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 30 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The last time that he’d spoken to Sophie was at the end of the summer. They were sleeping in his bed, her body tight to his. The fan drew the heavy air through the window, animated it slightly, and cooled their skin. They slept naked on top of his thin sheet. Sophie’s hair writhed in the fan’s breeze, and he lay there, watching her sleep. He had sensed a distancing between them for a couple of weeks, ever since they had seen Charles at the bonfire that night after the concert in the park. Sophie left Alek’s lap to speak to Charles, and he had been forced to watch it all unfurl. Charles, thick, as if cut from the side of a mountain. Charles with his decent but unremarkable technique. Charles with his curls and handsome face—he and Sophie had gone around together for as long as Alek had known them both, but Sophie had surprised him by letting him kiss her the night after the cough began. Sophie had let him put his hand on her lower back and draw her to him, had let him feel so much bigger for it, in control of both of their bodies. It was like partnering, how one only appears to surrender to the illusion of grace. And then he’d thought, perhaps, that she liked him enough, that he was enough for her. That she and Charles were done. They made small dinners. They spoke together in low voices outside the practice hall. They held hands in the casual, easy way that comes to people in relationships. Alek had begun to imagine a lifetime of such minor joys, small intimacies, which were all he could manage. They would be dancers and in love. But when she left him by the fire to stand next to Charles, he had known that the thing between them, for all its easiness and the joy it brought him, would end. And so for weeks he had watched her recede. Watched her from the back of morning exercises, from the back of the library as she looked over old choreography. Watched her over dinner and coffee, even watched her buy cigarettes from the corner store, waiting for her to turn to him and smile and shrug. Waiting and watching. The last time he spoke to Sophie was some morning, when she was putting on her clothes and tying up her hair, shrugging. He watched the expanse of her back vanish into her shirt, and she turned, kissed his palm, and said she would call him later. But she didn’t. • • •

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I see phantoms in relationships sometimes; certain ways people are with each other that I can’t be. I wonder if maybe I would have wanted kids, if none of this had happened. Maybe I wouldn’t—maybe that part would have been the same and it would have just been clearly not for me. But I think I might have, and that life is a ghost for me, haunting, distant, just out of reach across the line of my life. For me, it got better and worse and better again. I lost some of the most important people in my life because they could not stand by me while I was walking into darkness. Others said they would, and then did not, and that changes a person. I am less trusting now. When people say they’ll be there, I think, We’ll see. But there are rarely days that lay me out, now. It’s hard to knock me down for long. This many years into living with these scars, into being a person who carries this thing with me, I am fairly adept at it. I can shift the weight of it around, I know what it looks like on different days, how it moves with me through the seasons, through the years. I own my identity. I am a survivor, and I am out as a survivor, and I keep coming out as one over and over again. I am not shy about it, and I am not ashamed. But if people want details, if they want the easily consumable tragedy so that they can file me away somewhere and not have to think about it again, they are not going to get it from me. This story is in the bedrock of me. It’s in my bones, what happened, and I have grown around it and over it, and you can’t have it. It’s mine. Picture PerfectSharisse TraceyDADDY MOVED US OUT TO CALIFORNIA WHEN I WAS FIVE; Mommy didn’t like it there. I hated being there as an only child mostly because, if I’d had a brother or sister, I would’ve had someone to play with. Daddy said that I was spoiled, but I worked more at thirteen than he did; like Cliff Huxtable, he was home a lot while Mommy worked at the phone company. My dad was a freelance photographer who worked steady for a while until he got too sick with sickle cell. I never really saw him in a photo shoot with models (or women wanting to be models), but I sure saw the results in his albums. My mom didn’t seem to mind about the pictures—or, if she did, I didn’t know. I never heard them arguing about his photography or the women in the shots.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Farnland wet his lips as though he had received something appetizing. Charles watched his eyes go glossy and distant. It was the same expression that came across Farnland’s face during rehearsals when he watched Viktor shadow Charles, learning the overly emotive choreography of the middle section. It was supposed to be drawn from The Four Temperaments but lacked that piece’s emotional reserve. On Viktor, Farnland’s choreography was hectic, scattered. On Charles, because he lacked Viktor’s speed, it had a certain gravitas. Or so Charles liked to think. But during rehearsal last week, he had looked up to see Farnland watching Viktor as he made some adjustments to the ending combination. That same distant, wantful gloss of the eyes, the subtle shifting of the lips as the music wound up to its slow conclusion. “Well, just remember, we’re all after the same thing.” “Right. Pathos.” “Fucker,” Farnland said, but then he smiled, showing Charles his teeth, gnarly and green-yellow. Charles smiled back. Pathos was what Farnland had called his “dumb number.” It was, he said often during rehearsal, art’s most noble pursuit. One evening, one of the other dancers had jokingly said, What about ethos? And Farnland, from a seated position, had flung a hard-shell water bottle at her head. Then he’d shouted them all down for ten minutes about making snide little remarks and the terrors of their generation. What did any of them know about art? About anything? Charles half wished that Farnland would make a scene now. That he’d do something. But he didn’t. Farnland waved him off and pushed out into the hall. The noise from