Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When I was sixteen and called myself a Fabian socialist, when I was sixteen and refused to pet with boys who liked Ike, when I was sixteen and cried into the Rubaiyat, when I was sixteen and cried into the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay—I used to dream of a perfect man whose mind and body were equally fuckable. He had a face like Paul Newman and a voice like Dylan Thomas. He had a body like Michelangelo’s David (“with those rippling little marble muscles,” as I used to tell my best friend, Pia Wittkin, whose favorite male statue was Discobolus; we were both avid students of art history). He had a mind like George Bernard Shaw (or, at least, what my sixteen-year-old mind conceived of as George Bernard Shaw’s mind). He loved Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” above all other mortal music. He shared my passion for unicorn tapestries, Beat the Devil, the Cloisters, Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, witchcraft, and chocolate mousse. He shared my contempt for Senator Joe McCarthy, Elvis Presley, and my philistine parents. I never met him. At sixteen, my not meeting him seemed unbearable. Later I learned to take the cash and let the credit go, nor heed the rumble of a distant drum. The contrast between my fantasies (Paul Newman, Laurence Olivier, Humphrey Bogart, Michelangelo’s David) and the pimply faced adolescent boys I knew was laughable. Only I cried. And so did Pia. We commiserated in her parents’ gloomy apartment on Riverside Drive. “I imagine him as being very—you know—sort of a cross between Laurence Olivier in Hamlet and Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil—with very savage white teeth, and an absolutely fantastic body—sort of like the Discobolus.” She indicated her own rather well-upholstered belly. “What are you wearing?” I asked. “I see it as a sort of—you know—medieval wedding. I have this pointed white hat with a chiffon veil floating from it—and a red velvet dress—maybe wine—and very pointed shoes.” She drew the shoes for me with her black-inked Rapidograph pen. Then she drew the whole outfit—an empire-waisted gown with a very low neck and long tight sleeves. It was being modeled by a gorgeous creature whose cleavage swelled up out of the gown voluptuously. (At the time, Pia herself was overweight but flat-chested.) “I see the whole thing as taking place in the Cloisters,” she went on. “I’m sure you could rent the Cloisters if you knew the right people.” “Where would you live?”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Really, I thought, sometimes I would like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche. With no toadying servility and no ingratiating seductiveness. A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was neither bitchy nor mealymouthed because she didn’t hate her mother or herself. “Isadora!” What I really wanted was to give birth to myself—the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world. I hugged my knees. I felt strangely safe there, under my mother’s fur coat. “Isadora!” Why did they have to keep rushing me and trying to cram me into the same molds that had made them so unhappy? I would have a child when I was ready. Or if I wasn’t ever ready, then I wouldn’t. Was a child any guarantee against loneliness or pain? Was anything? If they were so happy with their lives, why did they have to proselytize all the time? Why did they insist that everyone do as they did? Why were they such goddamned missionaries? “Isadora!” Why did my sisters and my mother all seem to be in a conspiracy to mock my accomplishments and make me feel they were liabilities? I had published a book which even I could still stand to read. Six years of writing and discarding, writing and changing, trying to get deeper and deeper into myself. And readers had sent me letters and called me in the middle of the night to tell me that the book mattered, that it was brave and honest, that I was brave and honest. Brave! Here I was in a closet hugging my knees! But to my family I was a failure because I had no children. It was absurd. I knew it was absurd. But something in me repeated the catechism. Something in me apologized to all the people who complimented my poems: something in me said: “Oh but remember, I have no children.” “Isadora!”