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 The Folding Star (1994)

  "The jolly old weather again! In the morning there was some . . . fog; then it went off and there was only small cirrocumulus formations." " Aren't your friend Patrick's parents worried about leaving their house unattended?" I was brooding on the dream-mirage of yesterday's sunshine on white stucco, a door left open, and he was adding and taking away, smuggling Sibylle out of the picture, touching in the stratospheric clouds that I had never looked up to see. "They aren't worried. My friend's father, Mr Roger Dhondt, goes there quite often. He is a writer and, well, he does his writing there." "So your friend Patrick's surname is Dhondt?" "Yes, have you heard of him? Roger Dhondt has had published books about nature and— ecologie . . . " "Ecology. No, I've never heard of him." "You know he used to be at Het Zwin, with the wild fowl. He is very interested in birds." I glanced at Luc, and saw he was troubled by my frown. "In fact," he said encouragingly, "their house is called Sea-Gulls." "I know, I know," I felt like mumbling, as even the vacant charm of that boarding-house, blue-skied name tarnished. "Sometimes in the summer there are people living on the sand. But they are bums and we are not worried about them." He grinned like a child who has no access to his parents' puzzling sadness and tries to entertain them, while they exchange a stony intimate look. "Sometimes they go into another house there, which has been empty for many years. We know they sometimes go into the garden, which is fine, okay, and make a fire and have a party. Now, my friend Patrick thinks there are people living in the house, but I don't know." "And why would he think that?" I said vaguely. "I mean, has he seen people there?" Luc was vaguer still. "He said he heard noises in the house, which is next to ours, to his. There was, you know, a guy around, that we kept seeing; he was a stranger, but I think he was a nice good-looking guy, quite rich, and not a bum who would break open the house." I stared at him, and saw him stir himself again—but as though not certain it was worth the effort—to a further pleasantry. "My friend Patrick says he could hear the sound of someone snoring, in fact, coming out of the house. But I think it was only the sound of the sea."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  At least if there isn't an upset in the later pages. I've never quite finished reading one of her letters before the next one arrives." We were late, perhaps loud with drink (one never knew), and the sole survivors of lunchtime. The waiter who was left to us gave only a curt nod when we asked for a second pot of coffee. "So what about this breaking heart of yours?" said Edie. "Or am I exaggerating?" "God, I wish you were," I gasped, tears suddenly in my eyes. "Darling. Perhaps it will be all right." "Of course it may be all right..." I lit a cigarette, it was from a packet left behind in the bar, an American brand, thin and sweet—the shock of finding what other people buy and like. "Have you actually . . . made a move?" I shook my head. "There are the most tremendous bars and forces in the air. Sometimes I'm only eighteen inches away from him, our feet are virtually touching as we sit at the table for the lessons, I can smell the milky coffee on his breath. And yet I'm completely immobilised." "Well, you could hardly start groping him in a lesson." Then, "How's it going to end?" "That—that's too logical and impossible a question. How it is is all that counts." Edie said nothing. "I'm so empty and aching for him, he affects everything I do and think, and it's very hard to believe that maybe he doesn't even know. It really makes me feel quite mad at times. When I go round for the lessons, you know how it is, at first I feel absolutely mad simply being with him, then after a few minutes I kind of subdue my passion with words, things get normalised, their banality somehow shows through for a while—of course there are spurts of hot heart-burn—and then as the end approaches it becomes unbearable again. I feel my face is stiff with all the pain he doesn't even know he's inflicted: it's just that basic biological thing, you can't stand being separated, and for minutes after he's said goodbye your heart is thumping and thumping and you feel full of despair and shock as if you'd just witnessed some great accident. And you have to have a drink." I took a deep pull on the cigarette and stubbed the whole thing out. "Ah, coffee." The waiter set down the copper pot, and busied and obstructed us removing the ashtray and at last empty glasses. "Which way do you think his thoughts turn?" Edie asked. "Anights? Well, it's hard . . . Did I mention the Three? They enhance each other's mystique no end. They're all beautiful and well off and give the impression of being crazy about each other."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Paul was talking about something and I found myself laughing exaggeratedly so as to make an impression of happy indifference on the young man; at the same time the laugh was a mask behind which I looked at him all the more keenly. I wasn't listening to what Paul was saying and didn't know if he had registered my lapse of attention: he tended to busy on, caught up in the oblique runs of his own thoughts. But he looked across with a moment's surprise as the man drew level with a questioning smile and I let out a bold little "Hi!" My heart sped up for a while, I even fell a pace or two behind and glanced back at him moving away. It wasn't often you saw a soldier by himself. He was a natural buttocky type, like the young Dawn, though what cut into me was the glint of intelligence, the hint of witty sous-entendu his glasses lent his square, inexperienced face. And maybe we did make an enigmatic couple, me stubbly and leather-jacketed and fucked-looking, Paul, in his oddly vented paletot and broad-brimmed trilby, seeming perhaps a little fruity and mysterious, like one of those flamboyant but watchful dons who