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.

Page 15 of 170 · 20 per page

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The dynamics of the Ideal Lover have limitless possibilities, not all of them erotic. In politics, Talleyrand essentially played the role of the Ideal Lover with Napoleon, whose ideal in both a cabinet minister and a friend was a man who was aristocratic, smooth with the ladies—all the things that Napoleon himself was not. In 1798, when Talleyrand was the French foreign minister, he hosted a party in Napoleon's honor after the great general's dazzling military victories in Italy. To the day Napoleon died, he remembered this party as the best he had ever attended. It was a lavish affair, and Talleyrand wove a subtle message into it by placing Roman busts around the house, and by talking to Napoleon of reviving the imperial glories of ancient Rome. This sparked a glint in the leader's eye, and indeed, a few years later, Napoleon gave himself the title of emperor—a move that The Ideal Lover • 39 only made Talleyrand more powerful. The key to Talleyrand's power was his ability to fathom Napoleon's secret ideal: his desire to be an emperor, a dictator. Talleyrand simply held up a mirror to Napoleon and let him glimpse that possibility. People are always vulnerable to insinuations like this, which stroke their vanity, almost everyone's weak spot. Hint at something for them to aspire to, reveal your faith in some untapped potential you see in them, and you will soon have them eating out of your hand. If Ideal Lovers are masters at seducing people by appealing to their higher selves, to something lost from their childhood, politicians can benefit by applying this skill on a mass scale, to an entire electorate. This was what John F. Kennedy quite deliberately did with the American public, most obviously in creating the "Camelot" aura around himself. The word "Camelot" was applied to his presidency only after his death, but the romance he consciously projected through his youth and good looks was fully functioning during his lifetime. More subtly, he also played with America's images of its own greatness and lost ideals. Many Americans felt that with the wealth and comfort of the late 1950s had come great losses; ease and conformity had buried the country's pioneer spirit. Kennedy appealed to those lost ideals through the imagery of the New Frontier, which was ex-emplified by the space race. The American instinct for adventure could find outlets here, even if most of them were symbolic. And there were other calls for public service, such as the creation of the Peace Corps. Through appeals like these, Kennedy resparked the uniting sense of mission that had gone missing in America during the years since World War II. He also attracted to himself a more emotional response than presidents commonly got. People literally fell in love with him and the image.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  agent, a modeling star of the fifties who had the manner of a dorm mother and the heart of a pimp. Over the months, though, you started eating at better restaurants and Amanda started getting her hair cut on the Upper East Side. The first time she went to Italy for the fall showings, she cried at the airport. She reminded you that in a year and a half you had never spent a night apart. She said to hell with it, she would skip Italy, screw modeling. You convinced her to go. She called every night from Milan. Later on these separations did not seem so traumatic. You postponed your honeymoon indefinitely because she had to do the spring collections three days after the wedding. You were busy with your own work. There were nights you got home after she was asleep. You looked at her across the breakfast nook in the morning and it often seemed that she was looking through the walls of the apartment building halfway across the continent to the plains, as if she had forgotten something there and couldn’t quite remember what it was. Her eyes reflected the flat vastness of her native ground. She sat with her elbows on the butcher-block table, twisting a strand of hair in her fingers, head cocked to one side as if she were listening for voices on the wind. There was always something elusive about her, a quality you found mysterious and unsettling. You suspected she herself couldn’t quite identify the longing that she variously attached to you, to her job, to having and spending, to her missing father, and that she had once attached to the idea of getting married. You were married. And still she was looking for something. But then she would cook you a special dinner, leave love notes in your briefcase and your bureau drawers. A few months ago she was packing for a trip to Paris when she began to cry. You asked her what was wrong. She said she was nervous about the trip. By the time the cab arrived she was fine. You kissed at the door. She told you to water the plants. The day before she was due home, she called. Her voice sounded peculiar. She said she wasn’t coming home. You didn’t understand. “You got a later flight?” “I’m staying,” she said. “For how long?”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Genji went far away, and things settled down. Then the emperor died and his son took over. A kind of emptiness had come to the court: the dozens of women whom Genji had seduced could not endure his absence, and flooded him with letters. Even women who had never known him intimately would weep over any relic he had left behind—a robe, for instance, in which his scent still lingered. And the young emperor missed his jocular presence. And the princesses missed the music he had played on the koto. And Oborozukiyo pined for his midnight visits. Finally even Kokiden broke down, realizing that she could not resist him. So Genji was summoned back to the court. And not only was he forgiven, he was given a hero's welcome; the young emperor himself greeted the scoundrel with tears in his eyes. The Natural • 65 The story of Genji's life is told in the eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu, a woman of the Heian court. The character was most likely based on a real-life man, Fujiwara no Korechika. Indeed another book of the period, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, describes an encounter between the female author and Korechika, and reveals his incredible charm and his almost hypnotic effect on women. Genji is a Natural, an undefensive lover, a man who has a lifelong obsession with women but whose appreciation of and affection for them makes him irresistible. As he says to Oborozukiyo in the novel, "I am always allowed my way." This self-belief is half of Genji's charm. Resistance does not make him defensive; he retreats gracefully, reciting a little poetry, and as he leaves, the perfume of his robes trailing behind him, his victim wonders why she has been so afraid, and what she is missing by spurning him, and she finds a way to let him know that the next time things will be different. Genji takes nothing seriously or personally, and at the age of forty, an age at which most men of the eleventh century were already looking old and worn, he still seems like a boy. His seductive powers never leave him. Human beings are immensely suggestible; their moods will easily spread to the people around them. In fact seduction depends on mimesis, on the conscious creation of a mood or feeling that is then reproduced by the other person. But hesitation and awkwardness are also contagious, and are deadly to seduction. If in a key moment you seem indecisive or self-conscious, the other person will sense that you are thinking of yourself, instead of being overwhelmed by his or her charms. The spell will be broken.