and spoon to go with it. Once I watched a man take out a stack of napkins I was sure he was going to walk off with. But instead he sat there for thirty minutes making notes on them, then balled them all up and threw them away when he left. My mama was scandalized by that. “And right over there on the shelf is a notebook selling for ten cents. What’s wrong with these people?” “They’re living in the movies,” Mabel whispered, looking back toward the counter. “Yeah, Bette Davis movies,” I added. “I don’t know about the movies.” Harriet put her hand on Mama’s shoulder. “But they don’t live in the real world with the rest of us.” “No,” Mama said, “they don’t.” I take a bite of cherry tomato and hear Mama’s voice again. No, she says. “No,” I say. I tuck my blouse into my skirt and shift in my shoes. If I close my eyes, I can see Mabel’s brightly rouged cheekbones, Harriet’s pitted skin, and my mama’s shadowed brown eyes. When I go home tonight I’ll write her about this party and imagine how she’ll laugh about it all. The woman who was talking to me has gone off across the room to the other bar. People are giving up nibbling and going on to more serious eating. One of the men I work with every day comes over with a full plate and a wide grin. “Boy,” he drawls around a bite of the cornbread I contributed to the buffet. “I bet you sure can cook.” “Bet on it,” I say with my Mississippi accent. I swallow the rest of a cherry tomato and give him my heartbreaker’s smile. Steal Away M y hands shake when I am hungry, and I have always been hungry. Not for food—I have always had enough biscuit fat to last me. In college I got breakfast, lunch, and dinner with my dormitory fees, but my restless hunger didn’t abate. It was having only four dollars till the end of the month and not enough coming in then. I sat at a lunch table with the girls who planned to go to the movies for the afternoon, and counting three dollars in worn bills the rest in coins over and over in my pocket. I couldn’t go see any movies.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  117 o The monks presented an alternative culture, based not on wealth but poverty, not on power but weakness, not on prestige but lowliness. o In their communal life, they saw themselves as “New Testament Christians” living the “apostolic life” described by the Acts of the Apostles. o In a real sense, the impulse that drove the Reformation of the 16 th century was active already in early monasticism: a return to simplicity, poverty, the imitation of Jesus, and the trusting faith of the heart. Evagrius of Pontus and Palladius • The appeal of the monastic life even for the wealthy and sophisticated can be seen in the figures of Evagrius of Pontus and Palladius. • Evagrius of Pontus (345–399) was born Christian and was educated in Constantinople. After an inappropriate love relationship when in priestly orders, he fled to Jerusalem and joined a monastery of Rufinus and Melania. He spent most of his life in the desert in Nitria. A disciple of Origen, his writings (the Praktikos and the Gnostic Chapters) had a great influence on later spirituality. • Palladius (c. 364–420/30) was born in Galatia. As a young man, he traveled extensively in Egypt among the monks, collecting stories in the manner of an ethnographer. He later became bishop of Heliopolis in Bithynia. In his Lausiac History, he presents a vivid picture of the cultural complexity represented by Egyptian monasticism. o Palladius is an example of a well-established figure in society who “goes on pilgrimage” to visit the monks of Egypt and Palestine, collecting stories and sayings and seeking a simplicity and nobility of life not available in the cities.

