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)

  "I didn't know," I said, with sudden force on the final word which surprised both of us and made him pause a moment. "I didn't know," I repeated more sensibly. "Tell me if you're coming again—don't pay." "That's very kind of you." He started up the stairs again. "Are you running off now? Have you seen it all?" "I have to. It's Marcel's lesson in half an hour." I smiled and shrugged to suggest that that was life, but that it wasn't a burden. "Ah yes. Well, come and see us again, won't you? Perhaps you'll join us for supper tomorrow. We'll have a couple of people in, but nothing formal. I'm a bit worried about you," he said, nodding, whimsical but clairvoyant. "I think we need to feed you up." I'd just turned into my street when there was an annoying pip—pip—pip on a horn, and a kind of jeep, metallic blue, with yards of chrome trim, triple exhausts and gigantic tyres, pulled up just past me. It reminded me of the uncomplaining toys which tumble over and right themselves all day long in trays outside Oxford Street gift shops. I looked in and Matt was leaning across, trying to open the passenger door. Our relations had been cool and abstracted on the night of the Hermitage, so I knew he must be stopping to show off his ridiculous vehicle. "Hey, Ed!" he said. "Jump in, let's go for a ride." "I can't," I said, "I've got a lesson." The mistaken diminutive rattled me. My mother had insisted on the full Edward all my life, and so had I—though my uncle Wilfred was allowed the deviation of Ned. Yet there was a pleasure to be had from answering to it—a hasty, holiday intimacy. Ed was someone it might be a relief to be for a day, under a sunny sky. I felt a frisson of recall, just half a second of access to a keen, lost mood—a childhood summer at Kin chin Cove, my brother nagging me to put down my book and play rounders, a beach bully shouting, "What's his name? All right, Ed, you're over there, Ed . . ." "Is he the cute one? We could take him for a ride too." "He isn't, I'm afraid. Not this one. He's a fat little fellow with asthma." I leaned in at the open door. Matt's right hand lay on the passenger seat still, its veins sexily fat and blue over the delicate bones, the nails shockingly bitten. I imagined it moving up my thigh as I sat beside him and we burned out of town. "Where is it you live?" "Just there. The white house on the corner." "It looks very grand." "Yes, doesn't it?" We gazed at it as if I was the lucky owner of the whole thing. "And who's that?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I know all about little boys," he said, "I know all about cocks and cunts"—so that the kid backed off and turned away fast, though with a mock-cheery shout to his companions. But Gus had already lost interest. The indolent bunching of the shoppers, a parked van, the street corner with its hanging lamp and mutilated figure of St Anthony of Padua—all prevented me from seeing that broad-shouldered, strong-bottomed lad, and on impulse I followed him round the corner. He and his friends had cantered on for a bit, and it took me a moment to find them, stopped again under the iron and glass marquee of the theatre. There was my friend, and a taller fair boy beside him; beyond them, looking back at me, was a calm, wide-faced girl, hair cut in a shining bob. The shorter boy's hand rested above the small of the taller one's back, as if he had touched it lightly to reassure him or command his attention and then left it there in comfortable forgetfulness. It was a turning-point in my life, this second sighting of Luc. I knew at once how the shape of him lingered in me, like a bright image gleaming and floating on the sleepy retina: there was a kind of miserable excitement, a lurch of the heart. At the moment I recognised him and laid a hopeless claim to him, I knew I was observing him on the loose in a world that barely touched on mine: I had the clearest sense of his indifference, as he stood there with his back to me in a brown suede jerkin and white jeans, his back on which this appealing stranger was allowed to rest his hand, confident in some unguessed intimacy. Never love at first sight; but second sometimes—while I strode through the theatre colonnade, as if unaware of the three, and with a certain glamorous urgency bent on some objective beyond them, the singing echoes of my shoe-tips rang through a longer arched perspective, and seemed to summon up the skitterings of earlier loves setting out on their improbable journeys. The three had perhaps reached a natural pause in their conversation, though of course I thought their quite abrupt silence, when I was just by them but looking away at the long irrelevant announcements for Henry VIII and La Siffleuse, was virtually an act of aggression. I swept on stiffly to the Grote Markt, and crossed it as if they were still watching me, even following me.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It's like sometimes you can't understand, when people speak too clearly. I am devastated by his beauty, which seems to me on another plane from when I first saw him. He tells me 2.30 has just sounded from the church. We are standing at the top of the stairs and I ask him with laborious irony if it is all right to go disturbing his sisters at this hour: it has been very quiet there. He says it is fine, they are both away for the night in Antwerp. "Oh," I say, with a muggy sense of opportunity. I take his left hand between both of mine and stroke the back of it for a moment. I lean into his anxious breath and trace with my fingertips the quick-pulsing blue vein in the miracle of his neck. He pushes me to arm's length, frowns a disappointment that cuts to the heart, and holds out a hand. We shake once, twice, and he springs down the shadowy stairs without a word. A Sunday morning