recruit discreetly for the intelligence services. When I caught him up again he stared at me for a second, and I thought his large pale eyes had never been more subtly comprehending. I felt he must know about Luc and everything, but simply, kindly held back from touching on a situation which he could only see as futile and perhaps improper. He wasn't a drunk or a gossip. I knew he cared about me. He must have read my smothered hints, my trembling unconcern at every mention of Luc and his ancient family. I looked away into the arched stillness under a bridge that the road rose and swung to cross. Almost a circle, arch and reflection crossed by the water's wintry line. I was working with nothing, I had nothing on Luc, nothing of him that mattered, nothing from him. It came over me with a certain desolate formal perfection and for the first time. "Have you been to St Vaast?" said Paul. I told him I had passed it on the evening I arrived in town, roaming about . . . "It was locked," I said, "I couldn't get in. It looked rather melancholy, I think." "I'm afraid it is. This little parish is a very poor one. The people still use the church, but they've never had the money to do it up. It had that rather wonderful porch tacked on in the seventeenth century. Since then it's been more or less left alone."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "She was a young woman of the parish—only twenty-five or so when Orst first met her. I believe she had lost her fiance in the Great War. She took in washing, like so many of the women round here. I can still remember the long drying-racks along the canal-side, and the tunnels and alleyways of sheets you could get lost in if you were a child." "So they had an affair?" "Well, it must be said she didn't only take in washing." "I see." "She had always had something of a reputation, though it's not clear to me that Orst ever knew that." "He became her—client, do you call it?" "He saw her one day coming from the market-place. She got on to a tram, and he immediately followed her. The thing was that she looked uncanmly like Jane Byron; rather statuesque, with of course the amazing red hair— orange was his word, I think quite literal." "He surely didn't tell you about all this." "No, no. Mad though he often was he was never indiscreet. But much later on he told his sister, and he started to keep a journal, just under the force of the new emotion, which no one but she and I have ever read." "You are incredibly protective," I said rudely, with a short laugh, in unchecked exasperation; he paled, looked aside as if others might have heard the accusation, but didn't retaliate. In fact, no one seemed to care that we were talking. "Go back to the tram," I said softly. Paul paused a moment longer. "He followed her on the tram, and followed her when she got off. He felt he was seeing an apparition, as if the image he had been painting over and over for the past twenty years had suddenly come to life—come back to life, as it were. He noted which house she turned into, wrote it in his pocketbook, then wandered on bemusedly and got lost. He didn't know this part of town, despite having lived here all his life. He had to get right back to the other side, to the new suburbs where the Villa Hermes so incongruously was. "Like many rather severe people he was actually quite shy. You know he spent the years of the Great War in England"—again, I just smiled and shook my head—"and he had cut himself off so much at the Villa, and in effect denied the present so successfully, that he didn't know how to go about meeting an ordinary girl again." "But he must have been much older," I objected. "Surely too old, too self-conscious, if he didn't know what sort of woman she was, to go chasing after her."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Oh yes, I do." I was tracking a story of Luc's about a holiday in Italy . . . Padua . . . Galileo . . . the anatomy theatre . . . How formal he was with them tonight. I wanted to shout "At ease", to drag him back to the beach, kids sparring in the sand . . . "Yes, he's, he's a nice lad. Of course he's had a difficult time." "He's very frightened of you," she said, in a way which showed conclusively that she wasn't. But I respected fright this evening, I knew the warping pressure and panic that another person's presence could cause. "He has no need to be," I said. "In fact I don't think he can be any more—we've become great friends." I pictured him at home, pottering with the pastry scraps, always reaching back for childish solace, just the opposite of these three, drinking beers in a gay bar. "He tells me you've been doing work for his father." "Yes, that's right." " . . . incredibly handsome Italian men . . . " Patrick was saying. "I always think he's rather a pathetic figure." "How come?" I said, with a cross little laugh. "Oh, having lost his wife in that bizarre way. Marcel and I talk about it a lot. We think he hasn't had the heart for anything since." "He's extremely fond of his son," I said warmly, wondering if even so I did justice to his devotion. Sibylle shook her glossy bob and leaned back on the bar. I thought I didn't really like her confidence. She said, "My father says he'll never finish this famous catalogue. He says that Paul Echevin used to be a first-class scholar when he worked on Rembrandt, but for some reason he gave it all up to work on Orst, since when he's written no more than a couple of articles. My father thinks he's lost hope." "I can't tell you how wrong you are," I said. I'd had this before, from Helene. I was sick of the conspiracy against my friend. "For a start he works on the catalogue every day. I've never seen such a hard worker. He's a real scholar, you know, he wants to get things right. It will be finished by next spring. And he's written far more than a couple of articles, I can assure you." (I certainly recalled seeing three.) But she stuck by her high-up father's opinion, even if she distanced herself from it in some canny way. Patrick was giving Luc an update on St Narcissus gossip, tales of nicknamed masters, football news, told in his sturdy bollocksy voice but full of the shiver and gloom of winter school. Luc laughed and I felt his exclusion from it all, a hint that he would rather not hear about it.