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  By afternoon, we were drunk and jolly. We were soused on beer. We stopped to buy peaches from a roadside farmer and found that he’d only sell them by the box, so we drove off with the Triumph loaded with peaches. A huge crate of them filling the back of the car. I began eating them greedily and discovered that nearly all of them had worms. I laughed and I ate around the worms. I tossed the wormy peach halves out into the countryside. I was too drunk to care about worms or pregnancy or marriage or the future. “I feel great!” I said to Adrian. “That’s the idea, ducks. Now you’ve got the idea.” — But by evening, when the beers wore off, I was depressed again. There was something so aimless about our days, our driving, our drinking. I didn’t even know what day of the week it was. I hadn’t seen a newspaper since Vienna. I had hardly even bathed, or changed my clothes. And what I missed most of all was my writing. I hadn’t written a poem in weeks and I began to feel that I never would be able to again. I thought of my used red electric typewriter sitting in New York, and a pang of yearning went through me. That was who I loved! I could see myself going back to Bennett for the sake of having custody of the typewriter. Like people who stay together “for the children” or because they can’t decide who’ll get the rent-controlled apartment. — That night we found a real campsite rather than a roadside. (Le Camping, as they say in France.) It wasn’t fancy, but it had a swimming hole, a snack bar, a place where you could shower. I was dying for a shower and as soon as Adrian had staked out our parcel of ground, I made off to the shower house. As the dirt was rolling off me, I spoke to Bennett telepathically. “Forgive me,” I said to him wherever he was (and to myself, wherever I was). When I got back to the tent, Adrian had made a friend. Two friends, in fact. An American couple. She, coarsely pretty, red-haired, freckled, bosomy, Jewish, with a Brooklyn accent. He, bearded, brown-haired, fuzzy, fattish, with a Brooklyn accent. He was a swinging stockbroker who dabbled in hallucinogens. She was a swinging housewife who dabbled in adultery. They had a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, a Volkswagen camper, three kids in camp, and the fourteen-year itch. Adrian was wowing the wife (Judy) with his English accent and Laingian theories (which had already worn thin with me). She looked just about ready to tent down with him. “Hi,” I said brightly to my compatriots and coreligionists. “Hi,” they said in one voice. “Now what?” said Adrian. “Bed first or booze?” Judy giggled. “Don’t mind me,” I said. “We don’t believe in possessiveness or possession.” I thought I was doing a pretty good imitation of Adrian.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Suddenly we realized that we were talking about ourselves again. There was no topic neutral enough for conversation that afternoon. Everything came back to us. After lunch we went to the Hofburg once more to hear a paper on the psychology of artists. This paper posthumously analyzed Leonardo, Beethoven, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Donne, Virginia Woolf, and an unknown, unnamed woman artist who had been treated by the analyst. All his evidence proved overwhelmingly that artists were, as a group, weak, dependent, childlike, naive, masochistic, narcissistic, poor judges of character, and hopelessly immersed in Oedipal conflicts. Due to their extreme sensitivity as children and their greater-than-average need for mothering, they always felt deprived no matter how much mothering they in fact got. In adult life, they were doomed to look for mothers everywhere, and not finding them (ever, ever) they sought to invent their own ideal mothers through the artifice of their work. They sought to remake their own histories in an idealized image—even when this idealization came out seeming more like a brutalization than an idealization. Nobody’s family, in short, was as transcendentally evil as the modern autobiographical novelist (or poet) imagined his family to be. To excoriate one’s family was ultimately the same thing as to idealize. It showed how fettered one still was to the past. Through fame, too, the artist sought to compensate himself for the sense of early deprivation. But it never quite worked. Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been loved by one person when you were small, and besides the world is a lousy lover. So fame too was a disappointment. Many artists turned in despair to opium, alcohol, homosexual lechery, heterosexual lechery, religious fervor, political moralizing, suicide, and other palliatives. But these never quite worked either. Except suicide—which always worked, in a way. At that point I remembered an epigram by Antonio Porchia which the analyst had not wit enough to quote: I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings for the soul that cures its sufferings dies. So too with artists. Only more so. Throughout the whole description of the artist’s weakness, dependency, naiveté, etc., Bennett squeezed my hand and shot me knowing glances. Come back home to Daddy. All is understood. How I longed to come back home to Daddy! But how I also longed to be free!