the class next door, the music, filled the room briefly, and then was gone. Charles flexed his fist and worked over his knee. Little old man, full of spite. But Charles had done nothing to stop him. • • • CHARLES CUT THROUGH THE COURTYARD, scattering a group of smoking students. They trailed white smoke, legible in the piercing daylight. His sweat had turned to a chalky crust, and he could feel it breaking up when he moved, cold sneaking in against his skin. The class had done its work. His muscles were warm, and he felt pliant, alive. He’d pulled the brace on to give his knee some relief. On the other side of the courtyard, he slipped into the dance library. Sophie often haunted the upper levels of the library in the media room, looking over old choreography. She could have streamed it on her phone in high definition, but she liked browsing through the years of archival footage, poring over little-known, minor dancers, taking bits here and there from everyone like a magpie. He found her sitting on the floor with an enormous album covering her entire lap. She was running her finger up and down the list, deciding which to take out.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Everyone went out into the backyard, even though it had started to snow; there was nothing to see but the glare of the lampposts through the trees and the bright blue light from the neighbors’ shed. They passed around a joint someone had brought. “Analog vaping,” the host said. “Love it.” Lionel reached out through the porch railings and combed through the fat flakes of snow that drifted downward through the night. Their delicacy as they melted made him want to cry. The host smelled like wine and pot, sweet and a little musky. He squatted next to Lionel, and they bumped shoulders. “Do you want to stay over tonight?” the host asked. “To properly celebrate.” Lionel knew he meant Do you want to have sex? He asked it loud enough for others to hear, but quiet enough to suggest that there was some seriousness to the query. Lionel looked out at the other people’s faces and wondered what they would do if he said yes. “Hmm,” he said instead. There, with their faces pressed close and the smell of smoke in his hair, Lionel felt that if things had been slightly different he might easily have said yes and let himself be pulled under. If only for the possibility that the host’s good luck and good life might rub off on him. Charles sat on a stool and Sophie leaned down against his back. She had her arms around his neck, but she was watching Lionel. She was not quite smiling at him. No, not that. But there was warmth beneath her expression. In the porch light, she glowed. Charles stroked her arm with his finger. They could go on forever that way, Lionel thought. They knew what to do to each other. How to be together. That business in the kitchen had been an aberration, or maybe just the prelude to this tenderness. Sophie kissed the top of Charles’s head and pulled away from him. She sat next to Lionel in her thick gray tights and corduroy skirt. She had a purple jacket over her shoulders and a green hat that someone had knit for her. As everyone had been getting ready to go outside, she had passed the hat around, clearly proud of it, like a family heirloom. “Rough going at dinner. I see you and Charlie made up, though.” She propped her chin on her hand. Charlie. “Yeah,” Lionel said. “We’re old buddies now.” Sophie’s face shifted subtly under the porch light, like a figure from myth or a trailer for an ominous horror movie. Charles leaned forward on the stool and braced his arms on the banister. In the yard, the others had begun to spin in slow circles with their heads back and their arms out in Christ pose. “He’s good at enjoying himself,” Sophie said. “I’m afraid I’m out of my depth. Or maybe I’m too drunk to have this conversation.”

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Jim drives away. Again, the memory of the brown-haired youngman he was with when the cops raided the park pursues him. Is he in jail right now? Restlessly, he drives from place to place in the vast city, merely moving in his car, not getting out now, as if to feel the energy, all of it, his, the night's, the city's, to grasp it all, as if the city and night themselves are throbbing sexually with him. He feels a giant longing without object. As he drives up to the lot outside the Turf Bar, he sees two gay men in cop costumes, goggles gleaming, handcuffs dangling, bully sticks protruding. Both men are heavy, slightly drunk. At the corner, one stands stiffly in a military posture and, boots clicking, salutes the other. VOICE OVER: S & M vs. ''S & M'' VOICE OVER: S & M vs. “S & M” S OME TIME PRIOR to April 10, 1976, a number of Los Angeles police were involved in a secret mission of major priority. They were on their way to Universal Studios. They might even have to stop off at Columbia Studios and the Western Costume Company. Through those facilities they would obtain important crime-fighting equipment, including: “4 bleached Levi's—tight-fitting; 4 bandanas, 2 red, 2 blue” also, “boots, rough, dirty … [a] motorcycle hat; studded Levi's, jacket.” Somewhere else in the cool city of angels, a police officer planning his small—but important—aspect of the operation was doodling nervously on a sheet of paper containing names and telephone numbers of organizations the IRS might have information on and that the suspects might contact as a result of the surveillance involved or of the operation itself. He drew an open-ended parallelogram, another, another, eight such, each straining to become what it finally did only on the ninth doodle: A box!—hesitant, yes, but nonetheless distinctly a box. Now having committed himself, he drew—under the trembling series—an assertive, fully erect version of the same troubling box. Elsewhere in the city that seems to float on flowers, for four grueling days four officers, specialists in their fields, were being “briefed and schooled … as necessary” on details including “proper attire to be made with help of Universal Studios.” Still elsewhere in the vast city that stretches palmtreed to the lapping ocean, a surveillance team was trailing the main suspects. The surveying officers had become quite familiar with their quarries, they had been watching them intently for weeks and weeks. They even knew—and recorded—how many pieces of mail were received in a day by one of the suspects, and from whom.

