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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  What do you think that will solve?” “It’s just that I want to really feel close to someone, united with someone, whole for once. I want to really love someone.” “What makes you think love solves anything?” “Maybe it doesn’t solve anything,” I said, “but I want it. I want to feel whole.” “But you felt you were part of Brian and that didn’t work either.” “Brian was crazy.” “Everyone’s a little crazy when you get inside their head,” Adrian said. “It’s only a matter of degree.” “I guess…” “Look—why don’t you just stop looking for love and try to live your own life?” “Because what sort of a life do I have if I don’t have love?” “You have your work, your writing, your teaching, your friends….” Drab, drab, drab, I thought. “All my writing is an attempt to get love, anyway. I know it’s crazy. I know it’s doomed to disappointment. But there it is: I want everyone to love me.” “You lose,” Adrian said. “I know, but my knowing doesn’t change anything. Why doesn’t my knowing ever change anything?” Adrian didn’t answer. I suppose I wasn’t asking him anyway, but just throwing out the question to the blue twilit mountains (we were driving through the Goddard Pass with the top of the Triumph down). “In the mornings,” Adrian finally said, “I never can remember your name.” So that was my answer. It went through me like a knife. And there I was lying awake every night next to him trembling and saying my own name over and over to myself to try to remember who I was. — “The trouble with existentialism is” (I said this as we were driving down the autostrada ) “that you can’t stop thinking about the future. Actions do have consequences.” “ I can stop thinking about the future,” Adrian said. “How?” He shrugged. “Dunno. I just can. I feel glorious today, for example.” “Why do I feel so lousy when you feel so glorious?” “Because you’re bloody Jewish,” he laughed. “The Chosen People. You may be mediocre at other things, but at suffering you’re always superb.” “Bastard.” “Why? Just because I tell you the truth? Look—you want love, you want intensity, you want feeling, you want closeness—and what do you settle for? Suffering. At least your suffering is intense…. The patient loves her disease. She doesn’t want to be cured.” — The trouble with me was that I always wanted to be the greatest in everything. The greatest lover. The greatest hungerer. The greatest sufferer. The greatest victim, the greatest fool…If I got myself into scrapes all the time, it was my own damn fault for always wanting to be the greatest.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden. But that mimosa grove—the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. 5 The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches: ... Fräulein von Kulp may turn, her hand upon the door; I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor that Gull. A paper of mine entitled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an “Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties—and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest. I found a job—teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil. Then a school for boys employed me for a couple of winters. Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I had formed among social workers and psychotherapists to visit in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools, where pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted one in dreams. Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.” It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see “nine” and “fourteen” as the boundaries—the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks—of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  It was the first time in almost two years that he was truly alone, and truly separated from Eva. Suddenly he felt new emotions sweeping over him: he pinned her photographs all over the wall. Outside, massive strikes were being organized to protest his imprison- ment, but all he could think about was Eva. She was a saint, a woman of destiny, a heroine. He wrote to her, "It is only being apart from loved ones that we can measure our affection. From the day I left you ... I have not been able to calm my sad heart. . . . My immense solitude is full of your memory." Now he promised to marry her. The strikes grew in intensity. After eight days, Perón was released from prison; he promptly married Eva. A few months later he was elected presi- dent. As first lady, Eva attended state functions in her somewhat gaudy dresses and jewelry; she was seen as a former actress with a large wardrobe. Then, in 1947, she left for a tour of Europe, and Argentines followed her every move—the ecstatic crowds that greeted her in Spain, her audience with the pope—and in her absence their opinion of her changed. How well she represented the Argentine spirit, its noble simplicity, its flair for drama. When she returned a few weeks later, they overwhelmed her with attention. Eva too had changed during her trip to Europe: now her dyed blond hair was pulled into a severe chignon, and she wore tailored suits. It was a serious look, befitting a woman who was to become the savior of the poor. Soon her image could be seen everywhere—her initials on the walls, the sheets, the towels of the hospitals for the poor; her profile on the jerseys of a soccer team from the poorest part of Argentina, whose club she spon- sored; her giant smiling face covering the sides of buildings. Since finding out anything personal about her had become impossible, all kinds of elabo- rate fantasies began to spring up about her. And when cancer cut her life short, in 1952, at the age of thirty-three (the age of Christ when he died), the country went into mourning. Millions filed past her embalmed body. She was no longer a radio actress, a wife, a first lady, but Evita, a saint. 