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 32 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  As he relates a tumultuous coupling followed by abandonment followed by more coupling, he sorts out his own relationship, concluding once again that Jason is a shit. “But he’s got a big dick,” he adds with a wry chuckle, “and god he can fuck.” “I suppose you have to decide, then, what it is you want. Love or fucking.” “Can’t I have both?” “Not always.” “Have you had that?” he asks with genuine curiosity. I look into his eyes, grateful that he wants to know anything about me at all. “Yes, I was very much loved in a twenty-six-year relationship. He was older and died four years ago. I miss him to this day.” “Tell me about him,” Harley says, taking more wine. “I need to hear something good about a man.” And so I bring Carl to life for us, sharing the sex and the love, the mishaps and the joys, and during this Harley scoots in, working himself into the crook of my arm. And as I relate some of Carl’s wisdom, I unzip the boy’s pants and free his stiff cock. I smear his juice down the shaft and fondle him until he utters a “please,” then lies back. I bend to take him into my mouth and as I suck the come from him, I know I’m at the precipice all over again, my life in these young hands. Maybe he will remain, I think, as I taste his spunk. IMAGINATION MORPHS INTO REALITY Doug Harrison The tropical noonday sun forced its way through my closed eyelids. Or was it intuition that woke me from a dreamy slumber to scan the Hawaiian surf? No matter. I raised myself on my elbows, conscious of my eager hard-on straining painfully against the metal and leather confines of my cock cage—deliciously decadent on a family beach. He was standing waist deep in shimmering, sea-green water, staring at me. I grinned, he smiled. He was too far away for me to scrutinize his facial features, but I sensed he was handsome. And what a body, at least the upper half: broad shoulders, very broad indeed; wellsculpted biceps; a strong chest and clearly defined pecs whose cleavage pointed to classic washboard abs. I’d read that women are most attracted to great abs. If so, he could have any woman on the beach.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Their footsteps throw up a soft rustle as they move across the bed of leaves and sticks. Milton feels his way ahead with his feet, searching for hidden dangers. Nolan bumps against him occasionally, and Milton commits these nudges to memory along with the shape of the mountain pressing against the night sky. “Who are you texting anyway? Abe?” “No, not Abe. Nobody, really.” “Somebody,” Milton teases. “Can’t be nobody, can it?” “None of your business, anyway, is it?” “None of my business,” Milton repeats. “Sure.” “Do you really want to know? That’s weird, right? But I’ll tell you if you want to know.” “If you wanted to tell me, you would have.” There is more meaning to Milton’s voice than he intends, but he cannot deny the truth of it or how much it bothers him. Perhaps it’s that soon he’ll be gone and whoever is on the other end of that phone will remain. That even when Milton’s gone, Nolan will be able to speak to this other person, and so this moment may be the last time he and Nolan will walk together through these woods, among the shadows of their history. He grins, pushes at Nolan’s shoulder. “Don’t be so sensitive.” “We’re almost there,” Nolan says. Milton catches the tilt of the sky through the trees overhead. The incline underfoot pitches higher. “Yeah.” “Man, look. You got something to say, then say it. You hate me? What?” “Hate you?” “I mean, you know, if you’re sick of my shit, I get it. I don’t think it’s fair, but I get it.” “I don’t even know what that means, Nolan.” “It means if you’re sick of my shit, I get it. I would be.” “I’m not sick of your shit,” Milton says, but Nolan isn’t looking at him. He’s back on his phone, scrolling. “Sure, okay.” “Because I didn’t jump up right away to go hang out with fucking Abe? Come on.” “Why do you hate him so much?” “I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody,” Milton says. They’re at the edge of the woods now. The park is a series of gentle green slopes, trees, paths, and farther on, a playground of sorts. In the distance, he sees a couple of people with dogs tossing colored disks in the low light of evening. The sound of traffic from the nearby road washes in like the sound of the ocean. “Don’t cry, man,” Nolan says, and Milton almost screams. “Shut up,” he says. “Are you gonna cry about it?” “Cry about what, Nolan?” “Hell if I know, you won’t tell me anything.” “Well, that should tell you everything, shouldn’t it? What’s to tell?” • • •

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences. What I daydreamed of was a lover who would be older than I, richer and more influential, but also companionable. He would prize me for my sexuality, which was at once my essence and also an attribute I was totally unfamiliar with, like the orphan’s true name, a magical identity he knows nothing of until the very moment of revelation. The name ennobles the orphan, just as one’s sexual nature confers a previously undivined but achingly anticipated human nature upon love’s candidate. I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being. Although I lived surrounded by people and regularly visited a psychoanalyst, it never entered my mind to discuss with anyone my fantasies, those in which the Belgian soldier or a silver-haired stranger in a dove-gray suit seated in his Silver Cloud took me away and married me. For other boys, who can legally marry their fantasies, marriage itself must seem less magical. It is, after all, a ceremony they will eventually go through. But for me, who’d never even read about