swim was what Edie always had. She rose from the bed like a zombie at 8.30 and I heard the flush of the loo and the humourless rhythmic grunts that accompanied her exercises. Incredible how she did it. I pulled the duvet over my head, thinking with satisfaction that I was too lazy to become a creature of habit. I didn't seem to have a hangover yet. I wanted to go back into the shallow dreams of old friends, brought to mind by all the nostalgic talk we had been having . . . She was standing at the bedside with a mug of tea. What a brick. "Time to get out your deviant swimwear," she said. What a fiend. I writhed and kicked and bawled but it was no good. "And shall I give Agustin a knock?" Agustin! I lurched into the other room and got into the cupboard. There was the faint sound of a radio-voice, something beginning—oh, I knew it, K361. Had I done anything truly terrible? Surely not, though there was a lingering sense of pain. He'd have to be a bit of a prig to hold it against me. Had I tried to kiss him? Awful guilt-circuit of years ago. The music snapped off and then a door slammed. I went to the front window and looked down into the yard, and saw him go busily out. It was only for a moment of course, but he seemed to have displaced Luc at the summit of my mania. Edie said, "I thought we'd agreed long ago that you didn't get involved with straight boys and I didn't get involved with queer ones, since it was in either case a recipe for heartbreak?" "You are right," I said, standing unguarded, paunchy in my boxer-shorts. In a spirit of mortification I went to look for my swimming things.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The door shut behind them and I turned with an apologetic grimace to the barman, dear little Ivo, who had helped me at moments before, who kept his ears and eyes open—there was a horrifying noise from outside, a cracked re-echoing whoop, and another, and then another. It was like the never before-heard siren of a sinking ship. Gerard had let loose with his bombard at last. Ivo made a camp gesture of alarm, and clutched his tea-towel to his heart. A moment later, "I'm glad they've gone. They got on my nerves!" "Mine too." He paused by me, and stared at the counter, as if trying to pick up the thread of an interrupted conversation, then shook his head. "Staying in town for Christmas?" "I'm going back home in a couple of days." "Back to London, yeah?" "Well, a bit south of London." "Lucky you!" He unbuttoned his shirt-pocket and took out a packet of Marlboro. "Want one?" "Thanks a lot." I offered a light. "Thanks. No, everyone seems to get out of here as quick as they can. Not that I blame them." I didn't know what I thought about that. The place irked me, made me ache with the absence of Luc, each street mocked me, but I dreaded leaving, just for a few days, when he might need me, or might feel the seasonal tug home. "I was hoping Matt might be here." Ivo glanced at the clock. "It's a bit early for Matt. Or whatever he's called." "I suppose you're right." "Anyway, he's probably busy." I smiled and blew out smoke. I wondered how much he knew about my friend. "could well be." And indeed it was early for anybody: only the solstitial nightfall gave the hour the aura of drinks-time. "Being kept busy, from what I gather." I didn't quite see this. "Is he still seeing that boy?" I thought about it for a moment and a swallow of beer. "I don't think so. Which one do you mean?" I couldn't honestly say I knew or was jealous. Ivo assumed his scandalous "discreet" manner. "I don't know his name, dear. I just watched him pick him up in here one night. Then the next night he was telling me all about it when the kid comes in again. couldn't get enough, Matt said." He glanced both ways along the bar. "He had him seven times —and that was just the first night. I was moderately jealous. Not that he was my type—You know, tall, tall schoolboy, blond, mouth like a sponge. Still—only seventeen . . . It must be nice to get something really fresh." My hand was still steady, my heart flinty. "When would this have been?" "Ooh . . ."he searched with no sense that it mattered: "Three or four weeks ago?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And how unreal it must seem to be kept from them and their routines and gossip by this square of garden and this dull canal. It was as if one of the classrooms had floated off in a dream and perched nearby, filling its solitary pupil with a mood of privilege and anxiety. "I should have asked you before if you knew my other boy, Luc Altidore?" He mumbled, "No, I don't really know him." "Of course, he would be older than you." I turned and looked at him encouragingly. He was ready to go now and clearly waiting out of politeness, remembering perhaps that I was to come to dinner again, that he could never get away from me. "You must miss it all, Marcel, don't you?" I urged. "The companionship especially." "It is a very clever school, but I am not so very clever." He shook his head, to say it was touch and go whether he was happier then or now; and I understood that he had not been happy either at school or out of it. I had known him from the first as a boy set apart by his illness, but I had at least imagined a hobby—in the simplest terms, stamps or model kits—and a friend or two he shared it with. But I could see that Luc himself would not be such a friend. "And what do you know about Luc's girlfriend?" I boomed roguishly, appallingly, and blushed as I did so. Marcel shook his head and took on a dogged look, as if the lesson and its catechism were starting up all over again. "What's she called?" I hammed on—"Sibylle something?" Marcel looked down and fiddled with his satchel-buckle. He was flushing more richly than I was. "She is not his girlfriend," he said. "They are just friends." "Not his girlfriend," I echoed quietly. "No, I suppose he is a little young to have . . . " And what did Marcel know about girlfriends? "Well, I'll see you on Wednesday. No, tomorrow night. That will be nice." "He was never interested in girls," he said quickly in Flemish, as if the idea were too serious or shocking to manage in this difficult other language. I let the lapse pass, and hid away the longed-for but doubtful information to look at later. A moment after the door had closed I felt quite humiliated to be acting the role of the buffoon, agonised into farce.