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 dream was to escape all of the constraints on her future, for she was in- tensely ambitious. Perón was the perfect victim. He imagined himself a great leader, but the reality was that he was fast becoming a lecherous old man who was too weak to raise himself up.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  A. We are still in the midst of an unfinished revolution. Outwardly women seem to have more freedom but it is still difficult to combine love and work, still difficult to find happiness with the opposite sex, still difficult to find emotional freedom. Isadora poses questions that women still pose to themselves. Women still feel that they need a man to verify their identity. Many things have changed in society but women are still conflicted about achieving fulfillment. Q. What do people ask you most about Fear of Flying? A. People always ask how I got the guts to write such an intimate book. I don’t really know the answer. I was driven to write it. I wanted to document all the things that go on in a woman’s mind. I wanted to get the female psyche down on paper. And I must have achieved this because the most frequent comment I get about the book is: You read my mind. Q. What is the harshest criticism you have received? A. The harshest criticism has always been that Isadora is self-absorbed. I think our culture says that women who wonder about their own fulfillment aren’t doing what women should do—which is take care of everyone else. We don’t seem to criticize male protagonists for probing their own psyches. But women are held to a different standard. We are supposed to be caregivers both emotionally and psychically. It’s very hard to break out of that mindset. But how can women become important writers if they are thought to be unfeminine when they look into the female mind? Q. Whose praise meant the most to you and why? A. The most meaningful praise came from John Updike and Henry Miller, who both recognized, in very different ways, that I was trying to do something new for women in fiction. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION1. Isadora struggles to be her own woman in a man’s world. How do you think things have changed for women since the 1960s and how are they the same? Isadora says relationships are always unequal, that the ones who love us most we love the least and vice versa. Do you agree? 2. How was Isadora shaped by her mother and sisters? Do you think her mother’s advice to eschew the ordinary has caused her pain or happiness? 3. The book ends on an ambiguous note. What do you think happens when Bennett walks in on Isadora? Why? Is the ending affirmative or a comeuppance? Is the bathtub scene a rebirth as some have said? 4. What is it about Isadora’s voice that provokes empathy? 5. One of the most quoted lines from this novel is “Men and women—women and men—it will never work.” The tone is clearly ironic. Why do you think this line speaks to people?

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  But it wasn’t enough. I’d become a boxing junkie and a Latinhawk. When the Blue Velvet Boxing Club opened a few blocks from my apartment, I knew what I had to do. I spent a couple of days walking by the plain wood storefront, trying to glimpse the shadowy figures within. I wanted to know what it felt like to box, to enter a ring with a man who wanted to hurt me. What would that do to my body? Besides, Oscar had inspired me. He’d given me an idea for a novel, an Anglo-Latino homo thang, like a gay West Side Story. Oscar and Charles. Boxer and editor. I wanted our lips locked in Latin rhythms, our tongues to tango across our borders. How could I write a convincing boxing novel, I rationalized, with out training at a boxing gym? I practically fell into the place. The door was old and creaky and jammed, so when I forced it open, I lost my balance and stumbled into a guy who looked like a manager. “Whoa, buddy, what’s up?” he asked. “I wanted to find out about some boxing lessons.” “You’ve come to the right place. I’m Geno,” he said as he of fered his hand and then put a brotherly arm across my shoul ders. “Let me show you the place.” His arm was heavy on my neck, but sexless in a straight-guy way, graceful and unconscious. His skin was smooth, pale olive, his dark hair oily. He smelled like fresh-baked bread, doughy and warm. He walked me around the ground floor, where a boxing ring sat majestic beneath the room’s single skylight. Downstairs was a weight area, a locker room with showers, nothing fancy. I nodded and tried to butch it up a bit, walking stiffly and