the sort of union I longed for, marriage became more and more impossible, a transubstantiation as eerie and irreversible as death. Perhaps by framing this ideal and funereal homosexual marriage in a prospect of poisonous flowers, I was making it more and more remote, thereby putting off the day when I’d have to decide whether I myself was a homosexual or not. Of course I wanted to love a man and to be heterosexual; the longer I could delay sorting out this antinomy the better. I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving but spent the long weekend with the Scotts. They took the opportunity to introduce me to Father Burke, their “confessor,” and spiritual guardian. Rachel had told me that he regularly wrote her long letters full of counsel and prayer, although he lived only some fifty or sixty miles away and she and DeQuincey saw him often. Father Burke also wrote Quince long letters, which Quince would never show to Rachel. Father Burke had taken over the poorest, oldest, most backward parish in the state: a mortification, I suppose.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “You might run a vacuum over it if you’ve got one, but I think you’ll live.” Charles leaned down to kiss Lionel then, gripped the backs of his thighs and lifted him easily. “Your knee,” Lionel said. “You’re not a physio.” Lionel wrapped his legs around Charles and let himself be carried back to bed. Charles stomped in the boots. “Stay,” Lionel said later, when Charles was getting dressed. “Can’t,” Charles said. “I have to go.” “Stay.” “I’ll be back,” Charles said. He kissed Lionel’s forehead and then his mouth and he was gone out the door. Lionel drew his blanket around himself and lay down. “I have to go anyway,” Lionel said, and the only answer was the quiet of his apartment, the soft rattle of snow striking the kitchen sink. LITTLE BEAST Sylvia has blown up her life. She slices potatoes into screaming hot water and chants, “Take it back, take it back, take it back.” Out in the living room: regular thudding. She has agreed to let the twins have fries for lunch if they are quiet and good while they color. The boy’s whine trails each of the thuds. She’s been played. Sylvia drains the hot water, and then plunges the sliced potatoes into an ice bath. The water numbs her fingers and wrists. Starch turns the water hazy, and the potatoes go slick like something hauled out of the sea. When her hands turn white, she pours off the cold water and blots the potatoes dry. Then she rubs them down with salt and garlic butter she made herself. And into the oven. She feels productive, virtuous. Her reward is to close her eyes for just a moment. She dips into the brief dark of her eyelids, feels that woozy elation like holding her breath and letting it go. She drifts, sways. She considers, not for the first time this week, Hammond, the breakup. The doomed trip they took up to see her mother last month, how they’d they fought all the way there and back. The farm had done nothing to ease their splintering. All they’d done was move the location of the argument, not defuse the argument itself. Then she’d left him and that was that. But now, standing in the kitchen, she considers the permanence of that choice and how easy it had been to make in the end. So swift. Like a bolt of lightning. There and gone, but behind it an acrid, burning trail.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Tomorrow is another day, I tell myself. Yes, Miss Scarlett, it is indeed, and because I do give a damn, I shall put aside the unfortunate intrusion the memory of Cody Morse triggered by our hallway encounter, and take up where I so blissfully left off. Harley Keith shall crawl into bed with me and allow his warm buttocks to press against my prick, and I shall sleep well. But positive thought cannot overpower inner turmoil and I awaken after a restless night, absent any morning erection, gut complaining at my lack of food. I wolf down a bowl of cereal to calm the innards and skip coffee, which would rile them again. I shower and dress, thinking of Harley in class at ten. Dare I approach him about another tryst? Will he come to me on his own? Will he be enticed by the promise of my doing things to him or will he be repelled by an old man’s advances? By the time I reach the university, it’s all fused into a maelstrom and it’s all Cody’s fault. In class I had planned to discuss three stories as examples of what we’ve been after. Harley’s is one of these and while I’d planned to discuss his last, I move it to first because I need the connection. The topic is style and without naming the writer I introduce the story. “Longing,” I begin. “From the first sentence we gain a sense of longing. We are never told Michael is longing but we see by his actions that he is bereft, almost grieving in his need of love.” And here I begin to read. I’ve already read the story countless times just to be with Harley because he is within the words. I glance at him now and see him riveted, as if he’s never heard his work aloud. Maybe he hasn’t. We should do that. I could tutor him. Discussion about the story is lively. Harley offers nothing while I sneak a couple of smiles his way and prod the discussion until I’ve gotten as much as I can from the class. Reluctantly I move to the next. It gets half the effort and the third still less. When class ends and they all start to leave, I fix on Harley who remains seated. My heart leaps. I am in ecstasy, reborn, saved. Hallelujah! “How are you doing?” I ask as I go to him. He shrugs. “I dunno.” “Not man trouble again.” “Still.” “Ah, I see.” But of course I don’t. I thought he was done with the shitheel. “You’re back together, then?” “Not quite.” He shakes his head. “It’s kind of a mess. You know how things can get.”