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The concert hall gave on an inner court where some water lilies were growing in the fountain's basin; they lay wide open in the almost furious heat of a late August afternoon. During an interlude, Pancrates urged us to inspect more closely these flowers of rare type, red as blood, which bloomed only at the end of summer. At once we recognized our scarlet lilies of the oasis of Ammon; Pancrates was suddenly fired by the thought of the wounded beast expiring among the flowers. He proposed to me that he versify this episode of our hunt; the lion's blood would be represented as tinting the lilies. The formula is not new: I nevertheless gave him the commission. This Pancrates, who was completely the court poet, improvised on the spot a few pleasant verses in Antinous' honor: the rose, the hyacinth, and the celandine were valued less in his hexameters than those scarlet cups which would hereafter bear the name of the chosen one. A slave was ordered to wade into the water to gather an armful of the blossoms. The youth accustomed to homage gravely accepted the wax-like flowers with the limp, snaky stems; the petals closed like eyelids when night fell. In the midst of these pleasures the empress arrived. The long crossing had told on her: she was growing frail without ceasing to be hard. Her political associations no longer caused me annoyance, as in the period when she had foolishly encouraged Suetonius; she now had only inoffensive women writers about her. The confidante of the moment was a certain Julia Balbilla, whose Greek verse was fairly good. The empress and her suite established themselves in the Lyceum, from which they rarely went out. Lucius, on the contrary, was as always avid for all delights, including alike those of the mind and of the eye. At twenty-six he had lost almost nothing of that arresting beauty which aroused acclamations from the youth in the streets of Rome. He was still absurd, ironic, and gay. His caprices of other days had now turned to manias: he made no move without his head cook; his gardeners composed astonishing flower plantings for him even aboard ship; he took his bed with him wherever he went, modeled on his own design of four mattresses stuffed with four special kinds of aromatics, on top of which he lay surrounded by his young mistresses like so many cushions. His pages, painted, powdered, and attired like Zephyrs and Eros, complied as well as they could with mad whims which were sometimes cruel: I had to intervene to keep the young Boreas, whose slenderness Lucius admired, from letting himself die of hunger. All that was more exasperating than charming. We visited together everything to be visited in Alexandria: the Lighthouse, the Mausoleum of Alexander and that of Mark Antony, where Cleopatra triumphs eternally over Octavia, the temples, the workshops and factories, and even the quarter of the embalmers.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We didn't get to Orst that day, but we did a very quick tour of the Town Museum: Edie had an intense, photographic way of looking at pictures, unlike my lazy day-dreaming habit. I showed her the spot in front of the Bosch where I had met Cherif, and I was lyrical about him: so sexy, so ready . . . And where was he now? Rotterdam, was it still? "He's probably being ready and sexy down there too," said Edie, sceptically but not unkindly. We drifted out and round the corner, among a thin crowd, and there in the narrow back lane was the animal market again. I told Edie she must see it, perhaps in turn not noticing her reluctance, but after a few yards of terrified mice in wheels and tethered hawks hopping and snapping at their leg-chains she turned away tense with anger and distress. "I'm sorry, darling, I c a n ' t . . . I don't know how you can." "No, let's go somewhere else." I took her arm and we went to the lane's end, and left into the square by the theatre. "This is where I fell in love with Luc," I said, doggily marking each place with an amorous association. "It's like a bloody Jubilee Walkway," said Edie. "Except you've only been here five minutes." "Sorry to be a love-bore. You just happen to have caught me on my last mad fling before old age sets in." "Hmm." She swung away to take in the buildings. "Are you treating me to the theatre tonight?" "Well, we could. It does take up a lot of valuable drinking-time." "I have a hip-flask." "And I don't know if you'll like it. There's an opera season—Saint-Saens's Henry VIII and Gretry's La Siffleuse." "The second one would be lovely. It sounds like something for Sir Perry." This was a reference to our local old man of letters back home, Sir Perry Dawlish, known, up to a point, for a monograph on "Whistling in Literature". We ambled past the side of the theatre, drawn by the noise of a piano and a woman's voice. From an open rehearsal-room window a melancholy soprano came floating down: "Dans cette brumeuse Angleterre je meurs sous un pale soleil . . . " We listened until a stamp and a cry of "Shit!" precipitated a bad-tempered reprise. "It must be poor dear Catherine of Aragon," said Edie solicitously. "One knows how she feels." "Have you been writing anything?" she asked, much later on, in the Cassette. This was a reference to our local young man of letters, Edward Manners, groomed early for a career in print, and already considered by most to be a lost cause. "What a very insensitive question." "Sorry, darling. Do you want another beer?" "After that I certainly do." And it had caused me a genuine twinge of bleak unease.