• From The Girls (2016)

  The child who cannot decipher that her mother might be frightened, too. The mother who understands she can do nothing for protection except offer up her own weak body in exchange. —Maybe some part of me had known where things were headed, a sunken glimmer in the murk: maybe I had a sense of the possible trajectory and went along anyway. Later that summer, and at various points throughout my life, I would sift through the grain of that night, feeling blindly. All Suzanne said was that we were paying Mitch a visit. Her words were spiked with a cruelty I hadn’t heard before, but even so, this was the furthest my mind ranged: we were going to do what we’d done at the Dutton house. We’d perform an unsettling psychic interruption so Mitch would have to be afraid, just for a minute, would have to reorder the world anew. Good—Suzanne’s hatred for him allowed and inflamed my own. Mitch, with his fat, probing fingers, the halting, meaningless chatter he kept up while looking us over. As if his mundane words would fool us, keep us from noticing how his glance dripped with filth. I wanted him to feel weak. We would occupy Mitch’s house like tricky spirits from another realm. Because I did feel that, it’s true. A sense that something united all of us in the car, the cool whiff of other worlds on our skin and hair. But I never thought, even once, that the other world might be death. I wouldn’t really believe it until the news gathered its stark momentum. After which, of course, the presence of death seemed to color everything, like an odorless mist that filled the car and pressed against the windows, a mist we inhaled and exhaled and that shaped every word we spoke. —We had not gone very far, maybe twenty minutes from the ranch, Guy easing the car along the tight dark curves of the hills, emerging into the long empty stretches of the flat land and picking up speed. The stands of eucalyptus we passed, the chill of fog beyond the window. My alertness held everything in precise amber. The radio, the shuffle of bodies, Suzanne’s face in profile. This is what they had all the time, I imagined, this net of mutual presence like something too near to identify. Just a sense of being buoyed along the fraternal rush, the belonging. Suzanne rested her hand on the seat between us. The familiar sight stirred me, remembering how she’d grabbed for me in Mitch’s bed. The spotty surface of her nails, brittle from poor diet. I was sick with foolish hope, believing I would ever stay in the blessed space of her attention. I tried to reach for her hand. A tap of her palm, like I had a note to pass. Suzanne startled a little and jarred from a haze I had not noticed until it broke. “What?” she snapped.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  At the age of twenty, after two years of undergraduate studies, I took off a year from the turmoil that had become my life to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. My brother and cousin were studying at English universities at the time, and they suggested that I come over and join them. But I had been deeply affected by the Scottish music and poetry that my father loved, and there was something very appealing to me in the Celtic melancholy and fire that I associated with the Scottish side of my ancestry, even though I at the same time wanted to get away from my father’s black, unpredictable moods. Not entirely away, however; I think I had a vague notion that I might better understand my own chaotic feelings and thinking if I returned in some sense to the source. I applied for a federal grant, which enabled me for the first time to become a full-time student, and I left Los Angeles for a year of science by day, and music and poetry by night. St. Andrews, my tutor was saying, was the only place he knew where it snowed horizontally. An eminent neurophysiologist, he was a tall, lanky, and droll Yorkshireman who, like many of his fellow English, believed that rather superior weather, to say nothing of civilization, ended where the Scottish countryside began. He had a point about the weather. The ancient, gray-stoned town of St. Andrews sits right on the North Sea and takes blasts of late-autumn and winter winds that have to be experienced to be believed. I had been living in Scotland for several months by that time, and I had become a definite believer. The winds were especially harsh just off the town’s East Sands, where the university’s marine biology laboratory had been built. There were ten or so of us third-year zoology students, and we were sitting, shivering, wool layered, wool gloved, and teeth chattering, in the damp cold of the tank-filled laboratory. My tutor seemed even more puzzled by my being in these advanced zoology courses than I was. He was an authority on what one might have thought was a somewhat specialized portion of the animal kingdom, namely the auditory nerve of the locust, and just prior to his remarks about horizontal snowfalls in Scotland he had put my striking ignorance of zoological matters out into the public domain.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  The monks presented an alternative culture, based not on o wealth but poverty, not on power but weakness, not on prestige but lowliness. In their communal life, they saw themselves as “New o Testament Christians” living the “apostolic life” described by the Acts of the Apostles. In a real sense, the impulse that drove the Reformation of the o 16th century was active already in early monasticism: a return to simplicity, poverty, the imitation of Jesus, and the trusting faith of the heart. Evagrius of Pontus and Palladius • The appeal of the monastic life even for the wealthy and sophisticated can be seen in the figures of Evagrius of Pontus and Palladius. • Evagrius of Pontus (345–399) was born Christian and was educated in Constantinople. After an inappropriate love relationship when in priestly orders, he fled to Jerusalem and joined a monastery of Rufinus and Melania. He spent most of his life in the desert in Nitria. A disciple of Origen, his writings (the Praktikos and the Gnostic Chapters) had a great influence on later spirituality. • Palladius (c. 364–420/30) was born in Galatia. As a young man, he traveled extensively in Egypt among the monks, collecting stories in the manner of an ethnographer. He later became bishop of Heliopolis in Bithynia. In his Lausiac History, he presents a vivid picture of the cultural complexity represented by Egyptian monasticism. Palladius is an example of a well-established figure in society o who “goes on pilgrimage” to visit the monks of Egypt and Palestine, collecting stories and sayings and seeking a simplicity and nobility of life not available in the cities. 117