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  I could go on and on. What all these rich and complex waterfowl courtship displays have in common is that they have evolved through female mate choice. Males go through all these antics in their quest to be selected as mates by the extremely selective females. On the basis of her observations of male display, the female duck makes her choice about which one she wants to pair up with. In many species, like the Common Goldeneye, females choose their mates on the wintering grounds, and after they form a pair, they remain together for the rest of the winter months. There’s no copulation during the winter months, because neither sex is ready. The annual cycle of sexual development in birds is a wild hormonal roller coaster, whose ups and downs are seasonally driven. Birds progress from completely asexual in the nonbreeding winter season to having gonads thousands of times larger only a few months later, in the spring, when it’s time to mate. As mating season approaches, the pair migrates together to their breeding grounds. Once there, the male will continue to display, as well as to defend the female from other males. After much displaying, the pair will copulate on the water. The female signals that she is ready for copulation with a distinctive solicitation display, in which she extends her neck forward, holds her body horizontal, and raises her tail. [image "The peekaboo sham preening display of the male Mandarin Duck." file=image_rsrc3NF.jpg] The peekaboo sham preening display of the male Mandarin Duck. Why are female ducks so picky about whom they mate with? Because they can be. Remember how the female Common Goldeneyes I saw were surrounded by males who greatly outnumbered them? In most duck species, the sex ratio is highly skewed toward males, so females have plenty of mates to choose from. Given such a wealth of options, female ducks have evolved lots of elaborate mating preferences for colorful male plumage, extravagant displays, and complex, funky acoustic stimuli. And because many ducks begin courtship months before they reach the breeding grounds in spring, female ducks have ample opportunity to put the males through their paces in order to make a decision. Sounds great for the females. Unfortunately, there is a dark side to duck sex, too. Although some waterfowl, like the Canada Goose, Tundra Swan, and Harlequin Duck, form enduring, monogamous pairs in which both parents help to defend an exclusive nesting territory and raise the young together, most duck species, like the Mallards my fellow dinner guest was querying me about, do not. What distinguishes them from the pair-bonding waterfowl is that they are not territorial. They nest in habitats where their food supply is so highly concentrated and the populations are so dense that an exclusive feeding territory cannot be defended by any pair. And because they are non-territorial, their sexual and social relationships are quite different from those of the territorial species.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  She cocked her head to one side and smiled. In the cold winter daylight I could see the thick layer of pancake makeup covering her face and neck but stopping short of her shoulders. The makeup was so evidently painted on and of such an unlikely hue that I gasped: this woman must be very old, I thought, to need such a disguise. Everything about her intrigued me and I returned day after day just to be near her. I watched her so hard that I forgot I existed; she provided me with a new, better life. For hours I stood in front of one bookcase or another reading as the dirty snow melted off my boots and left black tracks on the wood floor. First I’d remove the cap with earflaps and stuff it in a pocket; ten minutes later I’d unwind the maroon scarf. The coat came off and fell in a heap on the floor; then a sweater threw its twisted body onto the coat: clumsy wrestlers. The woman hummed and placed a small nickel-coated pot on the hot plate. The upper third of each windowpane was steamy; as a result, a passing man was striated into blurred and clear zones, his neck detailed down to the stubble but his face an embryo’s still streaming within the caul. Although it was only four the light was already dying; the world creaked from the cold and hugged itself hopelessly. Blue mounds of snow cast bluer shadows, but inside, everything was cheery and animated. The woman, whom the new customer called Marilyn, was laughing at his long, murmured story and her laugh was lovely. By the third long afternoon I’d spent there I’d fallen into conversation with Marilyn. She made some comment or other on the book I’d been holding for half an hour as I kept stealing glances at her and eavesdropping on her snatches of song and remarks to customers. She said to me, “I noticed you’re intrigued by the set of Balzac. It’s a very good buy—the complete works for just forty dollars. That’s about a dollar a volume. You can’t beat that. And it’s a handsome edition, the titles in gold stamped on leather, which may or may not be real. Turn-of-the-century.” I was not a fast reader. Months could go by before I’d finish a single book. The project of reading all of Balzac would obviously absorb the rest of my life. Was I prepared to make that commitment before I’d read even one of his novels? “How interesting,” I said, as I’d been trained to say to everything, even the grossest absurdity. “Who was Balzac?” She smiled and said, to spare my pride, “Ah, now there’s a good question. We’ll wait till Fred comes. He can tell us both.