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Marcel and I patrolled separately through the day, among the beach shelters, the steamed-up cafes, the meagre amusements of the resort. Sometimes my beat would cross his and I would buy him a snack, some local speciality—a helping of chips or a hake sandwich. His attitude had improved dramatically. He might genuinely have come here for a holiday. Mrs Altidore had backed our hotel booking with her Master Card and the cashier advanced us a clip of thousand-franc notes. Marcel spent much of his time in a cacophonous games arcade, claiming that Luc would be drawn to it. I watched him as he went on further chases, through landscapes that opened up at sick-making speed, violet, rose, lime-green, where loss was met by derisive klaxons and victory by urgent trills. Other, rougher boys began to cluster behind him, sullenly impressed by his nerve and his quick hand. It wasn't Luc's sort of place at all. I saw him kicking along the beach, sunk beautifully in himself, hurling bits of driftwood back, watching the waves' sloping approach—like something felt along the heart . . . The storm had thrown up sand on the esplanade and caked the seaward windows of hotels with salt. Miniature reparations were being made with brooms and ladders. Something in the mood of leisured routine, the morning vacancy of hotels, snagged me with longing. I drifted to the station, asking "Why?" and "Where?" again and again—it was like some endless Lied my father might have sung, "Warum?", "Wohin?", the conventional stanzas shifted into breathtaking depth by the modulations between them. And the station too, with its tiny repertoire of arrivals and departures, was the threshold of everywhere else—Luc himself was perhaps already miles beyond the shining vanishing-point of the rails. Even so I was on edge for him. I sat and smoked in a bleak public garden sheltered from the wind but in sound of the sea; the flowerbeds were stripped out for winter, puddles shivered on the concrete paths. No one whatever came into it, which seemed to make it apt and ready for our reunion. There was a yelp from behind me and the slap of feet. I thought, this is it, and turned with a smile I knew would be half a grimace of doubt and fright. A thickset blond was jogging up and for a fraction of a second I tried to commute him into Luc, I wondered what he had done to himself. He glanced back at me as he passed, big features abstracted by the rhythms of running and music: I could hear the tinny racket from his headphones. He ran on round the garden's perimeter, then stopped and rocked on the spot, bending from the waist and doing exercises surely more eye-catching than useful. But what did I know?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  His mother knocked and brought two coffees in with a self-denying expression, as if to say that this would be her last intrusion on the serious work we had to do. Then the conversation made its faltering beginnings, and ran on for minute after minute, with topics artificially encouraged gaining a brief involuntary momentum before dying like an old engine in which too much confidence had been placed. We spoke about the geography of Belgium, the relative merits of the western plain and the south-easterly heights, and discussed the Flemish/Walloons question without reaching any very deep or new conclusions. It was a puzzling experience—I was fascinated by him, yet carrying on as though I'd been trapped with a bore at a cocktail party. Perhaps he really was a bore; there was no reason he shouldn't be, whatever his fretful mother had said. Or was I expecting too much too soon, and ignoring his steady merits, the schoolboy's vacant valuing of knowledge for its own sake? I felt I needed to find out about him, or like some subtle interrogator to beguile him into unnoticed indiscretions; I was slightly miffed when he started to give things away without much bother or self-importance. He was looking sunned and well, so I asked him about his recent spell out at the seaside. He had been to the villa of a former schoolfriend, just over the French border, right on the beach at a village called St Ernest-allx-Sablonnières, to which, he told me confidently, the saint's body had been brought after his fatal crusade. Patrick something was his great friend there, another rich kid I guessed, and they had often been together to this beach-house in the long holidays when the something family went out there. This time the fine weather on the very brink of the new term had tempted the boys to go there for a few days alone; or so I thought, and jealously hoped, until it emerged that there had also been a girl with them.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "No, not so many." He lowered his head to take a first slurp at his coffee. "I have had some good friends at St Narcissus, but now I do not see them too much." His voice, light, insistent, trust less, the heart-breaking Brutus of a school play; the occasional early-morning throatiness as if he were a smoker already. "I can't believe they've all dropped you. Decided not to be your friends any more." "There are some, few, people who will always be your friends, even though you may not be with them often, and there are others who you see, whom you see, all the time who, sure, they are your friends, but when life moves on you begin to forget them, and I find you do not have too much to say to each other any more." "How very true." "For instance my friend Jeroen at St Narcissus, you know we used to see each other every day, and so it was before then. His father was at the very same school with my father, and I used to play with Jeroen when we were just little kids. We both are, well, quite good runners, but he became faster than me, and perhaps I was unfriendly to him—not on the surface, you know, but more on the bottom. Yes, underneath. But now, when I see him in the town, like yesterday, I am actually quite upset because we just say a few words and maybe I am embarrassed a little bit because I am not in the school any more, but then I think he would like to be more grown-up and not to be in the school too, even though he is now one of the top duxes—do you say, the prefects, yes—and the captain of everything. So we just laugh at each other for a minute and then we go away." My poor darling Luc! What hateful lessons you have to learn. I grimaced avuncularly—not too avuncularly: the understanding smirk of a real friend. And it was cheering to think of his old unappreciative friends dropping away, leaving only our little corps of idolaters, unencumbered by other flatterers and time-wasters (though schism and betrayal within so fanatical a clique were a further danger not to be discounted). Even so there was a certain grossness in my pushing the next question forward, and I felt again for a second the interrogator's planned scorn for etiquette, moved by the fiercer logic of his need to know.