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  At the other end of the landing was a door with a boyish notice, "Julien, Privé, Danger de Mort", and as I opened it I saw for a fraction of a second a fat little boy with glasses earnestly coming to terms with The Police or Duran Duran. But as my eyes adjusted to the gloom there was nothing but a bare mattress, and a child's deal desk on which lay some Astérix books and a die-cast Ferrari Testa Rossa and a long-since shrivelled inflatable globe. I felt Julien must be a bit younger than Patrick. Had they known each other, played with the boat each long summer, been transformed one after the other by puberty, Julien anxious and awestruck by his Belgian friend? Maybe Luc had known him too, and maybe that earlier, simpler threesome had come up to his room to fight and boast and hold the stilted talk of adolescence. We camped out at the house, eating floury apples and pate and olives from ajar. Matt escaped a couple more times and swam again in the late afternoon when even he admitted that the sea was hurtingly cold. I liked having the house to myself and lay about in the diffused light of the sunroom, blindfolded with daydreams and drifting into sleep. I made a slight adjustment to the angle of the slats and from time to time looked through. Once the long windows on to the porch were open, and towels and trunks had appeared on the line: I had missed their return. Later the doors were closed and lights reached out across the lawn; but we were at too obtuse an angle to be able to see in. Later still, at one or two, I went out along the beach myself and loitered by the white palings of their fence. There were no lights now, but a hazy half-moon picked up the glimmer of the dunes, the small vanishing lines of the wave-crests, and, when I turned, the white villa itself and the hanging towels and the dim, sea-bleached hydrangeas. Here was the gate, jammed open in the sand, and then the stunted thorns, clipped by the wind into arrows pointing at the darkened windows. Why not step in? Suddenly I knew the house would not be locked, and that I could ghost through it and hover over each sleeping face, him with her or him. But I didn't, I wouldn't. I kicked and stumbled back through the dunes, my heart spurting with longing. I had left a candle burning in the kitchen and shielded it upstairs with its dumbshow of shadows and startlements to where Matt was already snoring and striking a sympathetic echo from the old cupboards and bare floors. I hovered over him for a minute, his arms pinned in a camphory cocoon of blankets, his beautiful, cynical face agape and faintly senile.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Luc was polite but indifferent and after a while drifted off into the adjacent room—I saw him through the open door, masturbating calmly and talking to someone else out of view. 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.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Perhaps that was itself the secret, the place where the pious gathered as they approached the end, though no one saw them come here. It occurred to me as a vague possibility that it might be something to do with Paul's wife, whom he never spoke of and whom I knew about only from the tragic anecdote I'd buuied from Marcel. There was a snapshot of her in an ivory frame on the desk in Paul's office, a sensible boyish blonde among Orst's menacing red-heads. To marry at last at fifty and then lose your wife, to find the long decades of bachelordom creep up again like some funereal Daimler that matched your pace, its leathery soutude always in waiting, patient of the brief postponement . . . "This is probably a complete waste of time," Paul whispered. "I can't quite think why I bothered dragging you out here." "I remember Orst used the tower of this church in the picture for the story of the False Chaplain," I said, like a doggy student. "Yes. He used to come here, you're quite right." There was a pause. "It's not easy to imagine why," I said. "It had one attraction." "Well, it is a church." "He wasn't a religious man. Well, he observed religion, in the sense of looking at it very much with an eye to its forms and legends, and he was moved by the primitive faith of his country and obviously the idea of mystery; but he wasn't properly a religious observer. He liked to watch people at prayer, but didn't pray himself—or so he claimed." "I think you're suggesting there was a particular person who prayed here that he liked to watch." Paul looked a little embarrassed that I had got the point; I couldn't help feeling he could have just told me—back home in the warm, proposing a pre-lunch gin as he opened the burgundy to breathe . . . Or would it have been quite the same? I glanced away, to shawled figures, lost profiles, lips moving almost silently, as if in troubled sleep, the bleak old building given depth and tenderness by the multiple soft pulses of the candlelight. And here Edgard Orst would sit or kneel among the poor, his fastidious mouth closed, his eyes behind his powerful spectacles drifting always to the same unwitting worshipper. "They seem all to be old people here," I said quiedy—some perhaps were only Paul's age, though so much more bent and buffeted. "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."