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Pia never married. I married twice—but still the search went on. Any one of my many shrinks could tell you that I was looking for my father. Wasn’t everyone? The explanation didn’t quite content me. Not that it seemed wrong; it just seemed too simple. Perhaps the search was really a kind of ritual in which the process was more important than the end. Perhaps it was a kind of quest. Perhaps there was no man at all, but just a mirage conjured by our longing and emptiness. When you go to sleep hungry, you dream of eating. When you go to sleep with a full bladder, you dream of getting up to pee. When you go to sleep horny, you dream of getting laid. Maybe the impossible man was nothing more than a specter made of our own yearning. Maybe he was like the fearless intruder, the phantom rapist women expect to find under their beds or in their closets. Or maybe he was really death, the last lover. In one poem, I imagined him as the man under the bed. The man under the bed The man who has been there for years waiting The man who waits for my floating bare foot The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs The man at the end of the end of the line I met him tonight I always meet him He stands in the amber air of a bar When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers & ride through the air on their toothpick skewers When the ice cracks & I am about to fall through he arranges his face around its hollows he opens his pupilless eyes at me For years he has waited to drag me down & now he tells me he has only waited to take me home We waltz through the street like death & the maiden We float through the wall of the wall of my room If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks I wrap myself around him like the darkness I breathe into his mouth & make him real SEVENA Nervous Cough What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren’t for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. —Jerzy Kosinski

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Or the Jew in Chicago with the sailboat, the Camel cigarettes and the skin that tanned so easily. We’d analyze their motives hour after hour as the towns and countryside sped past. We’d sing songs. We’d listen to the news. We’d point out sights to one another. But soon we’d be talking again about Herb or Bill or Abe. Did he miss our mother? What were his intentions? Was he dating anyone else? Should Mom play harder to get? Mother gained weight, sighed beside the phone, cried, hypothesized, thought up schemes of seduction or revenge, and all her technique—that is, all her helplessness—made my sister more and more ashamed of her. We were losers who talked a winning game. No wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. If she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous. My mother’s helplessness filled my sister with confusion and shame. She was confused after Mother had talked her way with conviction and obsessive tenacity all the way around the circumference of an absence. Mother would say Abe was just stringing her along, he had dozens of women, she was just another gal—one burdened, moreover, with two brats. Within half an hour she’d convinced herself that he thought so much of her he was afraid of her. She was too cultured, too intelligent, too genteel, too dynamic for him. She frightened him. I wasn’t ashamed. I was coldly indifferent as my mind closed its locks and slowly flooded with dreams. I was a king or a god. How my mother longed for that phone to ring. When my sister was old enough to date, she, too, waited by the phone. The negligence of men toward women struck me as past belief; how could these men resist so much longing? All this waiting, of course, was a petri dish in which new cultures of speculation were breeding. Was he not calling to prove a point? His independence, perhaps? Men hated feeling trapped. His own desirability? Or had he found someone else? Or was he shy and himself waiting for a call? I half wanted to be a man, a grown-up man, but a gallant one who could finally put an end to all this suffering. My other half wanted to have a man; I thought I’d know better how to get one and keep him. Or else how to punish him for his neglect. And all this speculation, I noticed, was occurring beside the obstinately mute telephone—brilliant, glittering black proof of the inefficacy of yearning. No thought, no architecture of thoughts no matter how intricate, could make that phone ring. Only beauty, youth, charm, money—only those things worked. The rest (goodness, worthiness, the conjuring of desire) was a pitiable substitute for the brute fact of glamour.