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  They taught me to enter into the thought of each man in turn, and to understand that each makes his own decisions, and lives and dies according to his own laws. The reading of the poets had still more overpowering effects; I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry. Poetry transformed me: initiation into death itself will not carry me farther along into another world than does a dusk of Virgil. In later years I came to prefer the roughness of Ennius, so close to the sacred origins of our race, or Lucretius' bitter wisdom; or to Homer's noble ease the homely parsimony of Hesiod. The most complicated and most obscure poets have pleased me above all; they force my thought to strenuous exercise; I have sought, too, the latest and the oldest, those who open wholly new paths, or help me to find lost trails. But in those days I liked chiefly in the art of verse whatever appealed most directly to the senses, whether the polished metal of Horace, or Ovid's soft texture, like flesh. Scaurus cast me into despair in assuring me that I should never be more than a mediocre poet; that both the gift and the application were wanting. For a long time I thought he was mistaken; somewhere locked away are a volume or two of my love poems, most of them imitated from Catullus. But it is of little concern to me now whether my personal productions are worthless or not. To my dying day I shall be grateful to Scaurus for having set me early to the study of Greek. I was still a child when for the first time I tried to trace on my tablets those characters of an unknown alphabet: here was a new world and the beginning of my great travels, and also the feeling of a choice as deliberate, but at the same time as involuntary, as that of love. I have loved the language for its flexibility, like that of a supple, perfect body, and for the richness of its vocabulary, in which every word bespeaks direct and varied contact with reality: and because almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek. There are, I know, other languages, but they are petrified, or have yet to be born. Egyptian priests have shown me their antique symbols; they are signs rather than words, ancient attempts at classification of the world and of things, the sepulchral speech of a dead race. During the Jewish War the rabbi Joshua translated literally for me some texts from Hebrew, that language of sectarians so obsessed by their god that they have neglected the human. In the armies I grew accustomed to the language of the Celtic auxiliaries, and remember above all certain of their songs. . . .

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I think I've got a much better picture of what happened without seeing the real thing." Though it was true I didn't quite feel the thrill or shock of it as Paul clearly hoped. My own obsessions made it hard for me to grant the force of someone else's—and besides it was long ago and part of the never fully plausible world of heterosexual feeling. I started trying to convert it into my own terms; if I had met someone physically identical to Luc would he have done just as well as the object of my wild longings—which flooded into my throat for a second and pricked my eyes as we turned a corner into the cold wind. "You say that I'm secretive," he said, in a tone that admitted the charge but showed his pride had in fact been scratched by my remark of a few minutes before. "But I've always been prepared to tell, if I could first find the right person. That's why I'm so glad you've got the point: I very much want you to get the point, since you're helping me so much to get all this done." I shoved my hands into my pockets and nursed this to me in a sflence I hoped he didn't feel was negative. I wondered if I had got the point. I had the sense that my importance, my helpfulness, were being flatteringly exaggerated. Proof-reading, fact-checking, were necessary of course; but they could be done just as well by somebody else, better perhaps by somebody who didn't share my groping remoteness from the subject. At the same time I was warmed and bucked up by the confidence Paul put in me, the tone of urgency I had sometimes heard before and the implication that I could meet the crisis, even if I didn't quite know yet what it was. It was as though he saw some virtue in me that I had lost sight of myself, or never believed myself to have possessed. Towards the end of lunch I pressed him further about the war. I'd had two or three, perhaps four, glasses of wine, he'd drunk more than usual himself and seemed cautiously to be celebrating. He was giving a comic account of some French art critics and their notions about Orst. I got a very clear impression of their style and their theoretical obtuseness, and also of the disquiet beneath Paul's mockery. Lilli listened to everything he said with her usual, rather stolid, attentiveness, sometimes repeating a phrase when he fell silent as though to memorise it or to help me to. I said simply, "Tell me about your visits to Orst"—and saw her gaze settle on his down-turned face.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was getting cold so we plundered and distributed the rugs and cushions; Marcel lifted a lever and pressed back in his seat till it was fully reclined. For the first time I felt a kind of comfort in having him there: I thought he didn't know what was going on, his attention faltered; but he'd be useful with Sibylle—I'd have to make use of him if the moment came. His breathing slowed as he slept and sounded like widely spaced snorts of vexation. A sort of eternity opened up, like double physics on a school-day afternoon, the palate dry, the hands smelling of rubber and copper . . . My head lolled in yawn after yawn. Events were dull and rhythmless—a cat's finical patience along the forecourt's low wall, the passing of long-distance lorries, tared and flagged, that shook the car with their bluster. I tried to remember the whole of poems I'd once learned by heart, to keep awake, but memory was tarnished, words were spotted over, image blurred into image and poet into poet. When they faltered I left them and went drowsily towards the mirage they had conjured up, of summer dusks, funny old anecdotes, old embarrassments that still made me burn, boys' cocks and kisses under elms that had died with my boyhood's end. And