• From Escape (2007)

  I didn’t start school until I was six and a half. Finally! I had watched Linda go to school every day, wishing I could go with her. Kindergarten didn’t exist in the FLDS because the belief was that children were better off spending another year at home. It didn’t do me any good. I was eager to get going. I wanted to learn. There wasn’t much stimulation at home beyond listening to my grandmother’s stories. Fairy tales were frowned upon, and we had no other children’s books at home. There was no public library in town, and I don’t remember my mother ever buying us books of our own. In 1974, a few weeks before school started, when I was counting down the days, I met Laura, who would become one of my closest friends. It was a scorching July day, one of those when the air feels too hot and dry to even want to breathe it in. I was playing paper dolls inside with Linda while Mother was sewing new dresses for our first day of school. The weather shifted suddenly; the sky darkened and then split apart in a downpour. Linda, Annette, and I stood at the kitchen window, listening to the rain pound the roof of the house and smelling its sweetness through the air conditioner. After the deluge, we begged Mama to let us go outside, and she said we could as long as we didn’t get muddy. The dirt road in front of our house had turned into a large stream of muddy water. I could think of nothing better than to run and splash in it. Linda read my mind. “Carolyn, don’t even think of it. We will all get a spanking if you do!” When my mother got mad at one of us for doing something disobedient or wrong, usually we all paid a price for her anger. What kept me on the porch wasn’t my fear of getting a spanking; it was the fear of how Linda would feel if I got her and Annette in trouble. A moment later, we heard children’s voices and suddenly saw the kids from a new polygamous family that had moved into the community. They’d come from Idaho with three wives and what seemed like two dozen children. A redheaded girl who looked about the same age as me caught my eye. She came running down the street and with a big jump and splash landed in the middle of the muddy water. All her other siblings followed her. They were laughing and splashing in the mud and having the best time. I was dying to join them but knew I couldn’t.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Being able to go wherever she wanted. Whenever she wanted. The feeling of being able to lift her fork and not have to think about what it will cost her later. Oh, she misses it. The carelessness of those four years. How easy it was. But now she misses her hair. She misses the moisture in her skin. She misses hunger. Not for food, exactly, or even the sensation of appetite, which remains, if much attenuated. She misses sex, the desire for sex, the capacity for sex. Before her diagnosis, she had been fucking a white boy named Jonas. He had played lacrosse at the University of Virginia. He was tall and firm. He came from money and his family had a second house in the mountains. Her friends had tried warn her about him. Not that he was dangerous or bad, but that white men were a particular kind of hazard. She was light-skinned, they said, susceptible. But it wasn’t like that, Grace didn’t think. She wasn’t thinking about her parents. She wasn’t thinking about how she’d been watched by her grandmother and aunts, or what it meant that her mother didn’t speak to her own family anymore because she’d run off with a black man. Grace was careless and free, and what she thought about was what felt good. Having been deprived of it her whole life, having spent all her time thinking about what other people thought, she’d given herself over to Jonas because he made her laugh and made her feel like she was showing him everything about his body and hers both. With Jonas it was always so good, so easy. He was so pliant, willing to give in to her, to give way to her desires. When they had sex, she could think only of herself, the friction inside her, the gathering heat between their bodies, the scent of her hair, of her sweat and his, the rhythm of their coming together and falling apart. She didn’t want a oneness with him, as she’d heard some people describe it. What she craved was the white-hot oblivion of an orgasm, riding the rim of it again and again until finally she slipped down into herself and shivered. All of that feels beyond her now. It seems a tragedy to say good-bye to that full-body shudder, that brief glimpse over the edge of herself down into eternity. She’d had it for only a few years before they found the tumor, before her slow withdrawal from life began. She doesn’t feel angry about it all the time. Rather, it’s as though she’d booked a cruise that is, at the last possible moment, canceled—or, more precisely, that her ticket alone has been canceled. The particular agony of it all is that she has to stand on the beach and watch as everyone she loves drifts out to sea without her. They go on eating. The clink of their silverware on the good plates.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They were cranky on the drive home, and mean, waspish to each other. They sniped and fought and insulted each other, until Marta pulled them over into a roadside motel, where the sheets were scratchy and hard. And she pushed Sigrid onto the bed and pulled her pants off. She pressed her face between Sigrid’s legs and kissed her against the outside of her panties. Sigrid was warm. She smelled like the field. After that, it was easygoing. They drove with the soft, blurry focus of people in love. Sigrid, who had gotten sunburned on the last day, drowsed. Marta played a Billie Holiday song and hummed along as they moved downward through the state. The trees gave way, turning steadily into flat fields drenched in yellow and green. The air grew thicker, heavier. And then, eventually, they were back. • • • One evening in the fall, Marta returned home to find Peter on her doorstep. He was tan and had filled out. He looked like a high-definition version of himself. He stood up the moment he saw her car. And, as she got out of it, he walked over to her. “Marta, it’s been a while,” he said. “A year,” she said, leaning against her car door. “How long have you been here?” “Here, as in the country, or here, as in town, or here, as in on your doorstep?” “All