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  larly from wealthy men, for at the time she was considered the most beauti- [ Greco] stretched ful woman in the world. Aristotle Onassis and the Shah of Iran telephoned languorously in an her almost daily, begging for a date. She turned them all down. A few days armchair of her Paris house after her arrival, though, she received an invitation from Elsa Maxwell, the and observed: • "They say I am a dangerous woman. society hostess, who was giving a little party in Cannes. Rita balked but Well, Aly was a dangerous Maxwell insisted, telling her to buy a new dress, show up a little late, and man. He was charming in make a grand entrance. a very special way. There is a kind of man who is very Rita played along, and arrived at the party wearing a white Grecian clever with women. He gown, her red hair falling over her bare shoulders. She was greeted by a re- takes you out to a action she had grown used to: all conversation stopped as both men and restaurant and if the most beautiful woman comes in, women turned in their chairs, the men gazing in amazement, the women he doesn't look at her. He jealous. A man hurried to her side and escorted her to her table. It was makes you feel you are a thirty-seven-year-old Prince Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan III, who queen. Of course, I understood it. I didn 't was the worldwide leader of the Islamic Ismaili sect and one of the richest believe it. I would laugh men in the world. Rita had been warned about Aly Khan, a notorious rake. and point out the To her dismay, they were seated next to each other, and he never left her beautiful woman. But that side. He asked her a million questions—about Hollywood, her interests, on is me. . . . Most women are made very happy by and on. She began to relax a little and open up. There were other beautiful that kind of attention. It's women there, princesses, actresses, but Aly Khan ignored them all, acting as pure vanity. She thinks, if Rita were the only woman there. He led her onto the dance floor, and 'I'll be the one and the others will leave.' though he was an expert dancer, she felt uncomfortable—he held her a lit- • " . . . With Aly, how tle too close. Still, when he offered to drive her back to her hotel, she the woman felt was most agreed. They sped along the Grande Corniche; it was a beautiful night. For important. . . . He was a great charmer, a great one evening she had managed to forget her many problems, and she was seducer. He made you feel grateful, but she was still in love with Welles, and an affair with a rake like fine and that everything Aly Khan was not what she needed.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Our personalities are often molded by how we are treated: if a parent or spouse is defensive or argumentative in dealing with us, we tend to respond the same way. Never mistake people's exterior characteristics for reality, for the character they show on the surface may be merely a reflection of the people with whom they have been most in contact, or a front disguising its own opposite. A gruff exterior may hide a person dying for warmth; a repressed, sober-looking type may actually be struggling to conceal uncontrollable emotions. That is the key to charm—feeding what has been repressed or denied. By indulging the queen, by making himself a source of pleasure, Disraeli was able to soften a woman who had grown hard and cantankerous. Indulgence is a powerful tool of seduction: it is hard to be angry or defensive with someone who seems to agree with your opinions and tastes. Charmers may appear to be weaker than their targets but in the end they are the more powerful side because they have stolen the ability to resist. 2. In 1971, the American financier and Democratic Party power-player Averell Harriman saw his life drawing to a close. He was seventy-nine, his wife of many years, Marie, had just died, and with the Democrats out 86 • The Art of Seduction of office his political career seemed over. Feeling old and depressed, he resigned himself to spending his last years with his grandchildren in quiet retirement. A few months after Marie's death, Harriman was talked into attending a Washington party. There he met an old friend, Pamela Churchill, whom he had known during World War II, in London, where he had been sent as a personal envoy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She was twenty-one at the time, and was the wife of Winston Churchill's son Randolph. There had certainly been more beautiful women in the city, but none had been more pleasant to be around: she was so attentive, listening to his problems, befriending his daughter (they were the same age), and calming him whenever he saw her. Marie had remained in the States, and Randolph was in the army, so while bombs rained on London Averell and Pamela had begun an affair. And in the many years since the war, she had kept in touch with him: he knew about the breakup of her marriage, and about her endless series of affairs with Europe's wealthiest playboys. Yet he had not seen her since his return to America, and to his wife. What a strange coincidence to run into her at this particular moment in his life. At the party Pamela pulled Harriman out of his shell, laughing at his jokes and getting him to talk about London in the glory days of the war.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  us have been stamped with the imprint of parent figures; and nothing con- modified my own reactions jures up this shared experience more than myth. The patterns of myth, accordingly. . . . " • Age: born out of warring feelings of helplessness on the one hand and thirst for 26, Sex: female, Nation-immortality on the other, are deeply engraved in us all. ality: British "I only fell in love once with a movie Mythic Stars are figures of myth come to life. To appropriate their actor. It was Conrad Veidt. power, you must first study their physical presence—how they adopt a dis- His magnetism and his tinctive style, are cool and visually arresting. Then you must assume the personality got me. His voice and gestures fascin-pose of a mythic figure: the rebel, the wise patriarch, the adventurer. (The ated me. I hated him, pose of a Star who has struck one of these mythic poses might do the trick.) feared him, loved him. Make these connections vague; they should never be obvious to the con-When he died it seemed to me that a vital part of my scious mind. Your words and actions should invite interpretation beyond imagination died too, and their surface appearance; you should seem to be dealing not with specific, my world of dreams was nitty-gritty issues and details but with matters of life and death, love and bare. " hate, authority and chaos. Your opponent, similarly, should be framed —J. P . MAYER, BRITISH not merely as an enemy for reasons of ideology or competition but as a vil-CINEMAS AND THEIR AUDIENCES lain, a demon. People are hopelessly susceptible to myth, so make yourself the hero of a great drama. And keep your distance—let people identify with you without being able to touch you. They can only watch and dream. 126 • The Art of Seduction The savage worships idols Jack's life had more to do with myth, magic, legend, saga, of wood and stone; the and story than with political theory or political science. civilized man, idols of flesh —JACQUELINE KENNEDY, A WEEK AFTER JOHN KENNEDY'S DEATH and blood. — G E O R G E BERNARD SHAW Keys to the Character When the eye's rays encounter some clear, well- polished object— be it Seduction is a form of persuasion that seeks to bypass consciousness, stirring the unconscious mind instead. The reason for this is simple: we are burnished steel or glass or so surrounded by stimuli that compete for our attention, bombarding us water, a brilliant stone, or with obvious messages, and by people who are overtly political and manipu-any other polished and