then the poems had their various occasions and points of view, which like the advice of well-meaning friends seemed hardly to take the measure of my own mood and problems. It was all so far from last night. I lived back through that with thumping heart and closed eyes. "This man is quickened so with grief, He wanders god-like or like thief, Upstairs and down—round and round—something like that—below, above, Without relief seeking lost love." God-like or like thief: I saw what it meant for the first time in the twenty years I'd known the poem. But then lost love . . . Had I lost it? Had I ever had it? Or hadn't I cleverly maximised the trouble by losing something that had never been mine? I looked at the ugly shuttered building with a moan of pure need—and a wild, small-hours certainty of being punished and forbidden. I went down by the waters, and a bird Sang with your voice in all the unknown tones Of all that self of you I have not heard, So that my being felt you to the bones. When Marcel's alarm went off I woke with the same metallic fear and sense of being far from home. He roused himself so slowly that it seemed pointless to expect him to sit alertly until 6 o'clock. Still, he snapped his seat upright and sat pawing his head, as if expecting to play his part. Perhaps he wouldn't feel as lonely and foolish as me.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "We all went when I was small, perhaps when I was . . . eight. No one had been there for a long time, and it wasn't all that safe. I think it wasn't built correctly." "Oh." "All I can remember well is a round room, do you say a rotunda, with paintings on the ceiling of my grandfather and all his rich friends, who were idlers in fact, dressed up for a fantasy. My grandfather Theo was dressed up like an Indian prince with a long sword." Luc looked at me openly. "I also remember I was very frightened of his picture." "And what's happened to it now?" He shrugged, denying his disappointment. "It's still there, with the windows all blocked up, and there is a metal roof over the top, because of the rain." I wanted to go there with him and help him get it back. It was just another strand of longing to know about the dereliction of what should one day be Luc's Little Trianon, and about a certain baffling shittiness in the last downward flight of the Altidore family history. At the same time I had the image of my own history like a locked and rotting pavilion too far off and too unsafe perhaps for Luc to want to visit it. These lessons were simulacra of conversations, my part pained and inquisitive, his merely reactive and polite. Once or twice I had mentioned my father's singing or my great-aunt's novels, both equally forgotten, or spoken reassuringly of my own schooldays and their various failures. His reaction was a tolerant blankness, a pause. Sometimes the pressure was almost too great, having him there in my sight, looking at me, moistening that fat lip with a hesitant tongue, pushing back his hair with the hand that later would undress him and make free with him. I got up abruptly and asked to be directed to the bathroom.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  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 as- piration to be great, a desire that, in France, inevitably included leadership in culture. His previous series of mistresses had tickled only his sensual de- sires. 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 out- wardly 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 decep- tive as to his normal character. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Keys to the Character E ach of us carries inside us an ideal, either of what we would like to be- come, 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 some- thing we feel is missing inside us. Our ideal may be buried in disappointment, but it lurks underneath, waiting to be sparked. If another person seems to have that ideal quality, or to have the ability to bring it out in us, we fall in love.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  After lunch we went to the Hofburg once more to hear a paper on the psychology of artists. This paper posthumously analyzed Leonardo, Beethoven, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Donne, Virginia Woolf, and an unknown, unnamed woman artist who had been treated by the analyst. All his evidence proved overwhelmingly that artists were, as a group, weak, dependent, childlike, naive, masochistic, narcissistic, poor judges of character, and hopelessly immersed in Oedipal conflicts. Due to their extreme sensitivity as children and their greater-than-average need for mothering, they always felt deprived no matter how much mothering they in fact got. In adult life, they were doomed to look for mothers everywhere, and not finding them (ever, ever) they sought to invent their own ideal mothers through the artifice of their work. They sought to remake their own histories in an idealized image—even when this idealization came out seeming more like a brutalization than an idealization. Nobody’s family, in short, was as transcendentally evil as the modern autobiographical novelist (or poet) imagined his family to be. To excoriate one’s family was ultimately the same thing as to idealize. It showed how fettered one still was to the past. Through fame, too, the artist sought to compensate himself for the sense of early deprivation. But it never quite worked. Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been loved by one person when you were small, and besides the world is a lousy lover. So fame too was a disappointment. Many artists turned in despair to opium, alcohol, homosexual lechery, heterosexual lechery, religious fervor, political moralizing, suicide, and other palliatives. But these never quite worked either. Except suicide—which always worked, in a way. At that point I remembered an epigram by Antonio Porchia which the analyst had not wit enough to quote: I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings for the soul that cures its sufferings dies. So too with artists. Only more so. Throughout the whole description of the artist’s weakness, dependency, naiveté, etc., Bennett squeezed my hand and shot me knowing glances. Come back home to Daddy. All is understood. How I longed to come back home to Daddy! But how I also longed to be free! “Freedom is an illusion,” Bennett would have said (agreeing for once with B. F. Skinner) and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability...I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  She is of a lower class, less refined, even a little tasteless. What poeticizes her in his mind is a series of exuberant moments they share together, moments that from then on he associates with her. One of these is a concert in a salon that they at- tend, in which he is intoxicated by a little melody in a sonata. Whenever he thinks of her, he remembers this little phrase. Little gifts she has given him, objects she has touched or handled, begin to assume a life of their own. Any kind of heightened experience, artistic or spiritual, lingers in the mind much longer than normal experience. You must find a way to share such moments with your targets—a concert, a play, a spiritual encounter, what- ever it takes—so that they associate something elevated with you. Shared moments of exuberance have immense seductive pull. Also, any kind of object can be imbued with poetic resonance and sentimental associations, as discussed in the last chapter. The gifts you give and other objects can be- come imbued with your presence; if they are associated with pleasant memories, the sight of them keeps you in mind and accelerates the poeti- cization process. Although it is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, an ab- sence too early will prove deadly to the crystallization process. Like Eva attention is fixed upon a man, it is very easy for him to dominate her thoughts completely. A simple game of blowing hot and cold, of solicitousness and disdain, of presence and absence is all that is required. The rhythm of that technique acts upon a woman's attention like a pneumatic machine and ends by emptying her of all the rest of the world. How well our people put it: "to suck one's senses"! In fact: one is absorbed—absorbed by an object! Most "love affairs" are reduced to this mechanical play of the beloved upon the lover's attention. • The only thing that can save a lover is a violent shock from the outside, a treatment which is forced upon him. Many think that absence and long trips are a good cure for lovers. Observe that these are cures for one's attention. Distance from the beloved starves our attention toward him; it prevents anything further from rekindling the attention.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I took this as proof of his masculine value. My “sisters” all agreed; he was “suave.” And I was impressed by how much he liked talking about his emotions, something I’d never seen a man do. “My mom’s a pothead now, and that’s why I have this deep sadness.” He took frequent trips to Tokyo for work and to San Francisco to visit his twin sister. I suspected she discouraged him from dating me. He broke up with me the first time freshman year because I was “too young and immature. I can’t be the one to help you grow out of your abandonment issues,” he explained. “It’s too much of a responsibility. You deserve someone who can really support your emotional development.” So I spent that summer at home upstate with my parents and had sex with a boy from high school, who was far more sensual and interested in how the clitoris “works,” but not quite patient enough to really interact with mine successfully. It was helpful, though. I reclaimed a bit of my dignity by feeling nothing for that boy, using him. By Labor Day, when I moved into Delta Gamma, Trevor and I were back together. Over the next five years, Trevor would periodically deplete his self- esteem in relationships with older women, i.e., women his age, then return to me to reboot. I was always available. I dated guys from time to time, but there was never another real “boyfriend,” if I could even call Trevor that. He wouldn’t have agreed to carry that title. There were plenty of one-night stands in college while we were on the outs, but nothing worth repeating. After I graduated and was flung into the world of adulthood—already orphaned—I was bolder in my desperation, made frequent appeals to Trevor to take me back. I could hear his cock harden on the phone whenever I called to beg him to come over and hold me. “I’ll see if I can squeeze it in,” he’d say. Then he’d be there and I’d shiver in his arms like the child I still was, swoon with gratitude for his recognition, savor the weight of him in the bed next to me. It was as though he were some divine messenger, my soul mate, my savior, whatever. Trevor would be very pleased to spend a night at my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, earning back all the bravado he’d lost in his last affair. I hated seeing that come on in him. One time he said he was afraid of fucking me “too passionately” because he didn’t want to break my heart.