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “Oh that’s just your sister. She’s so frustrated she has to pick on you. There’s nothing wrong with your nostrils. At least I don’t see anything wrong. Of course, I know you too well. If you like, we could consult a nose doctor.” A long pause. “Nostrils … Do people generally dwell on them? I mean, do people think about them a lot?” Small, high voice: “Are mine okay?” A hopeless silence. At last she began to snore delicately and I hurried to my own room. My sister’s door, next to mine, was closed but her light was burning resentfully. And I gave myself over to my reverie. I had a record player I’d paid for myself by working as a caddy and records I exchanged each week at the library, the music an outpost of my father’s influence in this unmusical female territory. I slipped out of my clothes as quickly as possible, though I tried to do everything beautifully, as in a movie of my life with Helen. In some way I felt it was already being filmed—not that I looked for hidden cameras but I simplified and smoothed out my movements for the lens. There were those, my mother and sister, who suffered too much and were too graceless to be film-worthy, but there were those others I aspired to join who suffered briefly, consolably and always handsomely, whose remarks were terse and for whom the mechanics of leaving a party or paying a bill had been stylized nearly out of existence in favor of highly emotional exchanges in which eyes said more than lips. Every detail of my room asked me to be solicitous. When the dresser drawer stuck I winced—this sequence would have to be reshot. I turned my sheets down as though she, Helen, were at my side. I rushed to snap off the lights. She and I lay side by side in the narrow boat and floated downstream. The stars moved not at all and only the occasional fluttering of a branch overhead or the sound of a scraping rock below suggested our passage. The moon was the wound in the night’s side from which magic blood flowed; we bathed in it. By dawn I’d made love to Helen four times. The first time was so ceremonial I had a problem molding the mist into arms and legs; all that kept flickering up at me was her smile. The second time was more passionate. I was finally able to free her breasts from their binding. By the third time we’d become gently fraternal; we smiled with tired kindness at each other. We were very intimate. 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.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I wanted to run through surf or speed off with a brilliant blond in a convertible or rhapsodize on a grand piano somewhere in Europe. Or I wanted the white and gold doors to open as my loving, true but not-yet-found friends came toward me, their gently smiling faces lit from below by candles on the cake. This longing for lovers and friends was so full within me that it could spill over at any provocation—from listening to my own piano rendition of a waltz, from looking at a reproduction of two lovers in kimonos and tall clogs under an umbrella shielding them from slanted lines of snow or from sensing a change of seasons (the first smell of spring in winter, say). Once, when I was Kevin’s age, I’d wanted my father to love me and take me away. I had sat night after night outside his bedroom door in the dark, crazy with fantasies of seducing him, eloping with him, covering him with kisses as we shot through space against a night field flowered with stars. But now I hated him and felt he was what I must run away from. To be sure, had he pulled the car off the highway right now and turned to say he loved me, I would have taken his hand and walked with him away from the stunned vehicle that creaked as it cooled, our only spoor the sparks flying from Dad’s cigar. Kevin took my hand. He was sitting next to me in the dark. I had scooted forward on the cushion to give the others more room. Now our linked hands were concealed between his leg and mine. Just as I’d almost given up on him with his Vaseline, he placed that hot hand in mine. I could feel the calloused pads on his palm where he’d gripped the bat. Outside, the half-moon sped through the tall pines, spilled out across a glimpse of water, hid behind a billboard, twinkled faintly in the windows of a train, one window still lit and framing the face of a woman crowned by white hair. Dogs barked, then stopped as the trees came quicker and quicker and pushed closer to the winding road. Only here and there could a house light be seen. Now none. We were in the deep forest. The change from scattered farms to dense trees felt like an entry into something chilled and holy, a packed congregation of robed and mitered men whose form of worship is to wait in a tense, century-long silence. Kevin had made me very happy—a gleeful, spiteful happiness. Here we were, right under the noses of these boring old grown-ups, and we were two guys holding hands. Maybe I wouldn’t have to run away. Maybe I could live here among them, act normal, go through the paces—all the while holding the hand of this wonderful kid. Back in the basement, we three undressed under the glaring Ping-Pong light.