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The opening line (minus “l’automne,” the last word) of “Nevermore”(title in English), by Paul Verlaine (1844–1896). H.H. begins his next sentence with that last word. Memories awakened by The Enchanted Hunters bring this line to mind. Verlaine’s poem ends with the poet telling his beloved that his most perfect day was when she charmingly murmured “Le premier oui”—her first yes (see also Keys, p. 33). For further Verlaine allusions, see Mes fenětres and mon ... radieux. H.H. identifies with Verlaine, who was abandoned by his much younger (and homosexual) lover and traveling companion, Rimbaud. In Pale Fire, Kinbote recalls a visit to Nice, and “an old bearded bum ... who stood like a statute of Verlaine with an unfastidious sea gull perched in profile on his matted hair” (p. 170). Ada and Van Veen are touched by “the long sobs of the violins,” the opening lines of Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne (1866), translated and quietly absorbed into the text of Ada (p. 411). Van’s “assassin pun” (p. 541) puns on “la Pointe assassine,” line seventeen of Verlaine’s Art poétique (1882). “Verlaine had been also a teacher somewhere / In England. And what about Baudelaire, / Alone in his Belgian hell?” writes Nabokov in “Exile,” an uncollected poem (The New Yorker, October 24, 1942, p. 26). For Baudelaire, see oh Baudelaire!. petite ... accroupie: nymphet crouching. spaniel ... baptized: the old lady’s dog, with which Lolita had played (cocker spaniel). H.H. wonders if the hotel’s policy of “NO DOGS” had been broken to accommodate Christian dogs, because “NEAR CHURCHES” was commonly used (c. 1940–1960) as a code sign, a discreet indication that only Gentiles were accepted. A similar quid pro quo occurs in the same hotel when “Humbert” is misunderstood and distorted into a Jewish-sounding “Humberg,” just as “Professor Hamburg” now finds the hotel full. “Refugee” H.H. is often mistaken for a Jew; see here, where John Farlow is on the point of making an anti-Semitic remark and is interrupted by sensitive Jean. Quilty thinks H.H. may be a “German refugee,” and reminds him, “This is a Gentile’s house, you know” (a Gentile’s house). Nabokov’s father was an outspoken foe of anti-Semitism. He wrote “The Blood Bath of Kishinev,” a famous protest against the 1903 pogrom, and was fined by the tsarist government for the fiery articles he wrote about the Beiliss trial (Maurice Samuel mentions him several times in his book on the Beiliss case, Blood Accusation [1966]—coincidentally published at the same time as Bernard Malamud’s novel based on it, The Fixer—and quotes from Nabokov’s reportage). Nabokov fils was also outraged by anti-Semitism, and, because his wife is Jewish, was sensitive to it in a most acutely personal way (witness the empathy for “poor Irving” [Irving]). Nabokov recalled going into a New England inn years ago, accompanied by his son and his son’s friend.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The sword from here above cleaveth not in haste nor tardy, save to his deeming who in longing or in fear awaiteth it. But turn thee now to others; for many illustrious spirits shalt thou see, if thou again dost lead thy look accordant to my speaking.” As was her pleasure directed I mine eyes, and saw an hundred spherelets, which together were made more beauteous by their mutual rays. I stood as one repressing in himself the prick of his desire, who doth not frame to ask, so feareth he to exceed. And the greatest and most shining of these pearls 1 came forward to make my will content concerning him. Then there within I heard: “Didst thou see, as I, the love which burneth amongst us, thy thoughts had been expressed; 2 but, lest thou by waiting lag from the lofty goal, I will make answer only to the thought of which thou art thus circumspect. That mount, upon whose slope Cassino lieth, was erst thronged on its summit by the folk deceived and ill-disposed. 3 And I am he who first bore up there his name, who brought to earth that truth which doth lift us so high; and so great grace shone o’er me, that I drew the places round about back from the impious cult which did seduce the world. These of her flames were all contemplatives kindled by that warmth which giveth birth to the holy flowers and fruits. Here is Maccarius, here is Romoaldus, 4 here are my brothers who within the cloisters stayed their feet and kept sound their heart.” And I to him: “The love thou showest, speaking with me, and the propitious semblance which I perceive and note in all your glows, hath so outstretched my confidence as the sun doth the rose when it openeth to its utmost power; wherefore, I pray thee, and do thou, father, give me assurance whether I may receive so great grace as to behold thee with uncovered image.” Whereat he: “Brother, thy high desire shall be fulfilled in the last sphere, where all the rest have their fulfilment, and mine too. There perfect, ripe, and whole is each desire; in it alone is every part there where it ever was, for it is not in space, nor hath it poles; and our ladder even to it goeth, wherefore it thus doth steal it from thy sight. 5 Right up to there the patriarch Jacob saw it stretch its upper part, when it was seen by him so with angels laden. But to ascend it now none severeth his feet from earth, and my rule abideth there for wasting of the parchments. 6 The walls which were wont to be a house of prayer, have become dens, and the hoods are sacks full of foul meal. But heavy usury is not exacted so counter to God’s pleasure as that fruic 7 which doth so madden the monks’ hearts.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I was dancin’ with my darlin’ to the Tennessee Waltz…” MiriMiri and Natalie rode the #24 bus from school, got off at the corner of Shelley and Magie, then walked down to the Osners’ house. In the kitchen Fern was dunking Oreos in milk while Mrs. Barnes prepared dinner. Whatever she was browning on the stove smelled delicious. The salad leaves were drying in a cloth towel, waiting to be torn into an ebony bowl with Corinne’s initials in silver. CMO for “Corinne Mendelsohn Osner.” Someday, when Miri was married with her own house, she would have the same salad bowl with her initials in silver. MAM for “Miri Ammerman McKittrick”—if she married Mason. But would Irene ever forgive her for marrying a boy who wasn’t Jewish? Maybe she would just spell out MIRI and leave her husband out of it. “Will Tim fly over our house today?” Fern asked Mrs.Barnes. “I expect so,” Mrs. Barnes