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  She snorted cocaine. When I saw her at age thirty-one, she had just moved into a small apartment in Oakland, by herself. For our visit, we both sat on boxes. And then I noticed that she had unpacked only one item—a framed photograph of herself as a little girl, standing with her mother and father, all smiling and happy. This is all that remained of the intact family, with Brenda struggling in her mind to hold on to some unity, some sense of affection, some hope. Even though her parents had in effect abandoned her, she, like Carol, talked about them with a longing that was utterly heartbreaking. Thus we are left with a troubling but very important finding that highlights what divorce can and cannot accomplish. Children who grow up in chaotic families—divorce or no divorce—have similar lives. The divorce by itself provides no rescue unless at least one parent changes and shows real concern for the child by establishing a stable household and responsible parenting. Sometimes, as Larry’s story shows, the child can rescue himself by finding mentors or summoning the inner strength to become his own parent. Both groups of children enter adulthood with low self-esteem, a hunger for love and human closeness, and badly skewed views of man-woman relationships. Women who are exposed to the sexual acting out of their parents are more likely to become promiscuous starting in their early teens and continuing into their twenties. But in what may be a silver lining to this dark cloud, their promiscuity tapers off as they reach their thirties. Some decide to just stop because they’re afraid of getting hurt or becoming ill. Others find that sex no longer relieves their depression. Still others are lucky enough to meet men who, as one woman put it, “refused to be just the next guy in line.” Two women in the divorced group joined churches with strict standards for moral behavior. “It took the church to keep my legs closed,” one told me seriously. The men raised in chaotic marriages and chaotic divorces also suffer low self-esteem but it’s not usually manifest in promiscuity. Rather, they turn to alcohol and drugs. Unlike their sisters who give up reckless sex, the men’s addictive behaviors overall do not wane as they reach their late twenties and early thirties. Nevertheless, a few of these men and women—six in all in our study—turned their lives around when they joined mainstream churches. None had gone to these churches as children, but here they found the moral guidelines they had been missing as children. They found spouses and a community that provided the support they had always longed for. I left Larry in his early twenties full of admiration for the progress he had achieved in rejecting the alcohol and violence that were the ideals of his adolescent years.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I don’t know quite why I was in there, but one evening in the cocktail bar I was served by this fabulously handsome boy, and I stayed on and got him talking, though he was madly shy, but then I’ve always liked that. It turned out he’d had a rather extraordinary experience, as he’d worked his passage over on a ship—this was long before West Indians came in any number, of course—and then, missed the boat home. He walked into town from the Docks and as it was rather cold and rainy and not I suppose at all what he’d hoped for he went into the National Gallery to keep warm, and there he was found by an artist called Otto Henderson, who was a madly musical type as we used to say—and also a third-rate painter by the way—and he sort of picked him up. He lived with Otto for a bit, but Otto was a terrible drunk and it got rather difficult, so Otto found him a job in the Trocadero, where, as it happened, he knew the head barman who was very Scottish and respectable apparently but underneath, according to Otto, wore ladies’ knickers. Scottie was terribly jealous, needless to say, when I hit it off so with his black Adonis. Later on, he even threatened to expose me, but he changed his tune when I promised to tell all about the knickers.’ Charles laughed, and waved a hand in the air, as if shaking a tambourine. ‘How did it all end up?’ ‘Oh, Scottie had him dismissed for drunkenness (he did put it away rather) so I took him on myself for a bit. That didn’t really work out, what with Taha in the house as well, so I farmed him out to a friend.’ His face clouded. ‘There was quite a lot of talk about it at the time. Of course in a way it helped being a Lord—the English have such a superstitious awe of the aristocracy. But it also had its disadvantages, in terms of gossip and what-have-you—the English having such prurient and priggish minds. As you will find out, my dear, when you succeed’—words which seemed to anticipate not only my succession but my success. ‘I suppose black people were comparatively rare then—in England.’ Charles half suppressed a burp of agreement. ‘There were a few seamen—they had a hostel out at Limehouse. I had some good friends there, brave, reckless fellows, many of them. There were jazz players in London, of course, who had quite a following. But I suppose most people in the country didn’t see a black person in all their lives.