• 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 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.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  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. What I was doing in those spring months was once again steeling my social nerve. I was becoming popular—not in a big way, of course, but as a bit player. I started smoking cigarettes in order to join the Butt Club, a coterie of fascinating disreputables who’d obtained parental permission to meet for fifteen minutes after lunch and dinner and for half an hour before bedtime to smoke. Serious athletes, admired prefects, good school citizens—they all looked down on us. We were not square, we were bums, hoods, bad characters. One small windowless room in the basement had been set aside for our regrettable hobby. Someone pinned up the famous nude calendar pose of Marilyn Monroe on the cinderblock wall, but even her maraschino charms looked bilious under the low-wattage green bulb screwed into the ceiling for “atmosphere.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  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 On Beauty (2005)

  ‘I could do with a little extra, that’s no joke – and this year I gotta get my Christmas shit to- geth -er. I always be sayin’ I’m gonna do it early this year and then I never do – just leave everything last minute just like always. But it’s expensive – oh, my word .’ ‘Yeah,’ said Levi pensively. ‘Shit gets tight for everybody this time of year . . .’ ‘I hear that,’ said LaShonda, and whistled. ‘And I ain’t got no one to do for me. I gotta do for myself, know what I mean? Baby, you taking your break? You want to come get some with me? I’m heading for Subway right about now.’ There was an alternative universe that Levi occasionally entered in his imagination, one in which he accepted LaShonda’s invitations, and then later they made love standing up in the basement of the store. Soon after, he moved in with her in Roxbury and took on her children as his own. They lived happily ever after – two roses growing out of concrete, as Tupac has it. But the truth was he wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like LaShonda. He wished he did know, but he didn’t. Levi’s girls were typically the giggly Hispanic teenagers from the Catholic school next door to his prep, and those girls had simple tastes: happy with a movie and some heavy petting in one of Wellington’s public parks. When he was feeling brave and confident, he sometimes hooked up with one of the exquisite fifteen-year-old LaShondas with the fake IDs that he met in Boston nightclubs, who took him semi-seriously for a  the anatomy lesson week or two until they drifted away, confused by his strange determination not to tell them anything at all about his life or to show them where he lived. ‘No . . . thanks, LaShonda . . . my break’s not till later.’ ‘All right, baby. I’ll miss you, though. You looking fine today – buff and all that.’ Levi flexed his bicep obligingly under LaShonda’s manicured touch. ‘ Damn . And the rest. Don’t be shy, now.’ He lifted his T-shirt up a little. ‘Baby, that ain’t even a six pack no more. That’s like a thirty-six pack or something! Ladies gotta look out for my boy Levi . . . damn . He ain’t a boy no more.’ ‘You know me, LaShonda, I like to take care of myself.’ ‘Yeah, but who gonna take care of you? ’ said LaShonda and laughed a good long time. She put her hand on his cheek. ‘OK, baby, I’m out. See you next week if I don’t see you later. You take care.’ ‘Bye, LaShonda.’ Levi leaned on a rack of Madame Butterfly recordings and watched LaShonda go. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop. That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments, immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me moan to-day with frustration. They would have been so much more than the snapshots I burned! Her overhead volley was related to her service as the envoy is to the ballade; for she had been trained, my pet, to patter up at once to the net on her nimble, vivid, white-shod feet. There was nothing to choose between her forehand and backhand drives: they were mirror images of one another—my very loins still tingle with those pistol reports repeated by crisp echoes and Electra’s cries. One of the pearls of Dolly’s game was a short half-volley that Ned Litam had taught her in California. She preferred acting to swimming, and swimming to tennis; yet I insist that had not something within her been broken by me—not that I realized it then!—she would have had on the top of her perfect form the will to win, and would have become a real girl champion. Dolores, with two rackets under her arm, in Wimbledon. Dolores endorsing a Dromedary. Dolores turning professional. Dolores acting a girl champion in a movie. Dolores and her gray, humble, hushed husband-coach, old Humbert. There was nothing wrong or deceitful in the spirit of her game—unless one considered her cheerful indifference toward its outcome as the feint of a nymphet. She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life, revealed an innocence, a frankness, a kindness of ball-placing, that permitted a second-rate but determined player, no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to poke and cut his way to victory. Despite her small stature, she covered the one thousand and fifty-three square feet of her