three, I guess,” she said. “I got in yesterday,” he said. “I came over a little while ago to see if you’d be here. But then I decided to wait.” She almost asked him what he was waiting for, but she didn’t. She almost asked him inside, but she didn’t. Peter seemed to be waiting for that, didn’t know what to do without the offer. “Can we sit down somewhere?” he asked, looking back toward the house. “The place is a mess,” she said. “Let’s just sit in my car.” “All right, then,” he said, and they got inside. Marta rested her hands on the wheel out of habit, stared directly ahead. Peter squirmed in the passenger seat. He had always driven when they were together. “This is funny, being in here again,” he said. “It is,” Marta offered. “Well, what’s on your mind?” “Oh, well. That’s a great question, a real great question.” He was fiddling with the center console. He lifted it, stared into its maw of papers and pill bottles, then dropped it shut. “I guess you’re wondering why I’m back.” “The thought did cross my mind,” she said. “My mother’s dying,” he said. “I came back to see her, and, well. I wanted to see you, too. I miss you.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  All over, he was on fire. The sun, hazy, distant, white on the horizon, the trees, spindly fibers whirling in the distance. Eventually the coughing subsided—it had been bronchial in nature, that hollow, echoing sound—and he could breathe again. He felt stunned, slapped, like he’d been dipped into some other world tucked just under this one and brought back too quickly. Sophie was sitting next to him, one hand gripping his, the other making circles on his back. A bead of sweat clung to the corner of her mouth. A red clip kept hair off her face. He had always admired her, thought her talent terrifying. Sophie. She gave him a tentative, sad smile. She let him drink from her bottle. The water was flat and warm. It had a coppery taste. “We better get inside,” she said. “All right,” he said, and he let her take him by the arm again, to get him on his feet. But then he was ready to stand on his own, or else he didn’t want her to think that he couldn’t. She put her arm around his waist to steady him and they went into the hall, where they could already hear the music starting up again. How long had it been since he’d spoken to Sophie? Alek sat on the floor now and began to stretch. First his legs. Then his back. He stretched to the tips of his toes, pressing himself flush against the tops of his thighs, holding the position for as long as he could. He could feel the cough gathering along the edge of his lungs, that tickling heat. He suppressed it as best he could. He counted to twenty and released the stretch, then lay on his back. The cough came quickly, loudly, and filled the empty room in the way a lonely prayer might fill a cathedral. The last time that he’d spoken to Sophie was at the end of the summer. They were sleeping in his bed, her body tight to his. The fan drew the heavy air through the window, animated it slightly, and cooled their skin. They slept naked on top of his thin sheet. Sophie’s hair writhed in the fan’s breeze, and he lay there, watching her sleep. He had sensed a distancing between them for a couple of weeks, ever since they had seen Charles at the bonfire that night after the concert in the park. Sophie left Alek’s lap to speak to Charles, and he had been forced to watch it all unfurl. Charles, thick, as if cut from the side of a mountain.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Lionel refrained from pointing out that this was as identifying as putting your information down in the first place, but people were allowed their convictions, and he could respect that. When he had taken the sheet back, he wrote French Absolutism on the board again and said, “You have two hours. Good luck.” They put their heads down over their blue books. There were five rows of five desks each, and the boys had spread out across the room in a weird sequence. One row was filled entirely, then the next left empty, and then a couple in the third and fourth rows, and the last row also filled. It was like a riddle or SAT question: 5, 0, 2, 3, 5. Out of habit, Lionel shifted the numbers around, first in increasing order, then decreasing order. He calculated the sum, the average, the sum of squares, the sum of cubes, the standard deviation. He leaned against the table at the front of the room, running the numbers through a string of permutations. It made him homesick for math—for the library where he’d worked through his first-year coursework in the graduate program, going through two or three legal pads of calculations a week, checking his work against WolframAlpha, graphing ridiculous functions and sending screenshots to the friend who had hosted the potluck last night. He missed the cramped TA office the math department had provided to him and the others who taught Calc I, and if they were unlucky, remedial algebra—those sullen, unhappy faces of the probationary students who didn’t know even the most basic of things. Lionel longed for that period of his life, when he made grilled cheeses and sat in the back patio of his building, trying to solve the problems that were sometimes pinned to the bulletin board in the department office. That smell like burning coffee when someone had left the machine on in the shared kitchen, the hum of the big printer and scanner. He missed the long talks with his advisor, Dr. Lauk, who had taken Lionel in after that summer program because Lionel was also interested in complex differential geometry, though Lionel didn’t like analysis and had struggled through his analytic geometry class. He even missed the mean, brutal hours of Dr. Nonan’s seminar on geometric isoforms and topology, the one class where he had gotten the minimum required B. Lionel remembered staring at the grade with great incredulity. No one in grad school got Bs unless something had gone wildly wrong. He remembered being summoned when that fall semester’s grade posted, and hearing Dr. Lauk say, with kindness that verged on condescension, “He can be a challenging instructor. You’ll do better next time.” The implication being that Lionel must retake the course and get an A because the subject matter intersected so deeply with his advisor’s specialty.