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When I finally got a chance at the bench I realised I felt strangely weary, and going in a rotation with three other guys I slightly knew, cut my ration each time from ten to eight lifts. After a couple of turns I saw that Bill was watching me. ‘I only made that eight, Will,’ he said, with a worried look. ‘Hi, Bill. Yes, I’m doing them in eights now.’ I watched him thinking and deciding not to censure what he obviously saw as an absurd infringement of tradition. ‘Well, everything going okay, Will? Too many people here, I think. Too many people. It’s getting ridiculous. Never used to be like this.’ I agreed that it was inconvenient, and suggested that the club was hungry for the money more membership must bring. ‘Very true, Will. But the interests of the members there are already have to be considered. It’s supposed to be democratically run, you know, this place.’ He looked around mournfully. ‘Seen young Phil lately?’ he asked with slight bashfulness. I hadn’t seen him here the previous evening, and I was left uncertain if it had been him in the cinema. ‘I haven’t, actually. Has he been neglecting his training?’ ‘He may have been coming in earlier,’ Bill assured himself. ‘There may be some other gym he goes to, too. I don’t know. He needs to keep in trim, though. Very nice little body, that.’ ‘Not so little,’ I suggested, remembering the beautiful hard heaviness in the dark. ‘What does he do, anyway?’ ‘He works in a hotel actually,’ Bill declared, proud to know this fact, which might be taken as the token of a fuller intimacy than was, evidently, the case. ‘How extraordinary,’ I said, my image of Phil as a military figure distorted by this notion, but settling into a new image of him, still in uniform however, marching along an upstairs corridor with a tray of coffee and sandwiches held at shoulder height. ‘Which one, do you know?’ ‘Not sure about that, Will,’ Bill admitted. ‘One of the big famous ones, I think.’ James had been swimming diligently while I was in the weights room and when I went down to the pool he was hanging by his elbows in the deep end, in spasmodic conversation with a person I hadn’t seen before. By a silly convention I always affected a censorious attitude towards men he might actually be getting somewhere with. I stopped by him at the end of my first length, pretended to adjust the strap of my goggles, and raising my eyebrows (an effort doubtless diminished by the goggles themselves) declared, ‘I don’t think much of yours, dear,’ before plunging on.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There is a whiff of black magic sometimes at Skinner’s Lane.’ ‘I’m not surprised. It’s not my kind of thing. Henderson was said to be mixed up with some sort of spiritualist society himself, and Cecil said something about Nantwich getting in touch with I think a friend who had died tragically. I must say it rather gave me the creeps, as did Nantwich himself. Worth it, for the pavement, though.’ ‘This was before you were married.’ ‘Actually it was just about the time that P. and I started seeing each other. The irony was not lost on Cecil; he very much came from that world, and it was he who told me about Denis. Very tight lips, as you may imagine. Of course, the irony’s rather worse for you, being, you know, gay, and—I’m frightfully sorry, Will.’ ‘My dear Gavin. Anyway, I must think a whole lot more.’ I looked around my untidy bedroom, and was surprised to find I missed the invitation that the Nantwich book had offered for the past few weeks. I had played hard to get without ever envisaging an outcome such as this. ‘I’d love to see you, too. We must all get together. Now that I’m not writing a book I’ll have so much more time.’ Gavin made a miraculous little humming sound, in which sympathy and scepticism were perfectly combined. ‘He must have known gay people—he was a cultured man. What did he think he was playing at?’ ‘Well I’m too young to know. But I suspect it really was a different world—not only the law, of course, but political pressures, and we just don’t know. It’s Uncle Will. Yes, you can. Hold on, Will, I’ve got your nephew here to speak to you. Very important, right … See you soon, my dear!’ There was a plonk and a series of rustlings and a protest of ‘Daddy’ before Rupert came on the line: ‘Hello, this is Rupert,’ in his serious treble. ‘Roops, how nice to hear you. How are things.’ ‘All right, thank you. I’ve got to wait before Daddy goes out of the room.’ This took a while, as apparently he came back for something, and was, as I pictured it, being expelled from his own study and his important work on Romano-British drains. ‘It must be jolly secret,’ I said encouragingly. ‘It’s that boy,’ he hissed. ‘Arthur, you mean? Have you seen him then?’ And looking across the empty bed and out into the hazy sky, chimneypots among still trees, I felt a sudden plunging need for him, a Straussian phrase sweeping from the top to the bottom of the orchestra. ‘Yes, I have. It was in the road, yesterday.’ ‘It was jolly clever of you to spot him.’ ‘Well, I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for him, you know.’ ‘What a good spy you are. What was he doing, did he recognise you?’