half of the court with wonderful ease, once she had entered into the rhythm of a rally and as long as she could direct that rhythm; but any abrupt attack, or sudden change of tactics on her adversary’s part, left her helpless. At match point, her second serve, which—rather typically—was even stronger and more stylish than her first (for she had none of the inhibitions that cautious winners have), would strike vibrantly the harp-cord of the net—and ricochet out of court. The polished gem of her dropshot was snapped up and put away by an opponent who seemed four-legged and wielded a crooked paddle. Her dramatic drives and lovely volleys would candidly fall at his feet. Over and over again she would land an easy one into the net—and merrily mimic dismay by drooping in a ballet attitude, with her forelocks hanging. So sterile were her grace and whipper that she could not even win from panting me and my old-fashioned lifting drive.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Do you have any idea how many times you say the word lesbian in a day ?’ asked Zora, switching on the television. Jerome laughed quietly at this. Howard, happy to amuse his family even incidentally, smiled too. ‘So,’ said Howard, clapping his hands, ‘money. If she wants me bled dry, so be it.’ ‘Look, man, I don’t want your money,’ said Levi resignedly. ‘Keep it. If it means I don’t have to listen to you talk about it.’ Levi lifted his sneaker up, a request for his father to do that special triple knot thing with the laces. Howard braced Levi’s foot against his thigh and began tying. ‘Soon, Howard,’ said Zora breezily, ‘she won’t need your money. Once the case is won she can sell the painting and buy a goddamn island.’ ‘No, no, no,’ said Jerome confidently, ‘she won’t sell that painting. You don’t understand anything if you think that. You have to understand the way Mom’s brain works. She could have kicked him out’ – Howard expressed alarm at this nameless characterization of himself – ‘but she’s like, ‘‘No, you bring up the kids, you deal with this family.’’ Mom’s perverse like that. She doesn’t go the way you think she’s going to go. She’s got a will of iron.’ They had this discussion, in different variants, several times a week. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ contributed Howard, and with exactly the morose intonation of his father. ‘She’ll probably sell this house from under us an’ all.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘I really hope so, Howard,’ said Zora. ‘She totally deserves it.’ ‘Zora, haven’t you got to get to work?’ asked Howard. ‘None of you knows anything,’ said Levi, hopping to swap feet. ‘She’s gonna sell that picture, but she won’t keep the money. I was round there yesterday, talked to her about it. The money’s going to the Haitian Support Group. She just doesn’t want Kipps to have it.’ ‘You were round there . . . Kennedy Square?’ queried Howard. ‘Nice try,’ said Levi, because they had all been instructed not to give Howard any details as to Kiki’s exact location. Levi put both feet on the floor and evened up the legs of his jeans. ‘How do I look?’ he asked. Murdoch, fresh from a short-legged scramble through the long grass, came scuffling into the kitchen. He was overwhelmed by attention from all sides: Zora ran over to pick him up; Levi played with his ears; Howard offered him a bowl of food. Kiki had wanted desperately to take him, but her apartment was not dog-friendly. And now the remaining Belseys being nice to Murdoch was, in some way, for Kiki; there was the unspoken, irrational hope that, although not with them in this room, she could somehow sense the care they were lavishing upon her beloved little dog, and that these good vibes would . . . it was ridiculous. It was a way of missing her.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When he was at rest, where did the speed go? During our field trips I’d sit beside him in a hardwood pew or stand close to him under a dusty chandelier as men’s voices chanted behind the iconostasis and I felt as though I were already Mr. Pouchet’s lover and why not, for he was as much a superfluous man as I was an excluded boy. Every morning at six he was out on the track running through the mist, stopwatch in hand, puffs of vapor issuing from his mouth, but surely he was running down. I had no idea how old he was (twenty-something), but doubtless he was declining physically. Here he comes, blood drained from his dark cheeks, lips purple and open to reveal wet, white teeth, legs lean and slightly bowed, the calves compact, not bulging, his whole body so intelligent that despite its hairiness nothing about it suggests an animal. He’s the cautious, isolated man who sleeps alone, rises before dawn, runs, irons his chinos, pares his beautiful nails that haven’t a single ridge or moon in them but that seem built up out of layer after layer of clear lacquer, who never seems to have a headache or hangover, who’s a well-maintained machine but idling, idling, who approaches each new experience (the iconostasis doors break open and the black nave floods over with candlelight: Christ is risen) in a spirit of mildly detached curiosity, and yet nothing has touched him. He is vulnerable and he’s untouched. He is a man to whom something is about to happen. In the meantime he sits under the buzzing fluorescent lamp over his desk in his dorm room and grades algebra quizzes. Between