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  We were asking each other a lot of questions with our eyes and answering them. It all happened real fast. I saw the tears just start spilling from her eyes and then she turned to go. By the time I found my voice to speak, Jacqueline was gone. Stone Butch Blues 37 THE NOTE SAILED ACROSS my desk and glided onto the floor. I kept an eye on Mrs. Rotondo while I bent over and picked it up. Luckily, she didn’t seem to notice. DANGER!! My parents want to know why your parents call our house looking for you. I cant cover for you anymore. PLEASE FORGIVE ME!! Love until eternity—your enduring friend, Barbara. I looked up and caught Barbara’s eyes. She wrung her hands and made a face that begged forgiveness. I smiled and nodded. I mimed smoking a cigarette. Barbara nodded and smiled. She made me feel warm inside. Barbara—the girl I'd sat next to in homeroom for two years. Barbara—the girl who told me if I were a guy she’d be in love with me. We met in the girls’ bathroom. Two of the juniors who were smoking had already opened the windows. “Where’ve you been lately?” Barbara demanded to know. “Working like crazy. Pve got to get out of my parents’ house or I’m gonna die. They act like they hate my guts.” I took a deep drag on my cigarette. “I think they wish I was never born.” Barbara looked frightened. “Don’t say that,” she told me, then glanced around as if someone might hear. She took a drag of smoke into her mouth and let it trickle out as she inhaled it up her nose. “Isn’t that wild? It’s called a French Curl. Kevin showed me.” “Oh, shit!’ someone hissed. “Alright girls, line up!” It was Mrs. Antoinette, the scourge of girls who longed for nicotine. She ordered us to line up so she could smell our breath. Since she hadn’t actually seen me, I took a chance and slipped out the door. The halls were deserted. Within minutes a maddening bell would ring and the halls would be jammed with kids using their notebooks in front of them like shields in battle. I guess the summer had changed me. Otherwise I would never have snapped the iron bands of habit and left the building during school hours. I wanted to run atound the track as fast as I could, to sweat out the sticky sensation of imprisonment. But the boys were in football practice in the middle of the field, and a group of girls were trying out for cheerleading. So I climbed up into the bleachers and walked to the far end.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Take a right, Ma. There’s the lot behind the bait and tackle shack where one summer I watched Trevor skin a raccoon he shot with Buford’s Smith & Wesson. He grimaced as he worked the thing out of itself, his teeth green from the drugs, like glow-in-the-dark stars in daylight. On the truck bed the black pelt rippled in the breeze. A few feet away, a pair of eyes, grained with dirt, stunned by the vision of their new gods. Can you hear it, the wind driving the river behind the Episcopal church on Wyllys St.? The closest I’ve ever come to god was the calm that filled me after orgasm. That night, as Trevor slept beside me, I kept seeing the raccoon’s pupils, how they couldn’t shut without the skull. I’d like to think, even without ourselves, that we could still see. I’d like to think we’d never close. You and I, we were Americans until we opened our eyes. Are you cold? Don’t you think it’s strange that to warm yourself is to basically touch the body with the temperature of its marrow? — They will want you to succeed, but never more than them. They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent. From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. You can make it home this way. Believe me, you can shake the wheat and still be nameless as cokedust on the tender side of a farmboy’s fist. How come each time my hands hurt me, they become more mine? Go past the cemetery on House St. The one with headstones so worn the names resemble bite marks. The oldest grave holds a Mary-Anne Cowder (1784–1784). After all, we are here only once. Three weeks after Trevor died a trio of tulips in an earthenware pot stopped me in the middle of my mind. I had woken abruptly and, still dazed from sleep, mistook the dawn light hitting the petals for the flowers emitting their own luminescence. I crawled to the glowing cups, thinking I was seeing a miracle, my own burning bush. But when I got closer, my head blocked the rays and the tulips turned off. This also means nothing, I know. But some nothings change everything after them. In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you. — They will tell you that to be political is to be merely angry, and therefore artless, depthless, “raw,” and empty. They will speak of the political with embarrassment, as if speaking of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Phil must have seen them far more often than I had, but he seemed content to stand and watch. Their mesmerising, impersonal play was a relief. Then first one, and then another, in three downward jumps, was switched off. A painful feeling of emptiness and ordinariness came over me. I turned ruefully to Phil, and looked him up and down for several seconds. As we walked on I wondered if I shouldn’t have used the moment to put an arm around him, even to kiss him. As we crossed the road to the hotel, though we both became more tense, there was a perceptible shift of power: we were entering his territory. ‘We’d better go round the back,’ he said. ‘We’re not supposed to be out front when we’re off duty.’ ‘No, sure,’ I said; then enquired, ‘When are you back on duty again?’ If it was any moment now, it would alter the whole imaginary campaign. ‘Oh, from midnight,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here. I don’t live here, you see, but when you’re on night duty they give you a room. I’m on nights all this month.’ ‘I see. Where do you live normally?’ I had a hunger to know these facts and to read things into them. ‘Oh, up in Kentish Town. There’s a staff house there—it’s known as the Embassy. Because of all the foreign staff,’ he explained needlessly. We went along by the huge Edwardian façade of the hotel, and I glanced nervously up at its convulsed top stages: balconies, bows, gables, turrets, executed in a sickly mixture of orange brick and dully shining beige faience. Then we cut down a narrow street that sheared at an angle across the corner of the hotel site and revealed the undecorated plainness of its back parts. Phil pulled open a door with a window in it, and we penetrated into a horrible area of store-rooms, rumbling boilers and stacked wicker laundry-baskets. It was like the subterraneous parts of the worst schools we used to play matches against. There were frequent fire doors which closed the corridor into hot, brightly lit sections. When we climbed to the floor above, which was the main floor of the hotel, we were treading for a few yards on patterned hotel carpet, and there were brass wall-lamps and prints of eighteenth-century London. Then we were in the service area again. We passed by the open door of a kind of rest-room: the curtains were drawn, and there was a semi-circle of once stylish wooden-armed easychairs, of the kind where the seat cushions collapse through the supporting rubber straps, and a television, in front of which a man in the hotel’s dark blue uniform was squatting. The air was dead with smoke and there were large, bar-room ashtrays on the floor, piled high with fag-ends. ‘Hi, Pino!’ said Phil. The man looked round; he had very curly dark hair, dull, handsome Spanish looks—about thirty years old. ‘Hey Phil!

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Caught between various dad candidates, Lindsay and I never learned how a man should treat a woman. Chip may have taught me how to tie a fishing hook, but I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go.” Mom perhaps sensed that Bob was regretting his decision to take on an additional child, because one day she called me into the living room to speak on the phone with Don Bowman, my biological father. It was a short but memorable conversation. He asked if I remembered wanting to have a farm with horses and cows and chickens, and I answered that I did. He asked if I remembered my siblings—Cory and Chelsea—and I did a little bit, so I said, “Kind of.” He asked if I’d like to see him again. I knew little about my biological father and barely recalled my life before Bob adopted me. I knew that Don had abandoned me because he didn’t want to pay child support (or so Mom said). I knew that he was married to a woman named Cheryl, that he was tall, and that people thought I looked like him. And I knew that he was, in Mamaw’s words, a “Holy Roller.” That was the word she used for charismatic Christians who, she claimed, “handled snakes and screamed and wailed in church.” This was enough to pique my curiosity: With little religious training, I was desperate for some exposure to a real church. I asked Mom if I could see him, and she agreed, so in the same summer that my legal father walked out of my life, my biological one walked back in. Mom had come full circle: Having cycled through a number of men in an effort to find me a father, she had settled on the original candidate. Don Bowman had much more in common with Mom’s side of the family than I expected. His father (and my grandfather), Don C. Bowman, also migrated from eastern Kentucky to southwest Ohio for work. After marrying and starting a family, my grandfather Bowman died suddenly, leaving behind two small children and a young wife. My grandmother remarried, and Dad spent much of his childhood in eastern Kentucky with his grandparents. More than any other person, Dad understood what Kentucky meant to me, because it meant the same thing to him. His mom remarried early, and though her second husband was a good man, he was also very firm and an outsider—even the best stepparents take some getting used to. In Kentucky, among his people and with plenty of space, Dad could be himself.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Grown to manhood, I found in hunting release from many a secret struggle with adversaries too subtle or too stupid in turn, too weak or too strong for me; this evenly matched battle between human intelligence and the wisdom of Wild beasts seemed strangely clean compared to the snares set by men for men. My hunts in Tuscany have helped me as emperor to judge the courage or the resources of high officials; I have chosen or eliminated more than one statesman in this way. In later years, in Bithynia and Cappadocia, I made the great drives for game a pretext for festival, a kind of autumnal triumph in the woods of Asia. But the companion of my last hunts died young, and my taste for these violent pleasures has greatly abated since his departure. Even here in Tibur, however, the sudden bark of a stag in the brush is enough to set trembling within me an impulse deeper than all the rest, and by virtue of which I feel myself leopard as well as emperor. Who knows? Possibly I have been so sparing of human blood only because I have shed so much of the blood of wild beasts, even if sometimes, privately, I have preferred beasts to mankind. However that may be, they are more in my thoughts, and it is hard not to let myself go into interminable tales of the chase which would try the patience of my supper guests. Surely the recollection of the day of my adoption has its charm, but the memory of lions killed