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Everyone went out into the backyard, even though it had started to snow; there was nothing to see but the glare of the lampposts through the trees and the bright blue light from the neighbors’ shed. They passed around a joint someone had brought. “Analog vaping,” the host said. “Love it.” Lionel reached out through the porch railings and combed through the fat flakes of snow that drifted downward through the night. Their delicacy as they melted made him want to cry. The host smelled like wine and pot, sweet and a little musky. He squatted next to Lionel, and they bumped shoulders. “Do you want to stay over tonight?” the host asked. “To properly celebrate.” Lionel knew he meant Do you want to have sex? He asked it loud enough for others to hear, but quiet enough to suggest that there was some seriousness to the query. Lionel looked out at the other people’s faces and wondered what they would do if he said yes. “Hmm,” he said instead. There, with their faces pressed close and the smell of smoke in his hair, Lionel felt that if things had been slightly different he might easily have said yes and let himself be pulled under. If only for the possibility that the host’s good luck and good life might rub off on him. Charles sat on a stool and Sophie leaned down against his back. She had her arms around his neck, but she was watching Lionel. She was not quite smiling at him. No, not that. But there was warmth beneath her expression. In the porch light, she glowed. Charles stroked her arm with his finger. They could go on forever that way, Lionel thought. They knew what to do to each other. How to be together. That business in the kitchen had been an aberration, or maybe just the prelude to this tenderness. Sophie kissed the top of Charles’s head and pulled away from him. She sat next to Lionel in her thick gray tights and corduroy skirt. She had a purple jacket over her shoulders and a green hat that someone had knit for her. As everyone had been getting ready to go outside, she had passed the hat around, clearly proud of it, like a family heirloom. “Rough going at dinner. I see you and Charlie made up, though.” She propped her chin on her hand. Charlie. “Yeah,” Lionel said. “We’re old buddies now.” Sophie’s face shifted subtly under the porch light, like a figure from myth or a trailer for an ominous horror movie. Charles leaned forward on the stool and braced his arms on the banister. In the yard, the others had begun to spin in slow circles with their heads back and their arms out in Christ pose. “He’s good at enjoying himself,” Sophie said. “I’m afraid I’m out of my depth. Or maybe I’m too drunk to have this conversation.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At dawn she began to disintegrate. The certainty of day pulsed into being and all my exertions were able to keep her at my side only a few more moments. At last she fled. I stumbled from class to class in a numb haze. Strangely enough, I was afraid I’d run into Helen. I didn’t feel up to her. I was too tired. In home room I yawned, rested my head on my desk and longed for the privacy of my bed and the saving grace of night. I wanted to be alone with my wraith. In my confusion the real Helen Paper seemed irrelevant, even intrusive. That night I wrote her a letter. I chose a special yellow parchment, a spidery pen point and black ink. In gym class as I’d stumbled through calisthenics and in study hall as I’d half dozed behind a stack of books, phrases for the letter had dropped into my mind. Now I sat down with great formality at my desk and composed the missive, first in pencil on scratch paper. If I reproduced it (I still have the pencil draft) you’d laugh at me or we would laugh together at the prissy diction and the high-flown sentiment. What would be harder to convey is how much it meant to me, how it read to me back then. I offered her my love and allegiance while admitting I knew how unworthy of her I was. And yet I had half a notion that though I might be worthless as a date (not handsome enough) I might be of some value as a husband (intelligent, slated for success). In marriage merits outweighed appeal, and I could imagine nothing less eternal than marriage with Helen. Naturally I didn’t mention marriage in the letter. A week went by before I received her answer. Twice I saw her in the halls. The first time she came over to me and looked me in the eye and smiled her sweet, intense smile. She was wearing a powder-blue cashmere sweater and her breasts rose and fell monumentally as she asked me in her soft drawl how I was doing. Nothing in her smile or voice suggested a verdict either for or against me. I felt there was something improper about seeing her at all before I got her letter. I mumbled, “Fine,” blushed and slinked off. I felt tall and dirty. I was avoiding Tommy as well. Soon enough I would have to tell him about my proposal to Helen, which I suspected he’d disapprove of. Then one afternoon, a Friday after school, there was her letter to me in the mailbox. Even before I opened it I was mildly grateful she had at least answered me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was always reading and often writing but both were passionately abstract activities. Early on, I had recognized that books pictured another life, one quite foreign to mine, in which people circled one another warily and with exquisite courtesy until an individual or a couple erupted and flew out of the salon, spangling the night with fire. I had somehow stumbled on Ibsen and that’s how he struck me: oblique social chatter followed by a heroic death in a snowslide or on the steeple of a church (I wondered how these scenes could be staged). Oddly enough, the “realism” of the last century seemed to me tinglingly farfetched: vows, betrayals, flights, fights, sacrifices, suicides. I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance—a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it. I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt. At the same time I was drawn to … What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth? The library downtown had been built as an opera house in the last century. Even in grade school I had haunted the library, which was in the same block as my father’s office. The library looked up like a rheumy eye at a pitched skylight over which pigeons whirled, their bodies a shuddering gray haze until one bird settled and its pacing black feet became as precise as cuneiform. The light seeped down through the stacks that were arranged in a horseshoe of tiers: the former family balcony, the dress circle, the boxes, on down to the orchestra, still gently raked but now cleared of stalls and furnished with massive oak card files and oak reading tables where unshaved old men read newspapers under gooseneck lamps and rearranged rags in paper sacks. The original stage had been demolished, but cleats on the wall showed where ropes had once been secured.