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  its imagination or realism, dream, or a movie star or political star, or even one of those real-life fasci-the meaningful impressions nators, like a Warhol, who may cross our path? Unable to have them, we it leaves—t hese are all become obsessed with them—they haunt our thoughts, our dreams, our secondary. Only the myth fantasies. We imitate them unconsciously. The psychologist Sandor Feris powerful, and at the heart of the enczi calls this "introjection": another person becomes part of our ego, we cinematographic myth lies internalize their character. That is the insidious seductive power of a Star, a seduction— that of the power you can appropriate by making yourself into a cipher, a mix of the renowned seductive figure, a man or woman (but real and the unreal. Most people are hopelessly banal; that is, far too real. The Star • 127 What you need to do is etherealize yourself. Your words and actions seem above all a woman) linked to come from your unconscious—have a certain looseness to them. You to the ravishing but specious power of the hold yourself back, occasionally revealing a trait that makes people wonder cinematographic image whether they really know you. itself. . . . • The star is by The Star is a creation of modern cinema. That is no surprise: film re- no means an ideal or sublime being: she is creates the dream world. We watch a movie in the dark, in a semisomno- artificial. . . . Her presence lent state. The images are real enough, and to varying degrees depict serves to submerge all realistic situations, but they are projections, flickering lights, images—we sensibility and expression know they are not real. It as if we were watching someone else's dream. It beneath a ritual fascination with the void, beneath was the cinema, not the theater, that created the Star. ecstasy of her gaze and the On a theater stage, actors are far away, lost in the crowd, too real in nullity of her smile. This is their bodily presence. What enabled film to manufacture the Star was the how she achieves mythical status and becomes subject close-up, which suddenly separates actors from their contexts, filling your to collective rites of mind with their image. The close-up seems to reveal something not sacrificial adulation. • The so much about the character they are playing but about themselves. We ascension of the cinema idols, the masses' glimpse something of Greta Garbo herself when we look so closely into divinities, was and remains her face. Never forget this while fashioning yourself as a Star. First, you a central story of modern must have such a large presence that you can fill your target's mind the way times. . . . There is no point in dismissing it as

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  arson in her heart. \ hair was pulled into a severe chignon, and she wore tailored suits. It was a Penelope was racked by serious look, befitting a woman who was to become the savior of the poor. crafty Ulysses's absence, \ Soon her image could be seen everywhere—her initials on the walls, the Protesilaus, abroad, made Laodameia burn. \ Short sheets, the towels of the hospitals for the poor; her profile on the jerseys of partings do best, though: a soccer team from the poorest part of Argentina, whose club she spon-time wears out affections, \ sored; her giant smiling face covering the sides of buildings. Since finding The absent love fades, a out anything personal about her had become impossible, all kinds of elabo-new one takes its place. \ With Menelaus away, rate fantasies began to spring up about her. And when cancer cut her life Helen's disinclination for short, in 1952, at the age of thirty-three (the age of Christ when he died), sleeping \ Alone led her the country went into mourning. Millions filed past her embalmed body. into her guest's \ Warm bed at night. Were you crazy, She was no longer a radio actress, a wife, a first lady, but Evita, a saint. Menelaus? — O V I D , T H E A R T O F L O V E , TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN Interpretation. Eva Duarte was an illegitimate child who had grown up in poverty, escaped to Buenos Aires to become an actress, and been forced to do many tawdry things to survive and get ahead in the theater world. Her Concerning the Birth of dream was to escape all of the constraints on her future, for she was in-Love • Here is what tensely ambitious. Perón was the perfect victim. He imagined himself a happens in the soul: • great leader, but the reality was that he was fast becoming a lecherous old 1. Admiration. • 2. You think, "Mow delightful it man who was too weak to raise himself up. Eva injected poetry into his Poeticize Your Presence • 281 life. Her language was florid and theatrical; she surrounded him with atten- would be to kiss her, to tion, indeed to the point of suffocation, but a woman's dutiful service to a be kissed by her," and so on. . . . • 3. Hope. You great man was a classic image, and was celebrated in innumerable tango bal- observe her perfections, and lads. Yet she managed to remain elusive, mysterious, like a movie star you it is at this moment that a see all the time on the screen but never really know. And when Perón was woman really ought to surrender, for the utmost