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I wish that he and Mom would move into the same house.” “Do you remember when they were married and all of you were living together?” “Sure. If they were together I wouldn’t have to take the bus so much and I would see them every day. It’s a long, long, long bus ride. I like seeing them both but this way’s hard because when I’m at my dad’s I miss my mom and when I’m at Mom’s I want to see Dad. Half the time I feel okay and half the time I feel bad. Every night I miss someone.” “What advice would you give someone your age who’s going to start living part-time with each parent, like you do?” “He’ll be tired,” Racer admitted, “because you have to keep on telling people where you are and you have so much to remember, where you are going and where your favorite stuff is. And it’s hard because, like, I have friends at my school but they can’t come to my dad’s house. And there are some kids I play with when I’m at my dad’s but I only see them when I’m there. And a lot of the time they don’t remember that I’m going to be there and they’ve made plans to play with someone else. So I don’t have anyone to play with when I go there. And when I’m at my mom’s the kids have made plans I don’t know about. Sometimes you feel like a rubber band. And,” here Racer looked very solemn, “if this boy likes to play baseball tell him he’ll probably miss some games and maybe some practices—that’s what happens. I hope his coach understands.” “Your mom told me you play baseball. She said you liked to pitch.” (This was an understatement. Racer is passionate about baseball but his parents have trouble getting him to practices and games with one home in Berkeley and one in San Jose.) “Yeah, I like to play a lot,” Racer told me. “Our team has the best record. We’re going to be in the championships. And the coach told me that I could pitch in the play-offs. But only if I’m there for the rest of the season.” Racer looked worried. “Have you talked to your parents about this? It’s so important to you.” “They said they’d try to work it out to get me to all the rest of the games, but I don’t know.” Racer scowled. “They say that a lot, but things don’t work out.” “If you could change something, what would it be?” “Going back and forth bugs me. Like me and my friends are playing and then it’s time to leave right when we’re into a game.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Whenever the door swung open I knew it would be him and swallowed my distress at the sight of his friendly face and everything it offered, and it was always someone else, a regular who won a curt, delayed greeting as he was absorbed into the group around the bar. With the exception of a woman in a dressing-gown who looked in from the back to complain, there were only men here. Yet it certainly didn't seem like a gay bar—unless it was some specialist working men's kind of ugly set. At last I nerved myself to gesture the barman down. Did he know someone called Cherif, French Moroccan, a docker . . . ? At which he made a very clear announcement that what do you call him Cherif was not welcome there, or any of his type. I walked out at once and started back the way I had come, the same children turning and watching as I passed. The early evening was high and receptive and unsurprised. The silence of neglect that enveloped the old church of St Narcissus was broken only by its hourly chime and—as I discovered that night—a six-hourly broken-toothed carillon, which donged its way heartlessly through a hymn that I hoped had ended each time it reached the irregular pauses of its missing notes. It had me awake at midnight and at six, with a stab of despair about last evening; I worked through wearying punitive fantasies about Cherif that fizzled out each time in shallow sleep. At ten I went round, through a gleaming holiday haze, to the Altidores' house. They lived in Long Street, which ran out from the centre of town in an elegant, endless curve; I counted ahead of me and picked out No 39 before I got to it: tall and reserved, with a high basement and four or five steps climbing steeply to the black front door. I noticed I was repressing my curiosity about my future, coming to our first encounter with the empty mind and last-minute turn of speed that are a way of meeting a challenge; though all the time the boy's touchingly sullen image was in the air before me, flickered, like a subliminal projection, over spires and gables, while his surname exercised its glimmering romance: Altidore, it was a gothic belfry in itself, or else a knight-errant out of The Faerie Queene . . . Luc's mother answered my short but frantic-sounding ring; I stepped into an interior I had never guessed at, and which I saw at once was the shrine and workshop of an obsession. She must have been the most prolific needlewoman in Belgium. The hall, and then the sitting-room she pushed me into, were festooned with her work.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  My mother's weary, unwitting half-joke, "Are you getting up?", would be shouted from the hall, and I would reply with my comprehensive euphemism, "I'm just having a think." Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined. It had been awkward, a bit scary, my legs were stung by nettles, we'd only kissed a lot, really, then quickly stroked each other off, but it was wholly different from the heartless occasional jerk-offs at school with someone who called you a queer afterwards. Next day my head was full of the heat of it, the lovely certainty we did it for each other. When we met tonight, it would be a step further into the dreamy underwoods of love. By the time I went out for my walk after supper I was prospecting far into the future. I had coached Dawn to some surprising exam results, he had moulded me into a runner and swimmer who commanded respect. I wrote long letters to an imaginary friend abroad, dotingly detailing Dawn's sweetness and beauty. For all our open-air beginnings I had him closeted with me in des Esseintes-like privacy, in a sealed world of silk and fur and absolute indulgence. But Dawn didn't come. I sat on the bench reading Tennyson, but not taking it in, looking up every few seconds for a bike or just for him in dark running gear. It was breezier than last night, the wood was stirring in tumultuous slow-motion, the pond broken and bickering. I waited through a muffled sunset till the wind had blown off the cannon-smoke of low cloud and opened up a sky of densening stars. Of course we hadn't said we'd meet. I walked nervously under the wood's edge for a minute, and looked out the way I thought he would come, for a light swivelling over grass and bushes. But there were only the lights of planes, high up, climbing out of Gatwick, the intermittent yawn of their engines, and when they'd gone just the gusting of the trees. I was shivery in a T-shirt, and jogged home for warmth, working out a story about how I'd come back safely along the road. Next day I was desolate, and even coaxed out a few tears in my room, which I found impressive and almost cheering. I knew I had to ring Dawn, and got up suspiciously early to do so, hanging about in the hall with a book, until I thought the coast was clear, and then swiftly dissimulating my intention when my mother or Charlie came heedlessly through. I was more and more nervous the more I deferred.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  173 “Justification by Grace Through Faith” THE GROANING OF CREATION Paul’s vision in Roman 1–8 concerns the unity of Greeks and Jews, that is, of all people, in a transformed world of global peace. But the vision of imperial Rome was also about the unity of all people in a transformed world of global peace. The con- frontation is not, therefore, about ends, but about means. Is that final consummation to come as peace through violent vic- tory and pacification or as peace through nonviolent justice and justifi cation? We ourselves might not consider the distinction between Gentiles and Jews the or even a major division of the global fam- ily. We might think of the haves and the have-nots, of the First World and the Third World, of those who have more than they need and those who can barely survive. But, in any case, it is and always will be about the world. So Paul concludes this section with a magnificent hymn not just to our freedom but to that of creation itself: For the creation waits with eager longing for the reveal- ing of the children of God; for the creation was sub- jected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will ob- tain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom. 8:19–23) Paul mentions “creation” five times in those five verses. Hear, then, the voices of God and Bible, Jesus and Paul as they whisper

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Almost all of the letters I sent home asked her to “kiss the babies and tell them that I love them.” Cut off for the first time from home and family, I learned a lot about myself and my culture. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the military is not a landing spot for low-income kids with no other options. The sixty-nine members of my boot camp platoon included black, white, and Hispanic kids; rich kids from upstate New York and poor kids from West Virginia; Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and even a few atheists. I was naturally drawn to those like me. “The person I talk to most,” I wrote to my family in my first letter home, “is from Leslie County, Kentucky. He talks like he’s from Jackson. I was telling him how much bullshit it was that Catholics got all the free time they did. They get it because of the way the church schedule works. He is definitely a country kid, ’cause he said, ‘What’s a Catholic?’ And I told him that it was just another form of Christianity, and he said, ‘I might have to try that out.’” Mamaw understood precisely where he came from. “Down in that part of Kentucky, everybody’s a snake handler,” she wrote back, only partially joking. During my time away, Mamaw showed vulnerability that I’d never seen before. Whenever she received a letter from me, she would call my aunt or sister, demanding that someone come to her house immediately and interpret my chicken scratch. “I love you a big bunch and I miss you a bunch I forget you aren’t here I think you will come down the stairs and I can holler at you it is just a feeling you aren’t really gone. My hands hurt today that arthritis I guess. . . . I’ll go for now write more later love you please take care.” Mamaw’s letters never contained the necessary punctuation and always included some articles, usually from Reader’s Digest , to occupy my time. She could still be classic Mamaw: mean and ferociously loyal. About a month into my training, I had a nasty exchange with a drill instructor, who took me aside for a half hour, forcing me to alternate jumping jacks, sit-ups, and short sprints until I was completely exhausted. It was par for the course in boot camp, something nearly everyone faced at one point or another. If anything, I was lucky to have avoided it for so long. “Dearest J.D.,” Mamaw wrote when she learned of the incident, “I must say I have been waiting for them dick face bastards to start on you—and now they have. Words aren’t invented to describe how they piss me off. . . . You just keep on doing the best you can do and keep thinking about this stupid asshole with an IQ of 2 thinking he is Bobby bad ass but he wears girls underwear.