said. “Any minute now, unless they were delayed by the weather.” Fern pretended to feed an Oreo to her cowboy bunny. “Roy Rabbit might be a pilot when he grows up.” “I hope he’s smart,” Mrs. Barnes said, “because you have to be smart to be a pilot.” “Don’t worry,” Fern said. “Roy Rabbit is very smart.” Natalie grabbed a bunch of green grapes and she and Miri headed for the den, where the windows looked down on a stand of Japanese cherry trees, bare now, but come spring she knew they’d be heavy with pink blossoms. She wished it could be spring now. Then she and Mason wouldn’t have to worry about where to go to be alone and warm. Natalie tuned the television to the Kate Smith show, though it wasn’t quite four o’clock, while Miri made a quick phone call to remind Irene she was at Natalie’s for the afternoon. Then both girls settled on the floor. Miri popped a grape into her mouth. Natalie rested her head on Miri’s lap. “Play with my hair,” she said. Miri lifted one soft curl, then another. “What are you thinking?” Natalie asked, looking up at her. “Guess,” Miri said. “I’ll bet it’s about Mason.” “Not really.” “I’ll bet you think about him every minute of every day.” “I think of him a lot but I wasn’t thinking of him just now.” “Are you in love with him?” “I’ve only known him thirty-eight days, not that I’m counting.” “My mother says she knew from the minute she first looked into my father’s eyes she was going to be with him for the rest of her life. She says it came to her in a flash, like lightning.” “I haven’t had that flash yet,” Miri said, which was a complete lie. Didn’t she know it the night they danced together in Natalie’s finished basement? And if not then, at the Y, the first time they kissed? Who was she kidding? But what went on between her and Mason was private.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Two developments were unfolding within me, or rather two quite different stories about a single life were getting told. In one, Dr. O’Reilly’s version, I was wrestling with my unconscious, an immense, dark brother who seeped around me when I was awake, flowed over me when I slept, who sometimes invaded my body, caused my pen or tongue to slip, who erased a name from the blackboard of memory—a force with a baby’s features, greedy orifices, a madman’s cunning and an animal’s endurance, a Caliban as quicksilver as Ariel. This doppelganger was determined to confine me to what I’d already experienced and to deny me adventure, as though life were a cynical editor of gothic romances who demanded that every novel conform to a formula, who might accept slight variations in detail so long as the plot remained the same. O’Reilly’s job was to outwit this brilliant tyrant. While I observed the rounds in this psychoanalytic struggle, a quite different, less lurid, more scattered sort of story was taking place within me, one that lacked narrative drive or even direction. It sprang up without warning like mushrooms after rain; it came and went, circled around itself, died away and then was crawling like moss over the rock face of my will. Like a whole rootless plantation of algae, it washed in tides of longing and self-loathing. For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve—then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging. If I had the skill I’d write about the way that place—the cold corridors of the school, its symmetrical parterres of snow, the replicas of the “Discobulos” and “Dying Gaul”—how that place became the espalier which my moods crept up. I’d find a way to connect moods to weather, to rhyme books I was reading with bouts of illness I endured, to link pop tunes of the moment with persistent fantasies I concocted (I was Rimbaud; Verlaine loved me so much he fired on me; I endured, lonely, smoking cigarettes on an African beach), I’d place Buddhism over Hesse, divide a laugh I borrowed from a popular senior with an incurable rash on my left ankle I scratched day after day—all figures in an algebraic equation in which X would stand for Stimmung and Y for truth.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  White, born stolidly upper middle class, forever empathizes with the truant, the nervy, the dismissed, the oversexed and underrated. His life’s work offers hundreds of love poems to such fellow recidivists. And in this novel, we watch as, one by one, such left-out figures step forward for their moment, attempting to either help or seduce the young leading man (or to help him by seducing him). To one and all, our boy usually proves a most apt pupil. As it is with bright only sons from “good” families, this narrator always knows which brand names (in art and consumer culture) will or will not do. His father’s boat is a Chris-Craft; his dad’s ties are Countess Mara. Dad’s favorite music is late Brahms, probably those recorded by Sviatoslav Richter. Here is a son who offers—as an incantation—all of Father’s favorite products. It’s one overliteral surefire way of describing a man so otherwise elusive. The boy recalls his dad with a strangely familiar combination of respect, contempt, unalloyed longing. This wish for a true connection comes to seem the book’s greatest undertow, its deepest emotional riptide, its finally dubious goal. Though the story might appear that of a boy with two surviving parents, if divorced ones, White’s novel really belongs in the literature of Orphanhood. A boy’s “own” story. The possessive pronoun boasts self-reliance even as it admits to solitary confinement. See Huck Finn. This gifted child appears the perfect product of his private German lessons, prep school, haberdashery, and analysis. And yet, though any Ivy League college’s admissions officer would see him as a likely candidate, as the son of evident privilege, he is really Oliver Twist’s first cousin. Erotically and emotionally, his request usually runs “More, sir, please.” And the very act of asking this aloud brings worse punishment down upon him. The boy is surrounded by so much space. Even in his crowded telling, amid his colorful toylike succession of eccentrics and pals, he usually feels singularly alone. He always seems to be planning his next romantic “accidental” meeting, writing some outsized letter of admiration. Part of our sense of his isolation must derive from the amazing acuity of his adult-scaled observations. We note how these differ in scope from his boyish features, his outward insecurity, the lapses we picture as he bumbles and strives. White is never afraid to let his young hero’s plaints veer toward the poignant; he knows that the very wit of their admission somewhat countermands their pathos:

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was given a bunk in a cold cabin that smelled of mildewed canvas; Ralph was led off somewhere else. As I tried to fall asleep I thought of him. I pitied him, as my mother wanted me to. I pitied him for his dumb animal stare, for his helpless search after relief—for his burden. And I thought about the plays I would direct. In one of them I’d be a dying king. In my trunk I’d brought some old 78s of Boris Godounov . Perhaps I’d die to those tolling bells, the Kremlin surrounded by the forces of the pretender, his face red and swollen with desire. There was a week to go before the other campers were due to arrive. Some local men with scythes swept their way through the overgrown grasses. Someone else repaired the leaking roof in the main house. Stocks of canned food were delivered. The various cabins were opened and aired and swept out. A wasp’s hive above the artesian well was bagged and burned. The docks were assembled and floated between newly implanted pylons. The big war canoes came out of winter storage and were seasoned in the cold lake. I worked from the first light to the last—part of my duty as a junior counselor. Ralph had no chores. He stayed in his cabin and came out just for his meals, led wherever he trudged by the big implacable bulge with the wet tip in his trousers. Every afternoon I was free to go off on my own. The chill still rose off the lake but at high noon the sun broke through its clouds like a monarch slipping free of his retinue. The path I took girdled the hills that rimmed the lake; at one point it dipped and crossed a bog that looked solid and dry, planted innocently in grasses, but that slurped voluptuously under my shoes. I’d race across and look back as my footprints filled with cold, clear water. A hidden bullfrog makes a low gulp and repeats the same sound but more softly each time under the steady high throb of spring peepers in full chorus. A gray chipmunk with a bright chestnut rump scurries past, his tail sticking straight up. Canoe birches higher up the hill shiver in a light breeze; their green and brown buds are emerging from warty, dark brown shoots. A hermit thrush, perched on a high branch, releases its beautiful song while slowly raising and lowering its tail. I came to know every turn in the path and every plant along the way. One day, late in the summer, I pushed farther into the woods than I’d ever ventured before. I clambered through brambles and thick undergrowth until I reached a logger’s road sliced through the wilderness but now slowly healing over. I followed that road for several miles. I entered a broad field and then a smaller clearing surrounded by low trees, although high enough to cut off all breezes.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  5The 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.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Sometimes now when I pass dozing suburban houses I wonder behind which window a boy waits for me. After a while I realized I wouldn’t meet him till years later; I wrote him a sonnet that began, “Because I loved you before I knew you …” The idea, I think, was that I’d never quarrel with him, nor ever rate his devotion cheap; I had had to wait too long. I’d waited so long I was almost angry, certainly vengeful. My father’s house was a somber place. The styleless polished furniture was piled high and the pantry supplies were laid in; in the fullness of breakfront drawers gold flatware and silver tea things remained for six months at a time in mauve flannel bags that could not ward off a tarnish bred out of the very air. No one talked much. There was little laughter, except when my stepmother was on the phone with one of her social friends. Although my father hated most people, he had wanted my stepmother to take her place in society, and she had. She’d become at once proper and frivolous, innocent and amusing, high-spirited and reserved—the combination of wacky girl and prim matron her world so admired. I learned my part less well. I feared the sons of her friends and made shadows among the debs. I played the piano without ever improving; to practice would have meant an acceptance of more delay, whereas I wanted instant success, the throb of plumed fans in the dark audience, the glare off diamonded necks and ears in the curve of loges. What I had instead was the ache of waiting and the fear I wasn’t worthy. Before dressing I’d stand naked before the closet mirror and wonder if my body was worthy. I can still picture that pale skin stretched over ribs, the thin, hairless arms and sturdier legs, the puzzled, searching face—and the slow lapping of disgust and longing, disgust and longing. The disgust was hot, penetrating—nobody would want me because I was a sissy and had a mole between my shoulder blades. The longing was cooler, less substantial, more the spray off a wave than the wave itself. Perhaps the eyes were engaging, there was something about the smile. If not lovable as a boy, then maybe as a girl; I wrapped the towel into a turban on my head. Or perhaps need itself was charming, or could be. Maybe my need could make me as appealing as Alice, the woman who worked the Addressograph machine with me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And in this novel, we watch as, one by one, such left-out figures step forward for their moment, attempting to either help or seduce the young leading man (or to help him by seducing him). To one and all, our boy usually