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  with him that she would dress in front of him, or greet him in her night-shared delights. Neglect \ gown. These glimpses of her body drove him crazy, and he would some-These devices— his ardor times try to steal a kiss or caress, only to have her push him away and scold will wane. A racehorse runs most strongly \ When the him. Weeks went by; clearly he had shown that his was not a passing fancy. field's ahead, to be paced \ Tired of the endless courtship, he took Conchita's mother aside one day And passed. So the dying and proposed that he set the girl up in a house of her own. He would treat embers of passion can be fanned to \ Fresh flame by her like a queen; she would have everything she wanted. (So, of course, some outrage— I can only would her mother.) Surely his proposal would satisfy the two women—but love, \ Myself, I confess it, the next day, a note came from Conchita, expressing not gratitude but re-when wronged. But don't let the cause of \ Pain be crimination: he was trying to buy her love. "You shall never see me again," too obvious: let a lover she concluded. He hurried to the house only to discover that the women suspect \ More than he had moved out that very morning, without leaving word where they were knows. Invent a slave who going. watches your every \ Movement, make clear Don Mateo felt terrible. Yes, he had acted like a boor. Next time he what a jealous martinet \ would wait months, or years if need be, before being so bold. Soon, how-That man of yours is— ever, another thought assailed him: he would never see Conchita again. such things will excite him. Pleasure \ Too safely Only then did he realize how much he loved her. enjoyed lacks zest. You The winter passed, the worst of Mateo's life. One spring day he was want to be free \ As Thaïs? walking down the street when he heard someone calling his name. He Act scared. Though the door's quite safe, let him in looked up: Conchita was standing in an open window, beaming with ex-by \ The window. Look citement. She bent down toward him and he kissed her hand, beside him-nervous. Have a smart \ self with joy. Why had she disappeared so suddenly? It was all going too Maid rush in, scream quickly, she said. She had been afraid—of his intentions, and of her own "We're caught!" while you bundle the quaking \ Youth feelings. But seeing him again, she was certain that she loved him. Yes, she out of sight. But be sure \ was ready to be his mistress. She would prove it, she would come to him. To offset his fright with Being apart had changed them both, he thought. some moments of carefree pleasure— \ Or he'll think

• From Middlesex (2002)

  hallway, the Acropolis night-light is burning, a gift from Jackie Halas, who owns a souvenir shop. My mother is at her vanity when my fa- ther enters the bedroom. With two fingers she rubs Noxzema into her face, wiping it off with a tissue. My father had only to say an af- fectionate word and she would have forgiven him. Not me but some- body like me might have been made that night. An infinite number of possible selves crowded the threshold, me among them but with no guaranteed ticket, the hours moving slowly, the planets in the heavens circling at their usual pace, weather coming into it, too, be- cause my mother was afraid of thunderstorms and would have cud- dled against my father had it rained that night. But, no, clear skies held out, as did my parents' stubbornness. The bedroom light went out. They stayed on their own sides of the bed. At last, from my mother, "Night." And from my father, "See you in the morning." The moments that led up to me fell into place as though decreed. Which, I guess, is why I think about them so much. The following Sunday, my mother took Desdcmona and my brother to church. My father never went along, having become an apostate at 11 the age of eight over the exorbitant price of votive candles. Likewise, my grandfather preferred to spend his mornings working on a mod- ern Greek translation of the "restored" poems of Sappho. For the next seven years, despite repeated strokes, my grandfather worked at a small desk, piecing together the legendary fragments into a larger mosaic, adding a stanza here, a coda there, soldering an anapest or an iamb. In the evenings he played his bordello music and smoked a hookah pipe. In 1959, Assumption Greek Orthodox Church was located on Charlevoix. It was there that I would be baptized less than a year later and would be brought up in the Orthodox faith. Assumption, with its revolving chief priests, each sent to us via the Patriarchate in Con- stantinople, each arriving in the full beard of his authority, the embroidered vestments of his sanctity, but each wearying after a time— six months was the rule— because of the squabbling of the congregation, the personal attacks on the way he sang, the constant need to shush the parishioners who treated the church like the bleachers at Tiger Stadium, and, finally, the effort of delivering a ser- mon each week twice, first in Greek and then again in English. As- sumption, with its spirited coffee hours, its bad foundation and roof leaks, its strenuous ethnic festivals, its catechism classes where our