in Mauretania is not bad either. To give up riding is a greater sacrifice still: a wild beast is first of all an adversary, but my horse was a friend. If the choice of my condition had been left to me I would have decided for that of centaur. Between Borysthenes and me relations were of almost mathematical precision; he obeyed me as if I were his own brain, not his master. Have I ever obtained as much from a man? Such total authority comprises, as does any other power, its risk of error for the possessor, but the pleasure of attempting the impossible in jumping an obstacle was too strong for me to regret a dislocated shoulder or a broken rib. My horse knew me not by the thousand approximate notions of title, function, and name which complicate human friendship, but solely by my just weight as a man. He shared my every impetus; he knew perfectly, and better perhaps than I, the point where my strength faltered under my will.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Here was a glancing shot under his chin, with the tiny nicks of inexpert shaving; an armpit, with sandy sun-bleached hairs; the broad nipples needing to be twisted and hurt. Here was the white watch-stripe on the tanned arm, the circle of the absent dial off-centre, sloped to the wrist-bone: time was away and somewhere else . . . Here he loomed in a kisser's blurred close-up, his molten trumpeter's lip. Behind him, in the clear irrelevance of a background, was the house next door, a slat of a sun-blind kinked down for a hidden eye. I lay in the dark and jerked off glumly. I thought, here is the room I left Dawn to come back to on all those nights, hot-mouthed, clumsy with disguised fatigue but high and alight with love. I could melt still at the memory of his back, when I pulled his shirt over his head, and pressed kisses on his shoulderblades and neck. No one ever looked nicer from behind. His back was the tapered shield, the figure of my love for him, too simple, too confounding to be put into words. I knew there had been a good deal of boredom and pretence, he hadn't perhaps been interesting to me in himself, and yet I also knew he was the motor of my grandest feelings and most darting thoughts, the ground bass to those first intense improvisations. At moments I felt lonely with him; at others, never so excitedly at peace. And what had there been since then? Nothing quite the same. Everything in some way melancholy, frantic or foredoomed.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The back of the house was dark, the jeep standing in the yard, loosely swathed in a nylon tarpaulin that rustled and lifted and sank in a stirring of breeze as if someone was there. I let myself in to the glass porch, which still held a dim vegetative smell from the withered azaleas and sprawling rubber-plants, and then into the flat, with its own bouquet of cologne-smothered squalor. So he'd brought Luc here. I lit a cigarette and hung around by the bed, disordering it further with a fastidious toe. For a second or more at a time I let myself imagine them. I seemed to have forgotten that I had slept here since, unknowing, hoping to forget. The jeep was a raucous starter—and after that it took a while to figure out the lights and the dip-switch. Getting into reverse proved tricky too. But then I was out of the gate, sitting high up, ready for off, hearing in the growl of the exhaust a tremor of that first outing to the sea; I went jerkily round the block, getting used to being in control, quite hoping I'd pass Matt walking home, then relieved I hadn't. I came up to a red light behind a little Fiat with three lads across the back, two more in front, joking and rowdy, off to a good time; my beam stroked the clean backs of their necks. I revved forlornly, and one of them turned, took in the flashy chrome and zipped-up rally lamps, and grinned—while the driver, scenting a challenge, revved as well, and when the light changed shot forward with a squeal. I let them go. Out of town the night was windy and glossy, the lights of farms and isolated houses burned clear across the fields, or bare treetops dipped and splintered them. For a while the road followed the high embankment of the sea-canal, the water black and barely visible below. There was no shipping in it, only the archaic hulk of a dredger, its platform lit and deserted. I rested my free hand on the seat beside me, as if on the thigh of an invisible passenger. The jeep's hood gibbered at its fastenings.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  As soon as he began to count in my life art ceased to be a luxury and became a resource, a form of succor. I have forced this image upon the world: there are today more portraits of that youth than of any illustrious man whatsoever, or of any queen. At first my desire was to have recorded in sculpture the successive beauties of a changing form; but later, art became a kind of magical operation, capable of evoking a countenance lost. Colossal effigies seemed to offer one means of expressing the true proportions which love gives to those we cherish; I wanted those images to be enormous, like a face seen at close range, tall and solemn figures, like visions and apparitions in a terrifying dream, and as overwhelming as the memory itself has remained. I demanded perfect execution, nay, perfection pure; in short, that god who every boy dying at twenty is for those who have loved him; but I sought also an exact resemblance, the familiar presence and each irregularity of a face dearer than beauty itself. How many discussions it cost to keep intact the heavy line of an eyebrow, that slightly swollen curve of the lip. ... I was counting desperately on the eternity of stone and the fidelity of bronze to perpetuate a body which was perishable, or already destroyed, but I also insisted that the marble, rubbed daily with a mixture of acid and oil, should take on the shimmer, and almost the softness, of youthful flesh. The face was unique, still I found it everywhere; I amalgamated divinities, sexes, and eternal attributes, the hardy