the first and second hour in the study hall in the evening the boys have ten free minutes. A bell rings, they explode out of their rooms, toilets flush, four guys are pounding a fifth where the stairs turn and Mr. Pouchet winds the gold wristwatch he received for high school graduation not so many years ago, stands and looks out his window across the courtyard at the opposite windows filled with yellow light and the coming and going of the upper formers. Mr. Pouchet is waiting. His mind is open, patient, expectant. Perhaps he’s the Buddhist, perhaps the Buddha, and if he doesn’t focus on this state of grace, then that oblivion is proof he’s blessed. If I imagine Mr. Pouchet masturbating I see him turning the light on and blinking as he hunts for some tissue, which he puts on the night table beside his cot. An annoying but necessary task. He’s wearing a clean white T-shirt and blue cotton pajama bottoms. He’s an entirely serious person, a lonely adult. Off with the light. He folds the blankets down till their doubled weight rests on his knees.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  24The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale’s white church tower when I looked around me for the last time. For unknown adventures I was leaving the livid house where I had rented a room only ten weeks before. The shades—thrifty, practical bamboo shades—were already down. On porches or in the house their rich textures lend modern drama. The house of heaven must seem pretty bare after that. A raindrop fell on my knuckles. I went back into the house for something or other while John was putting my bags into the car, and then a funny thing happened. I do not know if in these tragic notes I have sufficiently stressed the peculiar “sending” effect that the writer’s good looks—pseudo Celtic, attractively simian, boyishly manly—had on women of every age and environment. Of course, such announcements made in the first person may sound ridiculous. But every once in a while I have to remind the reader of my appearance much as a professional novelist, who has given a character of his some mannerism or a dog, has to go on producing that dog or that mannerism every time the character crops up in the course of the book. There may be more to it in the present case. My gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind’s eye if my story is to be properly understood. Pubescent Lo swooned to Humbert’s charm as she did to hiccuppy music; adult Lotte loved me with a mature, possessive passion that I now deplore and respect more than I care to say. Jean Farlow, who was thirty-one and absolutely neurotic, had also apparently developed a strong liking for me. She was handsome in a carved-Indian sort of way, with a burnt sienna complexion. Her lips were like large crimson polyps, and when she emitted her special barking laugh, she showed large dull teeth and pale gums. She was very tall, wore either slacks with sandals or billowing skirts with ballet slippers, drank any strong liquor in any amount, had had two miscarriages, wrote stories about animals, painted, as the reader knows, lakescapes, was already nursing the cancer that was to kill her at thirty-three, and was hopelessly unattractive to me. Judge then of my alarm when a few seconds before I left (she and I stood in the hallway) Jean, with her always trembling fingers, took me by the temples, and, tears in her bright blue eyes, attempted, unsuccessfully, to glue herself to my lips. “Take care of yourself,” she said, “kiss your daughter for me.” A clap of thunder reverberated throughout the house, and she added: “Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again” (Jean, whatever, wherever you are, in minus time-space or plus soul-time, forgive me all this, parenthesis included).

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  as moon fires set in my throat I love you flesh into blossom I made you and take you made into me. Artisan In workshops without light we have made birds that do not sing kites that shine but cannot fly with the speed by which light falls in the throat of delicate working fire I thought I had discovered a survival kit buried in the moon’s heart flat and resilient as turtles a case of tortoise shell hung in the mouth of darkness precise unlikely markings carved into the carapace sweet meat beneath. I did not recognize the shape of my own name. Our bed spread is a midnight flower coming all the way down to the floor there your craft shows. Contact Lenses Lacking what they want to see makes my eyes hungry and eyes can feel only pain. Once I lived behind thick walls of glass and my eyes belonged to a different ethic timidly rubbing the edges of whatever turned them on. Seeing usually was a matter of what was in front of my eyes matching what was behind my brain. Now my eyes have become a part of me exposed quick risky and open to all the same dangers. I see much better now and my eyes hurt. But What Can You Teach My Daughter What do you mean no no no no you don’t have the right to know how often have we built each other as shelters against the cold and even my daughter knows what you know can hurt you she says her nos and it hurts she says when she talks of liberation she means freedom from that pain she knows what you know can hurt but what you do not know can kill. From Inside an Empty Purse Money cannot buy you what you want standing