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Charles with his decent but unremarkable technique. Charles with his curls and handsome face—he and Sophie had gone around together for as long as Alek had known them both, but Sophie had surprised him by letting him kiss her the night after the cough began. Sophie had let him put his hand on her lower back and draw her to him, had let him feel so much bigger for it, in control of both of their bodies. It was like partnering, how one only appears to surrender to the illusion of grace. And then he’d thought, perhaps, that she liked him enough, that he was enough for her. That she and Charles were done. They made small dinners. They spoke together in low voices outside the practice hall. They held hands in the casual, easy way that comes to people in relationships. Alek had begun to imagine a lifetime of such minor joys, small intimacies, which were all he could manage. They would be dancers and in love. But when she left him by the fire to stand next to Charles, he had known that the thing between them, for all its easiness and the joy it brought him, would end. And so for weeks he had watched her recede. Watched her from the back of morning exercises, from the back of the library as she looked over old choreography. Watched her over dinner and coffee, even watched her buy cigarettes from the corner store, waiting for her to turn to him and smile and shrug. Waiting and watching. The last time he spoke to Sophie was some morning, when she was putting on her clothes and tying up her hair, shrugging. He watched the expanse of her back vanish into her shirt, and she turned, kissed his palm, and said she would call him later. But she didn’t. • • • VOICES IN THE HALL. Alek rolled onto his side, could smell the fresh polish of the floor. He pushed himself up, rolled his shoulders, and spread his legs. He leaned forward. The door slid open—Mats and Octavius came into the room. They were talking loudly about something, about someone, and Alek tried not to listen, but their voices came closer and closer until the two of them were standing over him. Octavius’s purple-black skin almost gleamed. Mats was shorter than Octavius, who was a giant for a dancer, a slash of a man. They wore sweaters from East Coast colleges that neither had attended, hand-me- downs from their parents. Mats in a blue Yale sweater and Octavius in a crimson Harvard sweatshirt.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He squinted down at the sheet of paper and said, “Do you mind if I don’t? Like, I don’t feel comfortable.” “Sure,” Lionel said. “Okay. Whatever you want.” The boy signed his name and passed the sheet to the next boy, who looked at it for a moment while holding his ID card aloft in his right hand, as if making up his mind about whether or not to write down his number. Lionel felt like he had lost some control over the room, like he’d just failed a test of his own. But after a moment the boy did write down his name and number, and the paper went on, with people adding their details, until it was clear that the only person without an ID number was the boy who had complained. Lionel refrained from pointing out that this was as identifying as putting your information down in the first place, but people were allowed their convictions, and he could respect that. When he had taken the sheet back, he wrote French Absolutism on the board again and said, “You have two hours. Good luck.” They put their heads down over their blue books. There were five rows of five desks each, and the boys had spread out across the room in a weird sequence. One row was filled entirely, then the next left empty, and then a couple in the third and fourth rows, and the last row also filled. It was like a riddle or SAT question: 5, 0, 2, 3, 5. Out of habit, Lionel shifted the numbers around, first in increasing order, then decreasing order. He calculated the sum, the average, the sum of squares, the sum of cubes, the standard deviation. He leaned against the table at the front of the room, running the numbers through a string of permutations. It made him homesick for math—for the library where he’d worked through his first-year coursework in the graduate program, going through two or three legal pads of calculations a week, checking his work against WolframAlpha, graphing ridiculous functions and sending screenshots to the friend who had hosted the potluck last night. He missed the cramped TA office the math department had provided to him and the others who taught Calc I, and if they were unlucky, remedial algebra—those sullen, unhappy faces of the probationary students who didn’t know even the most basic of things. Lionel longed for that period of his life, when he made grilled cheeses and sat in the back patio of his building, trying to solve the problems that were sometimes pinned to the bulletin board in the department office. That smell like burning coffee when someone had left the machine on in the shared kitchen, the hum of the big printer and scanner.