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  ness can create frustration and even hostility. He may be lured into a sexual dishes?" • "Never, encounter, but a longer-lasting spell cannot be created without an accom- indeed," replied Shakashik. • "Eat panying mental seduction. The key is to enter his spirit. Men are often heartily, then," said his seduced by the masculine element in a woman's behavior or character. host, "and do not be In the novel Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson, the young and de- ashamed!" • "I thank you, sir," answered vout Clarissa Harlowe is being courted by the notorious rake Lovelace. Shakashik, "but I have Clarissa knows Lovelace's reputation, but for the most part he has not acted already eaten my fill. " • as she would expect: he is polite, seems a little sad and confused. At one Presently, however, the old man clapped his hands point she finds out that he has done a most noble and charitable deed to a again and cried: "Bring in family in distress, giving the father money, helping the man's daughter get the wine!" • . . . " Sir," married, giving them wholesome advice. At last Lovelace confesses to said Shakashik, "your generosity overwhelms Clarissa what she has suspected: he wants to repent, to change his ways. His me!" He lifted the invisible letters to her are emotional, almost religious in their passion. Perhaps she cup to his lips, and made will be the one to lead him to righteousness? But of course Lovelace has as if to drain it at one gulp. trapped her: he is using the seducer's tactic of mirroring her tastes, in this • "Health and joy to you!" exclaimed the old case her spirituality. Once she lets her guard down, once she believes she man, as he pretended to can reform him, she is doomed: now he can slowly insinuate his own spirit pour himself some wine into his letters and encounters with her. Remember: the operative word is and drink it off. He handed another cup to his "spirit," and that is often exactly where to take aim. By seeming to mirror guest, and they both someone's spiritual values you can seem to establish a deep-rooted harmony continued to act in this between the two of you, which can then be transferred to the physical fashion until Shakashik, feigning himself drunk, plane. began to roll his head from When Josephine Baker moved to Paris, in 1925, as part of an all-black side to side. Then, taking revue, her exoticism made her an overnight sensation. But the French are his bounteous host notoriously fickle, and Baker sensed that their interest in her would quickly unawares, he suddenly raised his arm so high that

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  too early; they are only powerful once the target has begun to fall under outside, a treatment which your spell, and is vulnerable to suggestion. A man who had just met is forced upon him. Many Cleopatra would have found the Aphrodite association ludicrous. But a think that absence and long trips are a good cure for person who is falling in love will believe almost anything. The trick is to as- lovers. Observe that these sociate your image with something mythic, through the clothes you wear, are cures for one's the things you say, the places you go. attention. Distance from the beloved starves our In Marcel Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past, the character attention toward him; it Swann finds himself gradually seduced by a woman who is not really his prevents anything further type. He is an aesthete, and loves the finer things in life. She is of a lower from rekindling the attention. Journeys, by class, less refined, even a little tasteless. What poeticizes her in his mind is a physically obliging us to series of exuberant moments they share together, moments that from then come out of ourselves and on he associates with her. One of these is a concert in a salon that they at- resolve hundreds of little tend, in which he is intoxicated by a little melody in a sonata. Whenever he problems, by uprooting us from our habitual setting thinks of her, he remembers this little phrase. Little gifts she has given him, and forcing hundreds of objects she has touched or handled, begin to assume a life of their own. unexpected objects upon us, Any kind of heightened experience, artistic or spiritual, lingers in the mind succeed in breaking down the maniac's haven and much longer than normal experience. You must find a way to share such opening channels in his moments with your targets—a concert, a play, a spiritual encounter, what- sealed consciousness, ever it takes—so that they associate something elevated with you. Shared through which fresh air and normal perspective enter. moments of exuberance have immense seductive pull. Also, any kind of object can be imbued with poetic resonance and sentimental associations, as —JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET, ON LOVE: ASPECTS OF A discussed in the last chapter. The gifts you give and other objects can be- SINGLE THEME, TRANSLATED BY come imbued with your presence; if they are associated with pleasant TOBY TALBOT memories, the sight of them keeps you in mind and accelerates the poeticization process. Although it is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, an absence too early will prove deadly to the crystallization process. Like Eva 284 • The Art of Seduction Excessive familiarity can Perón, you must surround your targets with focused attention, so that in destroy crystallization. A those critical moments when they are alone, their mind is spinning with a charming girl of sixteen

• From Middlesex (2002)

  her. It was a little like Into the Sands ^ with Claude Barron, which she'd seen a couple of weeks ago. In that picture Claude Barron enlists in the Foreign Legion because Rita Carrol marries another guy. The other guy turns out to be a cheater and drinker, and so Rita Carrol leaves him and travels out to the desert where Claude Barron is fight- ing the Arabs. By the time Rita Carrol gets there he's in the hospital, wounded, or not a hospital really but just a tent, and she tells him she loves him and Claude Barron says, "I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you." And then he dies. Tessie cried buckets. Her mas- cara ran, staining the collar of her blouse something awful. Drilling at night and going to Saturday matinees, jumping into the sea and sliding down in movie seats, worrying and regretting and hoping and trying to forget— nevertheless, to be perfectly honest, mostly what people did during the war was write letters. In support of my personal belief that real life doesn't live up to writing about it, the members of my family seem to have spent most of their time that year engaged in correspondence. From Holy Cross, Michael Anto- niou wrote twice a week to his fiancee. His letters arrived in light blue envelopes embossed with the head of Patriarch Benjamin in the upper left-hand corner, and on the stationery inside, his handwriting, like his voice, was feminine and neat. "Most likely, the first place they'll send us after my ordination will be somewhere in Greece. There's going to be a lot of rebuilding to do now that the Nazis have left." At her desk beneath the Shakespeare bookends, Tessie wrote back faithfully, if not entirely truthfully. Most of her daily activities didn't seem virtuous enough to tell a seminarian-fiance. And so she began to invent a more appropriate life for herself. "This morning Zo and I went down to volunteer at the Red Cross," wrote my mother, who had spent the entire day at the Fox Theater, eating nonpareils. "They had us cut up old bedsheets into strips for bandages. You should see the blister I've got on my thumb. It's a real whopper." She didn't start out with these wholesale fictions. At first Tessie had given an honest accounting of her days. But in one letter Michael Antoniou had said, "Movies are fine as entertainment, but with the war I wonder if they're the best way to spend your time." After that, Tessie started 189