flatfooted and lying like a grounded chestnut unlovable and suspect I am trying to reach you on whatever levels you flow from treacherous growing water in a blind tongueless pond. I am the thread of your woman’s cloth the sexy prison that protects you deep and unspoken flesh around your freedom I am your enemy’s face. The money doesn’t matter so much as the lie telling you don’t know why in a dream I am trying to reach you before you fall in to me. A Small Slaughter Day breaks without thanks or caution past a night without satisfaction or pain. My words are blind children I have armed against the casual insolence of morning without you I am scarred and marketed like a streetcorner in Harlem a woman whose face in the tiles your feet have not yet regarded I am the stream past which you will never step the woman you can not deal with I am the mouth of your scorn. Sister Outsider We were born in a poor time never touching each other’s hunger never sharing our crusts in fear the bread became enemy. Now we raise our children

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (“Why are you a feminist?” I recently asked a guy I know who is very hot for the movement. “Because it’s the best damned way of getting laid nowadays,” he said.) Chaucer would be right at home here. Nothing he couldn’t cope with. I felt so cool and levelheaded for the moment that I was determined to enjoy myself before my panic returned. So I wasn’t pregnant after all. In a sense that was sad—menstruation was always a little sad—but it was also a new beginning. I was being given another chance. I ordered more coffee and watched the passing parade. All those innocents abroad! A couple was kissing on the street corner and I watched them, thinking of Adrian. They were gazing into each other’s eyes as if the secret of life were to be found there. What do lovers see in each other’s eyes anyway? Each other? I thought of my crazy notion that Adrian was my mental double and how wrong it had turned out to be. That was what I had originally wanted. A man to complete me. Papageno to my Papagena. But perhaps that was the most delusional of all my delusions. People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven’t the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love. I knew I wouldn’t run after Adrian to Hampstead. I knew I wouldn’t screw up my life for the sake of a great self-destructive passion. There was a part of me that wanted to and another part of me that despised Isadora for not being the kind of woman who gives her all for love. But there was no use pretending. I was not that sort of woman. I hadn’t the taste for total self-annihilation. I would never be a romantic heroine maybe, but I would stay alive. And that was all that mattered at the moment. I would go home and write about Adrian instead. I would keep him by giving him up. It was true I missed him desperately at times. I watched that couple kiss and I could almost feel Adrian’s tongue in my mouth. And I had all the other corny symptoms too: I kept thinking I saw his car across the street and maybe later I would even run over to inspect the license plates. I thought for an instant that I saw the back of his head in the café and then I found myself peering suddenly into some stranger’s face. I kept remembering, at odd moments, his smell, his laugh, his jokes…. But it would pass in time. It always did, unfortunately. The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained. But it was not a thirst for distant peregrinations that forced him to follow on the heels of Phileas Fogg, nor was it a boyish inclination for mysterious adventures that drew him to that house on Baker Street, where the lanky detective with the hawk profile, having given himself an injection of cocaine, would dreamily play the violin. Only much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern: Phileas, the dummy in the top hat, wending his complex elegant way with its justifiable sacrifices, now on an elephant bought for a million, now on a ship of which half has to be burned for fuel; and Sherlock endowing logic with the glamour of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a talisman progressing through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one radiant conclusion. [pp. 33–34] For more on Holmes, see Shirley Holmes. valetudinarian: a person having a sick or weakly constitution. visited with his uncle … Mother’s club: see 4640 Roosevelt Blvd.… mattress. sidetrack … female: see Some old woman. frileux: chilly; susceptible of cold. Florentine: Botticelli’s Venus (here). French … Dorset yokel … Austrian tailor: the “salad of racial genes” mentioned here, where a Swiss and “Danubian” dash is added. “I have carefully kept Russians out of it,” noted Nabokov, “though I think his first wife had some Russian blood mixed with Polish.” Similarly, there are very few specific allusions to Russian writers in Lolita. beast’s lair: Quilty. Viennese medicine man: Freud. See a case history. hypnotoid: a variant of “hypnoid,” of or pertaining to hypnosis. Streng verboten: German; strictly forbidden. like her mother: “Lolita’s smoking manners were those of her mother,” emphasized Nabokov. “I remember being very pleased with that little vision when composing it.” Cue: Quilty’s nickname; see “Vivian Darkbloom”. Curious coincidence: “Camp Q.” It’s no “coincidence” at all; someone in the know has planned it this way.