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Here I purposely pause, hoping he’ll pick up on what he’s doing to me, but youth is never as perceptive as age would have it. Youth is energetically oblivious, even when he’s trying, and I do think Harley tries. He just can’t pick up on an old man’s needs. “Would you like to talk about it? Maybe we could go somewhere.” He hasn’t expected this and I see hesitation, like he’s embarrassed for me. And I regret the overture, almost regret the fuck. “Of course you may have plans,” I quickly add. He thinks about it, which in itself is wounding. How can it be that he has to think? He knows what I can give him. I’ll make him come buckets. We can fuck for hours—but suddenly it’s Cody I’m fucking and I shake my head. “Never mind,” I say as I get up so quickly the chair topples. Harley stands. “You okay?” “Yes, fine.” At the door he asks where we can go. He says it like it’s the most casual thing on earth, which I suppose it is to him while to me it is the end all be all. “Would you like to come to my place? Have a drink?” “Okay.” On the drive I wonder if he even remembers us fucking. He seems much the neophyte, like he’s gotten into a car with an older man for the first time in his life and he has no idea I’ve even got a dick or will offer it to him. I try not to speed, then try not to go too slow lest he see an elder at the wheel. At the house he tosses his backpack onto a chair and starts looking at the books that line one wall of the living room. The house is a 1924 bungalow, small, cozy, comfortable. I open wine, pour two glasses, invite him to sit, but he takes the wine and remains at the books. “What are you looking for?” I ask. “Something I’ve read,” he says with a laugh. “Give it time. You’ll read them all.” I’m beside him, ecstatic with his proximity. I sip wine when I really want to get his pants down. I could fuck him standing at the books. We could recite titles as he takes my cock. “Who’s your favorite author?” I ask, trying to derail myself. “I like Hemingway’s stories but not his style. Updike is good and Chabon. I don’t know. I guess I’m looking for one of them to drill down into me and so far none has.” “Keep looking.” It’s the second glass of wine before we settle onto the sofa and I ask him about his boyfriend. Painful as this is, it remains my sole avenue and so I listen like the wise man he expects. My arm is on the sofa’s back, not quite reaching him.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Their car striking ruts in the road as they drove up the trail and then back out. The slow slope of the green hills, the vastness of the pine forest, the terrible distance, so far up, high above everything and everyone. That memory condensed, intensified—the rushing, clear air, the water, the call of animals, the emptiness of the perfect darkness that descends on a mountain where few people are living. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some mountain.” Charles reached for his hand. Lionel pivoted away. They passed again through the liberal arts building. Their steps echoed. Charles had parked near the campus. Lionel wished that he were as carefree as Sophie. He wished that he was the sort of person to run up the steep wall and wait to be drawn back down. He wished that he could manage some careless, easy gesture. But he was not. And Charles had noticed that he was avoiding contact. There was a distance between them. A quiet that grew bigger as they walked on. In the car, Lionel rolled down the window. Charles looked at him. “Are you nuts?” As they pulled out of the parking lot and into the street, Lionel closed his eyes. The cold air against his face seemed to open, leaving a cavity that was warm and hollow, deeper down in the flow of air. He pressed his face into it as if into a clear stream, and he could feel the cold rushing out and away, sliding past him. He opened his eyes, and the night was a gray smear of other lights, yellow and red and white, all of them blending until they were indistinct. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning. He could feel the churning up of something, the movement of memory. His grandmother and his grandfather had lived on that mountain, far away from everyone and everything. They kept animals, chickens and goats, sometimes a cow. Back then, Lionel had eaten meat and thought nothing of it. Back then, his grandfather had given him big bowls of venison or fish that they had trapped and killed and cleaned themselves. His grandfather had not been tall or stocky. He had been a tracing of a man, his skin deep and black. His grandfather had taught him how to kill in the most humane way—with the straightest, cleanest line, the purest shot. There had been days deep in the ashy frost of fall when Lionel had stood with his hands deep in the cavity of a deer, had felt its body cooling, its blood thickening.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They put their heads down over their blue books. There were five rows of five desks each, and the boys had spread out across the room in a weird sequence. One row was filled entirely, then the next left empty, and then a couple in the third and fourth rows, and the last row also filled. It was like a riddle or SAT question: 5, 0, 2, 3, 5. Out of habit, Lionel shifted the numbers around, first in increasing order, then decreasing order. He calculated the sum, the average, the sum of squares, the sum of cubes, the standard deviation. He leaned against the table at the front of the room, running the numbers through a string of permutations. It made him homesick for math—for the library where he’d worked through his first-year coursework in the graduate program, going through two or three legal pads of calculations a week, checking his work against WolframAlpha, graphing ridiculous functions and sending screenshots to the friend who had hosted the potluck last night. He missed the cramped TA office the math department had provided to him and the others who taught Calc I, and if they were unlucky, remedial algebra—those sullen, unhappy faces of the probationary students who didn’t know even the most basic of things. Lionel longed for that period of his life, when he made grilled cheeses and sat in the back patio of his building, trying to solve the problems that were sometimes pinned to the bulletin board in the department office. That smell like burning coffee when someone had left the machine on in the shared kitchen, the hum of the big printer and scanner. He missed the long talks with his advisor, Dr. Lauk, who had taken Lionel in after that summer program because Lionel was also interested in complex differential geometry, though Lionel didn’t like analysis and had struggled through his analytic geometry class. He even missed the mean, brutal hours of Dr. Nonan’s seminar on geometric isoforms and topology, the one class where he had gotten the minimum required B. Lionel remembered staring at the grade with great incredulity. No one in grad school got Bs unless something had gone wildly wrong. He remembered being summoned when that fall semester’s grade posted, and hearing Dr. Lauk say, with kindness that verged on condescension, “He can be a challenging instructor. You’ll do better next time.” The implication being that Lionel must retake the course and get an A because the subject matter intersected so deeply with his advisor’s specialty. There were moments in the spring semester when Lionel wondered if it was for his own benefit that he was retaking the class or if it was because he was being moved around a chessboard he couldn’t see, his graduate education a pawn passed between two egos. But even that he missed—the messy, ridiculous departmental politics, the rituals, all of it. But in his second year, Lionel had tried to kill himself. And now that was over.