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And what about those other longings which marriage stifled? Those longings to hit the open road from time to time, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head, to discover whether you could manage to survive in a cabin in the woods without going mad; to discover, in short, whether you were still whole after so many years of being half of something (like the back two legs of a horse outfit on the vaudeville stage). Five years of marriage had made me itchy for all those things: itchy for men, and itchy for solitude. Itchy for sex and itchy for the life of a recluse. I knew my itches were contradictory—and that made things even worse. I knew my itches were un-American—and that made things still worse. It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American. It may be condoned in a man—especially if he is a “glamorous bachelor” who “dates starlets” during a brief interval between marriages. But a woman is always presumed to be alone as a result of abandonment, not choice. And she is treated that way: as a pariah. There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness—her selfishness, in short—is a reproach to the American way of life. Even more to the point: the woman (unhappy though she knows her married friends to be) can never let herself alone. She lives as if she were constantly on the brink of some great fulfillment. As if she were waiting for Prince Charming to take her away “from all this.” All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else? My response to all this was not (not yet) to have an affair and not (not yet) to hit the open road, but to evolve my fantasy of the Zipless Fuck. The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  They would like to escape their mental prisons, they would like pure physicality, without any analysis, but they cannot get there on their own. Professor types sometimes engage in relationships with other professor types, or with people they can treat as inferiors. But deep down they long to be overwhelmed by someone with physical presence—a Rake or a Siren, for instance. Professors can make excellent victims, for underneath their intellectual strength lie gnawing insecurities. Make them feel like Don Juans or Sirens, to even the slightest degree, and they are your slaves. Many of them have a masochistic streak that will come out once you stir their dormant senses. You are offering an escape from the mind, so make it as complete as possi- ble: if you have intellectual tendencies yourself, hide them. They will only The Seducer's Victims—The Eighteen Types • 155 156 • The Art of Seduction stir your target's competitive juices and get their minds turning. Let your Professors keep their sense of mental superiority; let them judge you. You will know what they will try to hide: that you are the one in control, for you are giving them what no one else can give them—physical stimulation. The Beauty. From early on in life, the Beauty is gazed at by others. Their desire to look at her is the source of her power, but also the source of much unhappiness: she constantly worries that her powers are waning, that she is no longer attracting attention. If she is honest with herself, she also senses that being worshiped only for one's appearance is monotonous and unsatisfying—and lonely. Many men are intimidated by beauty and prefer to worship it from afar; others are drawn in, but not for the purpose of conversation. The Beauty suffers from isolation. Because she has so many lacks, the Beauty is relatively easy to seduce, and if done right, you will have won not only a much prized catch but someone who will grow dependent on what you provide. Most important in this seduction is to validate those parts of the Beauty that no one else appreciates—her intelligence (generally higher than people imagine), her skills, her character. Of course you must worship her body—you cannot stir up any insecurities in the one area in which she knows her strength, and the strength on which she most depends—but you also must worship her mind and soul. Intellectual stimulation will work well on the Beauty, dis- tracting her from her doubts and insecurities, and making it seem that you value that side of her personality.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The next night was the formal opening of the Congress, ushered in by a twilight cocktail buffet in the courtyard of the Hofburg—one of Vienna’s eighteenth-century palaces. The inside of the building had been renovated so that the public rooms exuded all the institutional charm of American motel dining rooms, but the courtyard was still back in the mists of the eighteenth century. We arrived at that purple hour—eight o’clock on a late July evening. Long tables stood framing the edges of the courtyard. Waiters moved through the crowd holding aloft champagne glasses (sweet German Sekt, it turned out to be, alas). Even the analysts were glittering in the mauve dusk. Rose Schwamm-Lipkin wore a pink beaded Hong Kong sweater, a red satin skirt, and her dressiest orthopedic sandals. Judy Rose slithered by in a braless body suit of silver lamé. Even Dr. Schrift was wearing a plum velvet dinner jacket and a large azalea-pink satin bow tie. And Dr. Frommer was in tails and a top hat. Bennett and I moved through the crowd looking for someone we knew. We wandered aimlessly until a waiter dispensing champagne gently dipped his tray to us and gave us something to do. I drank fast, hoping to get drunk immediately—no trick at all for me. In about ten minutes I was wandering through the still more purple mist seeing champagne bubbles in the corners of my eyes. I was supposedly in search of the ladies’ room (but really, of course, in search