Diana of the forests with the melancholy Bacchus, the vigorous Hermes of the palaestrae with the twofold god who sleeps, head on arm, like a fallen flower. I remarked how much a thoughtful young man resembles a virile Athena. My sculptors went slightly astray; the less able fell into the error of too soft a line, or too obvious; all, however, were more or less caught up in the dream. There are statues and paintings of the youth alive, reflecting that immense and changing landscape which extends from the fifteenth to the twentieth year: the serious profile of the obedient child; that statue where a sculptor of Corinth has ventured to retain the careless ease of a young boy with lounging posture and sloping shoulders, one hand on his hip, as if he were watching a game of dice at some street corner. There is that marble where Papias of Aphrodisias has outlined a body tenderly nude, with the delicate resilience of narcissus.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I went out to the car wondering if I could possibly have converted the estimate rightly. For a minute or so I found something inexplicably comic in the sight of Paul at the wheel of his desirable little Alfa Giulietta—upright and circumspect, as though he still remembered his lessons. I'm afraid it communicated itself in some way and sharpened his edginess. I did what I could, admired the car, then talked blandly about the town in the winter morning light—though once we were free of the outskirts I saw how little I missed it, what a ghost city it was, now Luc had gone. I felt a dread of living on there without him, the pointless months, the paralysis of ingrown failure. "No news of the Altidore boy?" said Paul, out of some subtle and forgiving sympathy. I turned my head and watched the slow wheeling-past of the farmlands, each shed and bungalow and leafless poplar bald and staring with his absence. "Nothing at all." I was aware of Paul watching me for a moment. "You're very in love with him, aren't you?" Poplars, a windmill, a level-crossing. "Yes—yes, I am." A slowing, waiting, then overtaking. "I'm so sorry—sorry, that is, that you must be going through hell." Paul was unembarrassed by my crying, or sensed the gleam of relief through its drizzle, the snivelling smile that welcomed comfort. "It must have been . . . obvious!" "Oh, not at all. Or hardly. I think in retrospect perhaps I wondered, or had little glimpses that I failed to make anything of at the time." "Quite often I thought you'd seen." "It was Lilli who told me. You know, you left some of the boy's clothes mixed up with your wash. It was only then I realised that you were having an affair." "Ah . . ." "Don't worry, she won't tell anyone. I assume it is a secret." "Urn—I don't think his mother would be very pleased." "One can imagine the effect on her needlework," said Paul quietly, not sure if a joke was allowed. I gave a grateful low guffaw. We drove on in silence, an expectant silence, whilst I wondered if I dared say more. I fingered the catch of the glove-box abstractedly. "Rodney told me he'd seen you together in a bar," said Paul, so that I thought he had just been softening me up before the serious trouble could begin. "I was very rude to him. I suppose he's been what he'd call researching me, has he? He probably thinks I've bumped Luc off. I'm sorry, but he's a nightmare—Rodney." "I suppose he's not perhaps very . . . " mumbled Paul, trying to adjust to what was clearly an unexpected view of his new employee. "Anyway, that isn't the point—he just appeared very concerned about the boy's whereabouts. He was asking Marcel all about your expedition."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I stared over his shoulder at my reflection in the lift's steely wall. I found "Printemps" quite sinister, a little smaller than life-size, with a steady grey eye and a torrent of red hair. The right breast was shiny and worn, as if often rubbed, like the burnished toe of a saint, by day-dreaming devotees. The figure ended at the knee and stood on a dulled and chipped get plinth. It gave a troubling sense of merely suspended animation, as though waiting to catch the viewer off-guard. I felt there should be a slot in the base for a coin that would set the head nodding, the eyes rolling, the lower lip and chin dropping and snapping shut; perhaps it would utter a slow, repeating laugh; then it would freeze again, just as it was, with the mockery and promise of its stare and its smile. Chapter 15 Cherif had grown a moustache. It was thick, not quite as broad as his mouth, and gave him a pugnacious expression; the appealing curl of his upper lip was disguised. I hesitated before taking a seat by him at the bar. "You probably don't recognise me," he said. I rested a hand for a second on his cool leather shoulder. "I recognise all the rest of you." "That's good." In fact there was shyness behind the bristles. "I thought you must be dead or something. I've been in here the last three nights." "Not me, someone else: I've been home for a funeral." He turned his glass around on its mat. "I thought you might be at that men's sauna, I went there." I knew about the place, I pictured it in a deeper shadowy circle of the city's sex-life. "No, I never go there. Any good?" A shrug. "One or two guys . . . I didn't really do anything." I noticed I was pleased he hadn't. "I don't have the figure for sauna sprawling any more." He kept frowning at his drink and said, "You look really thin"— with a hint of criticism, an implied allusion to the wasting of unappeased love? I ordered a beer for myself, and added one on for him. "So where have You been?" I said. He leaned towards me and pushed his hand through my hair and stayed stroking the smooth little knoll behind my ear with a gentle thumb. I thought he'd probably had a few—it was the mid-evening lull already. I'd come in straight from the airport, a bit queasy from turbulence and a string of miniature malts and the mad cabaret of the Kentair stewards. "Nowhere," he said. And I thought maybe that was enough curiosity shown.