• From Middlesex (2002)

  The source of the music was none other than a Brylcreemed Or- pheus who lived directly behind her. Milton Stephanides, a twenty- year-old college student, stood at his own bedroom window, dexterously fingering his clarinet. He was wearing a Boy Scout uni- form. Chin lifted, elbows out, right knee keeping time within khaki trousers, he unleashed his love song on the summer day, playing with an ardor that had burned out completely by the time I found that fuzz-clogged woodwind in our attic twenty-five years later. Milton had been third clarinet in the Southeastern High School orchestra. For school concerts he had to play Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart, but now that he had graduated, he was free to play whatever he liked, which was swing. He styled himself after Artie Shaw. He copied Shaw's exuberant, off-balance stance, as if being blown backward by the force of his own playing. Now, at the window, he flourished his stick with Shaw's precise, calligraphic dips and circles. He looked along the length of the shining black instrument, sighting on the house two backyards away, and especially on the pale, timid, excited face at the third-floor window. Tree branches and telephone lines ob- scured his view, but he could make out the long dark hair that shone like his clarinet itself. She didn't wave. She made no sign— other than smile— that she heard him at all. In neighboring yards people continued what they were doing, oblivious to the serenade. They watered lawns or filled bird feeders; young kids chased butterflies. When Milton got to the end of the song, he lowered his instrument and leaned out the win- dow, grinning. Then he started again, from the beginning. Downstairs, entertaining company, Desdemona heard her son's clarinet and, as if orchestrating a harmony, let out a long sigh. For the last forty-five minutes Gus and Georgia Vasilakis and their daughter Gaia had been sitting in the living room. It was Sunday af- ternoon. On the coffee table a dish of rose jelly reflected light from die sparkling glasses of wine the adults were drinking. Gaia nursed a glass of lukewarm Vernor's ginger ale. An open tin of butter cookies sat on the table. "What do you think about that, Gaia?" her father teased her. "Milton's got flat feet. Does that sour the deal for you?" 170 "Daddeee," said Gaia, embarrassed. "Better to have flat feet than to be knocked off your feet forever," said Lefty. "That's right," agreed Georgia Vasilakis. "You're lucky they wouldn't take Milton. I don't think it's any kind of dishonor at all. I don't know what I'd do if I had to send a son off to war."

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  All of us today are kings protecting the tiny realm of our own lives, of clear water which has weighed down by all kinds of responsibilities, surrounded by ministers and been known ever since as the pool of the king of advisers. A wall forms around us—we are immune to the influence of other Wu. Here, to amuse her people, because we are so preoccupied. Like Hsi Shih, then, you must lure lover, Hsi Shih would your targets away, gently, slowly, from the affairs that fill their mind. And make her toilet, using the what will best lure them from their castles is the whiff of the exotic. Offer pool as a mirror while the infatuated king combed something unfamiliar that will fascinate them and hold their attention. Be her hair. . . . different in your manners and appearance, and slowly envelop them in this —ELOISE TALCOTT HIBBERT, different world of yours. Keep your targets off balance with coquettish EMBROIDERED GAUZE: changes of mood. Do not worry that the disruption you represent is mak-PORTRAITS OR FAMOUS CHINESE LADIES ing them emotional—that is a sign of their growing weakness. Most people are ambivalent: on the one hand they feel comforted by their habits and duties, on the other they are bored, and ripe for anything that seems exotic, that seems to come from somewhere else. They may struggle or have doubts, but exotic pleasures are irresistible. The more you can get them Isolate the Victim • 313 into your world, the weaker they become. As with the king of Wu, by the In Cairo Aly bumped into time they realize what has happened, it is too late. [ the singer] Juliette Greco again. He asked her to dance. • "You have too bad a reputation," she replied. Isolation—The "Only You" Effect "We're going to sit very much apart. " • "What are you doing tomorrow?" he In 1948, the twenty-nine-year-old actress Rita Hayworth, known as insisted. • "Tomorrow I Hollywood's Love Goddess, was at a low point in her life. Her marriage take a plane to Beirut." • to Orson Welles was breaking up, her mother had died, and her career When she boarded the plane, Aly was already seemed stalled. That summer she headed for Europe. Welles was in Italy at on it, grinning at her the time, and in the back of her mind she was dreaming of a reconciliation. surprise. . . . • Dressed in Rita stopped first at the French Riviera. Invitations poured in, particu- tight black leather slacks and a black sweater