proves a most apt pupil. As it is with bright only sons from “good” families, this narrator always knows which brand names (in art and consumer culture) will or will not do. His father’s boat is a Chris-Craft; his dad’s ties are Countess Mara. Dad’s favorite music is late Brahms, probably those recorded by Sviatoslav Richter. Here is a son who offers—as an incantation—all of Father’s favorite products. It’s one overliteral surefire way of describing a man so otherwise elusive. The boy recalls his dad with a strangely familiar combination of respect, contempt, unalloyed longing. This wish for a true connection comes to seem the book’s greatest undertow, its deepest emotional riptide, its finally dubious goal. Though the story might appear that of a boy with two surviving parents, if divorced ones, White’s novel really belongs in the literature of Orphanhood. A boy’s “own” story. The possessive pronoun boasts self-reliance even as it admits to solitary confinement. See Huck Finn . This gifted child appears the perfect product of his private German lessons, prep school, haberdashery, and analysis. And yet, though any Ivy League college’s admissions officer would see him as a likely candidate, as the son of evident privilege, he is really Oliver Twist’s first cousin. Erotically and emotionally, his request usually runs “More, sir, please.” And the very act of asking this aloud brings worse punishment down upon him. The boy is surrounded by so much space. Even in his crowded telling, amid his colorful toylike succession of eccentrics and pals, he usually feels singularly alone. He always seems to be planning his next romantic “accidental” meeting, writing some outsized letter of admiration. Part of our sense of his isolation must derive from the amazing acuity of his adult-scaled observations. We note how these differ in scope from his boyish features, his outward insecurity, the lapses we picture as he bumbles and strives. White is never afraid to let his young hero’s plaints veer toward the poignant; he knows that the very wit of their admission somewhat countermands their pathos: Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke.… My hands were always in the air. In eighth grade I had appeared in the class pageant. We all wore togas and marched solemnly in to a record of Schubert’s “Unfinished.” My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d not sat cross-legged on the gym floor but resting one hand on a hip like the White Rock girl.… A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final “g” in “fucking.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I would not have mentioned this incident had it not started a chain of ideas that resulted in my publishing in the Cantrip Review an essay on “Mimir and Memory,” in which I suggested among other things that seemed original and important to that splendid review’s benevolent readers, a theory of perceptual time based on the circulation of the blood and conceptually depending (to fill up this nutshell) on the mind’s being conscious not only of matter but also of its own self, thus creating a continuous spanning of two points (the storable future and the stored past). In result of this venture—and in culmination of the impression made by my previous travaux—I was called from New York, where Rita and I were living in a little flat with a view of gleaming children taking shower baths far below in a fountainous arbor of Central Park, to Cantrip College, four hundred miles away, for one year. I lodged there, in special apartments for poets and philosophers, from September 1951 to June 1952, while Rita whom I preferred not to display vegetated—somewhat indecorously, I am afraid—in a roadside inn where I visited her twice a week. Then she vanished—more humanly than her predecessor had done: a month later I found her in the local jail. She was trés digne, had had her appendix removed, and managed to convince me that the beautiful bluish furs she had been accused of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spontaneous, if somewhat alcoholic, gift from Roland himself. I succeeded in getting her out without appealing to her touchy brother, and soon afterwards we drove back to Central Park West, by way of Briceland, where we had stopped for a few hours the year before. A curious urge to relive my stay there with Lolita had got hold of me. I was entering a phase of existence where I had given up all hope of tracing her kidnaper and her. I now attempted to fall back on old settings in order to save what still could be saved in the way of souvenir, souvenir que me veux-tu? Autumn was ringing in the air. To a post card requesting twin beds Professor Hamburg got a prompt expression of regret in reply. They were full up. They had one bathless basement room with four beds which they thought I would not want. Their note paper was headed: THE ENCHANTED HUNTERS NEAR CHURCHES NO DOGS All legal beverages

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Wherefore I intended to runne away, but the remembrance of you put alwayes the thought out of my minde, and so I came homeward very sorrowful: but because I would not seeme to come to my mistresse sight with empty hands, I saw a man shearing of blowne goat skinnes, and the hayre which he had shorne off was yellow, and much resembled the haire of the Boetian, and I tooke a good deale thereof, and colouring of the matter, I brought it to my mistresse. And so when night came, before your returne from supper, she to bring her purpose to passe, went up to a high Gallery of her house, opening to the East part of the world, and preparing her selfe according to her accustomed practise, shee gathered together all substance for fumigations, she brought forth plates of mettal carved with strange characters, she prepared the bones of such as were drowned by tempest in the seas, she made ready the members of dead men, as the nosethrils and fingers, shee set out the lumps of flesh of such as were hanged, the blood which she had reserved of such as were slaine and the jaw bones and teeth of willed beasts, then she said certaine charmes over the haire, and dipped it in divers waters, as in Wel water, Cow milk, mountain honey, and other liquor. Which when she had done, she tied and lapped it up together, and with many perfumes and smells threw it into an hot fire to burn. Then by the great force of this sorcerie, and the violence of so many confections, those bodies whose haire was burning in the fire, received humane shape, and felt, heard and walked: And smelling the sent of their owne haire, came and rapped at our doores in stead of Boetius. Then you being well tipled, and deceived by the obscurity of the night, drew out your sword courageously like furious Ajax, and kild not as he did, whole heard of beastes, but three blowne skinnes, to the intent that I, after the slaughter of so many enemies, without effusion of bloud might embrace and kisse, not an homicide but an Utricide.