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  They laugh, look away again. Jim's cock begins to strain. He can see the other's straining too. His own sweat on the other's shirt, Jim removes it slowly. The blond hustler holds the shirt, flings it over his shoulder, his head turning toward it, as if to touch his mouth to it. Then he slips it on. Silent moments. They look at each other. The smiles freeze. Then they both laugh—and move on. As Jim walks away, he feels longing clash with anger. Standing by the telephone booth—and the telephone is ringing—Jim sees a man he's gone with many times before. Seeing Jim, the man begins to make a U-turn. Jim takes a few steps away, around the corner, to avoid the man. But then he waits there. The man drives up to him. Athletic, like a highschool coach, the man calls out, “Hi.” It's always the same; each time the man pretends—and Jim goes along with the charade—that this is the first time they've met. And each time he goes with him, Jim promises himself he never will again. “Hi.” Jim stands by the open window, but he's preparing an excuse to walk away. “Hustling?” the man asks. “Uh—…” Jim pauses. He starts to turn away. “Yeah.” He faces the man. “How much?” “Thirty dollars,” Jim answers, higher than usual—to court the man's saying no, he tells himself. Or because he knows the extent of the man's desire. “Okay,” the man agrees. Jim waits a few seconds before getting into the car. 7:45 P.M. A House in the Hills. As always, the man pays Jim before they enter the airy, comfortable house. Beyond a windowed wall, the city is a smashed jigsaw puzzle. In the bedroom, the man immediately breaks a popper of amyl nitrite. Jim inhales. Sex implodes. The man holds the crushed ampule urgently to his own nose, as if to smother in the powerful fumes. The ritual begins, and Jim surrenders to the part of him he hates. The man kneels before him. “Master!” the man's hoarse voice pleads. Reeling scenes, spat words, rushing sensations, clashing emotions: The man groveling at Jim's boots, tongue washing them…. The man's face pressed down by one boot…. Jim lifting the eager head, bringing it harshly against his groin…. The man pulling at Jim's belt with his teeth, sucking the tip, which Jim holds as if it were a long, menacing cock…. Another ampule of amyl…. The man's exhortations: “Piss on me! Spit on me!”…. Gurgling…. Swallowing, pausing to swallow…. “Master 1” The man's hands pinioned behind…. The liquid splashing on the man's face, on his chest…. The belt…. The boots…. Jim's rough hands directing the head…. Jim's cum spurts on the man's protruding tongue. The man's body writhes. Jim rubs his smeared cock over the other's rapt face. Groaning, the man comes into his own hands. “I love you!” he blurts out at Jim. 8:30 P.M.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I sketch this pattern to suggest the way White plays musical theme and variation with it and many others. His own mid-twentieth-century boy’s tale charts a new indoor Alpine course, one of habituating vices, class-based dangers, lubricious temptations, latent cures. Our representative youth falls in love with boys (the golden and admired if heedless Tommy); he falls in love with girls (the sophisticated yet voluptuous Helen). These beloveds are inevitably the favorites of everyone at school; that’s the draw. And, even if our hero fails to make them love him, he—determined, almost cursed with the gift to please—at least contrives to date them both. A room full of books and LP records (jazz and classical) at the end of a long corridor in some faux-Tudor mansion in Grosse Pointe might not seem the zone of conventional peril. But White renders—in prose of startling jack-in-the-box compression and dark-to-red Sargent-esque elegance—a treacherous route no less lethal than the nineteenth century’s snowbound mountain passes. Of course, Grosse Pointe lacks the invigoration of physical danger endured in good male company. Here, a boy’s story is merely his “own.” This suggests someone made accountable at too young an age for the full burden of his personal narrative. White’s novel alludes to works of self-actualization like Ben Franklin’s witty autobiography. Then it comically tweaks our expectations of the typical young man’s upward climb into solvent respectability, independence, possible greatness: When I was fourteen, the summer before I went to prep school, a year before I met Kevin, I worked for my father. He wanted me to learn the value of a dollar. I did work, I did learn and I earned enough to buy a hustler. We are far past the boy-victim implied by Dr. Ray’s “wayward child.” Here we greet an intellectual full-born in search of information one can learn only during postcoital cigarettes, while lolling beside men or boys and girls either overqualified or unworthy. This work charts the terror of being left too much alone with one’s own intelligence. How soon all of that can turn on a young fellow! In the person of our narrator, we’re up against a youth with the ability to register every nuance, aesthetic to erotic, but often while missing some essential hearty emotional reward. Progress here involves this child’s relentless search for that one true fulfilling connection; when it fails, we find him quick to settle instead for a restless anatomizing, a cataloguing of types, the gathering of sensations for their own sake. White’s achieved and textural prose is similarly questing, now referring to the natural world, now obsessed with high art, soon readily unbuttoning into the lowest reaches of fugitive erotic pursuit. But behind this forward-moving pressure toward the Great Love, one feels throughout the book an immense vacuum provided and maintained by our nameless boy’s stunted, brilliant, shut-off father.