• From Middlesex (2002)

  And look: from the deck of the Giulia something else unwinds 63 now. Something multicolored, spinning itself out over the waters of Piraeus. It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connec- tion to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze. From two separate locations on the Giuliefs deck, Lefty and Des- demona— and I can say it now, finally, my grandparents— watched the airy blanket float away. Desdemona was standing between two air manifolds shaped like giant tubas. At midships Lefty slouched in a brace of bachelors. In the last three hours they hadn't seen each other. That morning, they'd had coffee together in a cafe near the harbor af- ter which, like professional spies, they'd picked up their separate suit- cases— Desdemona keeping her silkworm box— and had departed in different directions. My grandmother was carrying falsified docu- ments. Her passport, which the Greek government had granted un- der the condition that she leave the country immediately, bore her mother's maiden name, Aristos, instead of Stephanides. She'd pre- sented this passport along with her boarding card at the top of the Giuliafs gangway. Then she'd gone aft, as planned, for the send-off. At the shipping channel, the foghorn sounded again, as the boat came around to the west and picked up more speed. Dirndls, ker- chiefs, and suit coats flapped in the breeze. A few hats flew off heads, to shouts and laughter. Yarn drift-netted the sky, barely visible now. People watched as long as they could. Desdemona was one of the first to go below. Lefty lingered on deck for another half hour. This, too, was part of the plan. For the first day at sea, they didn't speak to each other. They came up on deck at the appointed mealtimes and stood in separate lines. After eating, Lefty joined the men smoking at the rail while Desde- 64 mona hunched on deck with the women and children, staying out of the wind. "You have someone meeting you?" the women asked. "A fiance?" "No. Just my cousin in Detroit." "Traveling all by yourself?" the men asked Lefty. "That's right. Free and easy."

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Madame de Pompadour, genius of seduction, understood that inside Louis XV was a great man yearning to come out, and that his obsession with pretty young women indicated a hunger for a more lasting kind of beauty. Her first step was to cure his incessant bouts of boredom. It is easy for kings to be bored—everything they want is given to them, and they seldom learn to be satisfied with what they have. The Marquise de Pompadour dealt with this by bringing all sorts of fantasies to life, and creating constant suspense. She had many skills and talents, and just as important, she deployed them so artfully that he never discovered their limits. Once she had accustomed him to more refined pleasures, she appealed to the crushed ideals within him; in the mirror she held up to him, he saw his aspiration to be great, a desire that, in France, inevitably included leadership in culture. His previous series of mistresses had tickled only his sensual desires. In Madame de Pompadour he found a woman who made him feel greatness in himself. The other mistresses could easily be replaced, but he could never find another Madame de Pompadour. Most people believe themselves to be inwardly greater than they outwardly appear to the world. They are full of unrealized ideals: they could be artists, thinkers, leaders, spiritual figures, but the world has crushed them, denied them the chance to let their abilities flourish. This is the key to their seduction—and to keeping them seduced over time. The Ideal Lover knows how to conjure up this kind of magic. Appeal only to people's physical side, as many amateur seducers do, and they will resent you for playing upon their basest instincts. But appeal to their better selves, to a higher standard of beauty, and they will hardly notice that they have been seduced. Make them feel elevated, lofty, spiritual, and your power over them will be limitless. 36 • The Art of Seduction Love brings to light a lover's noble and hidden qualities— his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his normal character. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Keys to the Character Each of us carries inside us an ideal, either of what we would like to become, or of what we want another person to be for us. This ideal goes back to our earliest years—to what we once felt was missing in our lives, what others did not give to us, what we could not give to ourselves. Maybe we were smothered in comfort, and we long for danger and rebellion. If we want danger but it frightens us, perhaps we look for someone who seems at home with it. Or perhaps our ideal is more elevated—we want to be more creative, nobler, and kinder than we ever manage to be. Our ideal is something we feel is missing inside us.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  with him that she would dress in front of him, or greet him in her night-shared delights. Neglect \ gown. These glimpses of her body drove him crazy, and he would some-These devices— his ardor times try to steal a kiss or caress, only to have her push him away and scold will wane. A racehorse runs most strongly \ When the him. Weeks went by; clearly he had shown that his was not a passing fancy. field's ahead, to be paced \ Tired of the endless courtship, he took Conchita's mother aside one day And passed. So the dying and proposed that he set the girl up in a house of her own. He would treat embers of passion can be fanned to \ Fresh flame by her like a queen; she would have everything she wanted. (So, of course, some outrage— I can only would her mother.) Surely his proposal would satisfy the two women—but love, \ Myself, I confess it, the next day, a note came from Conchita, expressing not gratitude but re-when wronged. But don't let the cause of \ Pain be crimination: he was trying to buy her love. "You shall never see me again," too obvious: let a lover she concluded. He hurried to the house only to discover that the women suspect \ More than he had moved out that very morning, without leaving word where they were knows. Invent a slave who going. watches your every \ Movement, make clear Don Mateo felt terrible. Yes, he had acted like a boor. Next time he what a jealous martinet \ would wait months, or years if need be, before being so bold. Soon, how-That man of yours is— ever, another thought assailed him: he would never see Conchita again. such things will excite him. Pleasure \ Too safely Only then did he realize how much he loved her. enjoyed lacks zest. You The winter passed, the worst of Mateo's life. One spring day he was want to be free \ As Thaïs? walking down the street when he heard someone calling his name. He Act scared. Though the door's quite safe, let him in looked up: Conchita was standing in an open window, beaming with ex-by \ The window. Look citement. She bent down toward him and he kissed her hand, beside him-nervous. Have a smart \ self with joy. Why had she disappeared so suddenly? It was all going too Maid rush in, scream quickly, she said. She had been afraid—of his intentions, and of her own "We're caught!" while you bundle the quaking \ Youth feelings. But seeing him again, she was certain that she loved him. Yes, she out of sight. But be sure \ was ready to be his mistress. She would prove it, she would come to him. To offset his fright with Being apart had changed them both, he thought. some moments of carefree pleasure— \ Or he'll think