of Adrian). I found thousands of him stretching back into infinity in a long mirrored baroque hallway outside the ladies’ room. He shimmered in the mirrors. An infinite number of Adrians in beige corduroy trousers and plum-colored turtlenecks and brown suede jackets. An infinite number of dirty toenails in an infinite number of Indian sandals. An infinite number of meerschaum pipes between his beautiful curling lips. My zipless fuck? My man under the bed! Multiplied like the lovers in Last Year at Marienbad. Multiplied like Andy Warhol’s self-portraits. Multiplied like the Thousand and One Buddhas in the Temple at Kyoto. (Each Buddha has six arms, each arm has an extra eye…how many pricks did these millions of Adrians have? And each prick symbolizing the infinite wisdom and infinite compassion of God?) “Hello, ducks,” he says, turning to me. “I have something for you,” I say, handing him the inscribed book I’ve been carrying around all day. The edges of the pages are beginning to fray from my sweaty palms. “You sweetheart!” He takes the book. We link arms and start walking down the mirrored hall. “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse,” as my old buddy Dante would say. The poems pimped for love, and their author too. The book of my body was open and the second circle of hell wasn’t far off. “You know,” I say, “we’ll probably never see each other again.” “Maybe that’s why we’re doing this,” he says.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The looser styles might fit her, I thought. I was feeling generous. The Egyptian slid the cigarettes and M&M’s across the counter with a scrap he’d ripped from a brown paper bag. “You still owe me six fifty from last week,” he said, and wrote down the sum I now owed on top of that, along with my name, which I was stunned he knew. I could only assume I’d come down for a snack during a blackout. The Egyptian taped the scrap of paper on the wall next to his rolls of scratch tickets. I put the cigarettes and the Klondike bar and the M&M’s in my coat pocket, took my coffees, and went back upstairs to my apartment. I suppose a part of me wished that when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I’d cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they’d grow wide and glisten with awe. I’d drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea. When I tried to imagine this new place, all I could come up with was a cheesy mural of a rainbow, a man in a white bunny costume, a set of dentures in a glass, a huge slice of watermelon on a yellow plate—an odd prediction, maybe, of when I’m ninety-five and losing my mind in an assisted-living facility where they treat the elderly residents like retarded children. I should be so lucky, I thought. I opened the door to my apartment, and, of course, nothing had changed. I threw my first empty coffee cup in the toppling pile of garbage around the trash can in the kitchen, broke back the lid of the second cup, downed a few trazodone, smoked a cigarette out the window, then flopped down on my sofa. I ripped open the M&M’s, ate them and a couple of Zyprexa, and watched Regarding Henry, dozing, the forgotten Klondike bar melting in my pocket. Reva showed up halfway through the movie with a huge tin of caramel popcorn. I answered the door on my hands and knees. “Can I leave this here?” she asked. “If I keep it at my house, I’m afraid I’ll eat it all.” “Uh-huh,” I grunted.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Give them an ambiguity that lets them see what they want to see, capture their imagination with little voyeuristic glimpses into your dark soul. The Greek philosopher Socrates was one of history's greatest seducers; the young men who followed him as students were not just fascinated by his ideas, they fell in love with him. One such youth was Alcibiades, the notorious playboy who became a powerful political figure near the end of the fifth century B.C. In Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades describes Socrates's seductive powers by comparing him to the little figures of Silenus that were made back then. In Greek myth, Silenus was quite ugly, but also a wise prophet. Accordingly the statues of Silenus were hollow, and when you took them apart, you would find little figures of gods inside them—the in- ner truth and beauty under the unappealing exterior. And so, for Alci- biades, it was the same with Socrates, who was so ugly as to be repellent but whose face radiated inner beauty and contentment. The effect was confus- grateful thanks to you!— yet not forgetting a bone I have to pick with you." • "Ah, sweet woman, what have I done?" was courteous Rivalin's reply. • "You have annoyed me through a friend of mine, the best I ever had. " • "Good heavens," thought he, "what does this mean? What have I done to displease her? What does she say I have done?" and he imagined that unwittingly he must have injured a kinsman of hers some time at their knightly sports and that was why she was vexed with him. But no, the friend she referred to was her heart, in which he made her suffer: that was the friend she spoke of But he knew nothing of that. • "Lovely woman," he said with all his accustomed charm, "I do not want you to be angry with me or bear me any ill will. So, if what you tell me is true, pronounce sentence on me yourself: I will do whatever you command." • "I do not hate you overmuch for what has happened," was the sweet girl's answer, "nor do I love you for it. But to see what amends you will make for the wrong you have done me, I shall test you another time." • And so he bowed as if to go, and she, lovely girl, sighed at him most secretly and said with tender feeling: • "Ah, dear friend, God bless you!" From this time on the thoughts of each ran on the other. • Rivalin turned away, pondering many things. He pondered from many sides why Blancheflor should be vexed, and what lay behind it all.