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  We already knew to sneer at certain folk singers for their “commercial” arrangements, their “slickness,” their betrayal of the heartrending plainness of real working folks. Although we strove in our daily lives to be as agreeable and popular as possible, to conform exactly to reigning fads, we simultaneously abhorred whatever was ingratiating. We were drawn to a club where a big, scarred Negro with lots of gold jewelry and liverish eyes ruminated over a half-improvised ballad under a spotlight before a breathless, thrilled audience of sheltered white teens (overheard on the way out from the newly elected president of our United Nations Club: “It makes you feel so damn phony. It even makes you Question Your Values”). Of course, the best thing about folk music was that it gave me a chance to stare at Tommy while he sang. After endless false starts, after tunings and retunings and trial runs of newly or imperfectly learned strums, he’d finally accompany himself through one great ballad after another. His voice was harsh and high, his hands grubby, and soon enough his exertions would make the faded blue workshirt cling to his back and chest in dark blue patches. Whereas when he spoke he was evasive or philosophical, certainly jokey in a tepid way, when he sang he was eloquent with passion, with the simple statement of passion. And I was, for once, allowed to stare and stare at him. Sometimes, after he fell asleep at night, I’d study the composition of grays poised on the pale lozenge of his pillow, those grays that constituted a face, and I’d dream he was awakening, rising to kiss me, the grays blushing with fire and warmth—but then he’d move and I’d realize that what I’d taken to be his face was in fact a fold in the sheet. I’d listen for his breath to quicken, I’d look for his sealed eyes to glint, I’d wait for his hot, strong hand to reach across the chasm between the beds to grab me—but none of that happened. There was no passion displayed between us and I never saw him show any feeling at all beyond a narrow range of teasing and joking. Except when he sang. Then he was free, that is, constrained by the ceremony of performance, the fiction that the entertainer is alone, that he is expressing grief or joy to himself alone. Tom would close his eyes and tip his head back. Squint lines would stream away from his eyes, his forehead would wrinkle, the veins would stand out along his throat and when he held a high note his whole body would tremble. One time he proudly showed me the calluses he’d earned by playing the guitar; he let me feel them. Sometimes he didn’t play at all but just sounded notes as he worked something out. He had forgotten me. He thought he was alone.

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

  So I said yes, I’m okay, even though to this day, for a moment, my mind leaves the room every time I undress in front of her. Even though I tighten every time she runs her fingers through my pubic hair. Because I love her and I love making love with her. Even though, after twelve years with her, I still find it hard to initiate sex. Even though, after twelve years, I want her more than ever but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to differentiate that kind of longing from the male eyes I’ve seen up close. And what if that longing that makes me sick is what she sees in my eyes when I look at her? And I said yes because I’m lucky. Not having a hymen, I’ve never had to have the difficult discussion about what it means to be a virgin. As a man, I’ve always been able to control exactly how and if and when my story is told. So I said yes, I’m okay, because I know the statistics, because it only happened once, and because I didn’t die, by my own hand or anyone else’s. Because, despite every razor blade I’ve held and then thrown in the garbage, one way or another, I survived. I said yes because now the nightmares are rare, because I don’t know how to tell the woman that I love that, when I dream, death is never the goal: it’s just the obvious outcome of trying to carve my body into something less dangerous. I said yes because I’m sick of using my past as a crutch to explain the present. Because everything feels like being trapped in a spider’s web and at the center is a pair of softball-sized glasses and running cleats and ripped jeans. And I don’t know if I’m strong enough to push through the web. But I said yes because I have to hope, someday, I will be. Knowing BetterSamhita MukhopadhyayBY THE TIME I TURNED THIRTY, I THOUGHT I HAD MY SHIT together: I had managed to turn a life of substitute teaching and hanging out at raves into a career in writing and a day job in media strategy, just from the exposure I was getting at a well-known feminist blog. I had just sent in my first print piece, for the anthology Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape edited by Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman. I was in talks for my first book deal, I was finishing my MA at night, and I was booking my first set of speaking gigs, touring the country to lecture young women about the importance of telling their stories.