• From Story of the Eye (1928)

  That was why the word egg was dropped from our vocabulary, and we never spoke about the kind of interest we had in one another, even less about what Marcelle meant to us. We spent all of Simone’s illness in a bedroom, looking forward to when we could go back to Marcelle, as nervously as we had once waited for the end of the last lesson in school, and so all we talked about was the day we would return to the château. I had prepared a small cord, a thick, knotted rope, and a hacksaw, all of which Simone examined with the keenest interest, peering attentively at each knot and section of the rope. I also managed to find the bicycles, which I had concealed in a thicket the day of our tumble, and I meticulously oiled the various parts, the gears, ball bearings, sprockets, etc. I then attached a pair of foot-rests to my own bicycle so that I could seat one of the girls behind. Nothing could be easier, at least for the time being, than to have Marcelle living in Simone’s room secretly like myself. We would simply be forced to share the bed (and we would inevitably have to use the same bathtub, etc.). But a good six weeks passed before Simone could pedal after me reasonably well to the sanatorium. Like the previous time, we left at night: in fact, I still kept out of sight during the day, and this time there was certainly every reason for remaining inconspicuous. I was in a hurry to arrive at the place that I dimly regarded as a “haunted castle,” due to the association of the words sanatorium and castle , and also the memory of the phantom sheet and the thought of the lunatics in a huge silent dwelling at night. But now, to my surprise, even though I was ill at ease anywhere in the world, I felt at bottom as if I were going home. And that was indeed my impression when we jumped over the park wall and saw the huge building stretching out ahead beyond the trees: only Marcelle’s window was still aglow and wide open. Taking some pebbles from a lane, we threw them into her chamber and they promptly summoned the girl, who quickly recognized us and obeyed our gesture of putting a finger on our lips. But of course we also held up the knotted rope to let her understand what we were doing this time. I hurled the cord up to her with the aid of a stone, and she threw it back after looping it around a bar. There were no difficulties, the big rope was hoisted by Marcelle and fastened to the bar, and I scrambled all the way up.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In 1967, Warhol was asked to lecture at various colleges. He hated to admirers too. Then one of talk, particularly about his own art; "The less something has to say," he felt, those he had scorned raised up his hands to heaven "the more perfect it is." But the money was good and Warhol always found and prayed: "May he it hard to say no. His solution was simple: he asked an actor, Allen himself fall in love with Midgette, to impersonate him. Midgette was dark-haired, tan, part Chero-another, as we have done kee Indian. He did not resemble Warhol in the least. But Warhol and with him! May he too be unable to gain his loved friends covered his face with powder, sprayed his brown hair silver, gave one!" Nemesis heard and him dark glasses, and dressed him in Warhol's clothes. Since Midgette knew granted his righteous nothing about art, his answers to students' questions tended to be as short prayer. . . . • Narcissus, wearied with hunting in and enigmatic as Warhol's own. The impersonation worked. Warhol may the heat of the day, lay have been an icon, but no one really knew him, and since he often wore down here [ by a clear dark glasses, even his face was unfamiliar in any detail. The lecture audi-pool] : for he was attracted by the beauty of the place, ences were far enough away to be teased by the thought of his presence, and by the spring. While and no one got close enough to catch the deception. He remained elusive. he sought to quench his * * * thirst, another thirst grew The Coquette • 73 Early on in life, Andy Warhol was plagued by conflicting emotions: he des-in him, and as he drank, perately wanted fame, but he was naturally passive and shy "I've always had he was enchanted by the beautiful reflection that he a conflict," he later said, "because I'm shy and yet I like to take up a lot of saw. He fell in love with personal space. Mom always said, 'Don't be pushy, but let everyone know an insubstantial hope, you're around.' " At first Warhol tried to make himself more aggressive, mistaking a mere shadow for a real body. Spellbound straining to please and court. It didn't work. After ten futile years he by his own self, he stopped trying and gave in to his own passivity—only to discover the power remained there motionless, that withdrawal commands. with fixed gaze, like a Warhol began this process in his artwork, which changed dramatically statue carved from Parian marble. . . . Unwittingly, in the early 1960s. His new paintings of soup cans, green stamps, and other he desired himself, and was widely known images did not assault you with meaning; in fact their mean-himself the object of his ing was totally elusive, which only heightened their fascination. They drew own approval, at once seeking and sought, himself