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Rescuers can make excellent victims, particularly if you enjoy chival- rous or maternal attention. If you are a woman, play the damsel in distress, giving a man the chance so many men long for—to act the knight. If you are a man, play the boy who cannot deal with this harsh world; a female Rescuer will envelop you in maternal attention, gaining for herself the added satisfaction of feeling more powerful and in control than a man. An air of sadness will draw either gender in. Exaggerate your weaknesses, but not through overt words or gestures—let them sense that you have had too little love, that you have had a string of bad relationships, that you have got- ten a raw deal in life. Having lured your Rescuer in with the chance to help you, you can then stoke the relationship's fires with a steady supply of needs and vulnerabilities. You can also invite moral rescue: you are bad. You have done bad things. You need a stern yet loving hand. In this case the Rescuer gets to feel morally superior, but also the vicarious thrill of in- volvement with someone naughty. The Roué. These types have lived the good life and experienced many pleasures. They probably have, or once had, a good deal of money to fi- nance their hedonistic lives. On the outside they tend to seem cynical and jaded, but their worldliness often hides a sentimentality that they have struggled to repress. Roués are consummate seducers, but there is one type that can easily seduce them—the young and the innocent. As they get 158 • The Art of Seduction older, they hanker after their lost youth; missing their long-lost innocence, they begin to covet it in others. If you should want to seduce them, you will probably have to be some- what young and to have retained at least the appearance of innocence. It is easy to play this up—make a show of how little experience you have in the world, how you still see things as a child. It is also good to seem to resist their advances: Roués will think it lively and exciting to chase you. You can even seem to dislike or distrust them—that will really spur them on. By be- ing the one who resists, you control the dynamic. And since you have the youth that they are missing, you can maintain the upper hand and make them fall deeply in love. They will often be susceptible to such a fall, be- cause they have tamped down their own romantic tendencies for so long that when it bursts forth, they lose control. Never give in too early, and never let your guard down—such types can be dangerous.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The young Napoleon Bonaparte, twenty-six at the time, had no inter- est in such revelries. He had made a name for himself as a bright, audacious general who had helped quell rebellion in the provinces, but his ambition was boundless and he burned with desire for new conquests. So when, in October of that year, the infamous thirty-three-year-old widow Josephine de Beauharnais visited his offices, he couldn't help but be confused. Jose- phine was so exotic, and everything about her was languorous and sensual. (She capitalized on her foreignness—she came from the island of Mar- tinique.) On the other hand she had a reputation as a loose woman, and the shy Napoleon believed in marriage. Even so, when Josephine invited him to one of her weekly soirees, he found himself accepting. At the soiree he felt totally out of his element. All of the city's great writers and wits were there, as well as the few of the nobility who had survived—Josephine herself was a vicomtesse, and had narrowly escaped the guillotine. The women were dazzling, some of them more beautiful than the hostess, but all the men congregated around Josephine, drawn by her graceful presence and queenly manner. Several times she left the men behind and went to Napoleon's side; nothing could have flattered his inse- cure ego more than such attention. He began to pay her visits. Sometimes she would ignore him, and he would leave in a fit of anger. Yet the next day a passionate letter would ar- rive from Josephine, and he would rush to see her. Soon he was spending most of his time with her. Her occasional shows of sadness, her bouts of anger or of tears, only deepened his attachment. In March of 1796, Napo- leon married Josephine. Two days after his wedding, Napoleon left to lead a campaign in northern Italy against the Austrians. "You are the constant object of my thoughts," he wrote to his wife from abroad. "My imagination exhausts itself in guess- ing what you are doing." His generals saw him distracted: he would leave meetings early, spend hours writing letters, or stare at the miniature of Josephine he wore around his neck. He had been driven to this state by the unbearable distance between them and by a slight coldness he now detected There are indeed men who are attached more by resistance than by yielding and who unwittingly prefer a variable sky, now splendid, now black and vexed by lightnings, to love's unclouded blue. Let us not forget that Josephine had to deal with a conqueror and that love resembles war. She did not surrender, she let herself be conquered. Had she been more tender, more attentive, more loving, perhaps Bonaparte would have loved her less. —IMBERT DE SAINT-AMAND, QUOTED IN THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE: NAPOLEON'S ENCHANTRESS, PHILIP W.