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  A hare which my young hunter had tamed with great effort was caught and torn by the hounds, sole woe of shadow-less days. The people of Mantinea uncovered some traces of kinship with that family of Bithynian colonists, hitherto unknown; the city, where the boy was later to have his temples, was enriched by me and adorned. Its immemorial sanctuary of Neptune had fallen in ruins, yet was so venerable that all entrance to it had been forbidden: mysteries more ancient than mankind itself were perpetuated behind those never-opening doors. I built a new temple, far more vast than the old and wholly enclosing the ancient edifice, which will lie hereafter within like the stone at the heart of a fruit. On the road not far from Mantinea I restored the tomb where Epaminondas, slain in the heat of battle, is laid to rest with the young companion struck down at his side; a column whereon a poem is inscribed was erected by my order to commemorate this example of a time when everything, viewed at a distance, seems to have been noble, and simple, too, whether tenderness, glory, or death. On the Isthmus the Games were celebrated with a splendor unparalleled since ancient times; my hope, in reviving these Hellenic festivals, was to make Greece a living unity once more. We were drawn by the hunt to the valley of the Helicon, then in its last bronzed red of autumn; at the spring of Narcissus we paused, near the Sanctuary of Love; there we offered a trophy, the pelt of a young she-bear fixed by nails of gold to the temple wall, to Eros, that god who is wisest of all. The ship lent me by Erastos, the merchant of Ephesus, to sail the Archipelago, idled at anchor in Phaleron Bay; [Hadrian 158a.jpg] Hadrianic Cuirass with High Relief of Roman Wolf Supporting Athena Torso Standing in Agora, Athens [Hadrian 158bc.jpg] Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens [Hadrian 158d.jpg] Antinous of Eleusis Museum of Eleusis (Found in Ruins of Eleusis) I had come back to Athens like a man coming home. I ventured to add to the beauty of this city, trying to perfect what was already admirable. For the first time Athens was to grow again, taking on new life after long decline. I doubled the city in extent: along the Ilissus I planned a new Athens, the city of Hadrian joined to the city of Theseus. Everything had to be rearranged, or constructed anew.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But I no longer inflict upon Borysthenes' successor the burden of an invalid whose muscles are flabby, and who is too weak to heave himself, unassisted, upon a horse's back. My aide Celer is exercising him at this moment on the road to Praeneste; all my past experiments with swift motion help me now to share the pleasure both of horse and of rider, and to judge the sensations of the man at full gallop on a day of sun and high wind. When Celer leaps down from his horse I too regain contact with the ground. It is the same for swimming: I have given it up, but I still share the swimmer's delight in water's caress. Running, even for the shortest distance, would today be as impossible for me as for a heavy statue, a Caesar of stone; but I recall my childhood races on the dry hills of Spain, and the game played with myself of pressing on to the last gasp, never doubting that the perfect heart and healthy lungs would re-establish their equilibrium; and with any athlete training for the stadium I have a common understanding which the intelligence alone would not have given me. Thus from each art practiced in its time I derive a knowledge which compensates me in part for pleasures lost. I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such sympathy would be one of the least revocable kinds of immortality. There have been moments when that comprehension tried to go beyond human experience, passing from the swimmer to the wave. But in such a realm, since there is nothing exact left to guide me, I verge upon the world of dream and metamorphosis. Overeating is a Roman vice, but moderation has always been my delight. Hermogenes has had to change nothing in my diet, except perhaps the impatience which made me devour the first thing served, no matter where or when, in order to satisfy the needs of hunger simply and at once. It is clear that a man of wealth, who has never known anything but voluntary privation, or has experienced hunger only provisionally as one of the more or less exciting incidents of war or of travel, would have but ill grace to boast of undereating.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Now the future had come he still hoarded and packed it. It sat opposite me, massive, gathering bullishly at the shoulders, the open shirt showing a broad V of black hair, the thighs splayed ponderously on the slashed and stitched upholstery of the banquette. I knew I could never love it or want it, but it was an achievement, this armour of useless masculinity. As we travelled west, through lit City stations like Bank and St Paul’s which I thought purposeless at night till I recalled that Charles, for one, would need them, that here and there in the City that was emptied for the weekend, people, eccentric or indigenous, still lived, my thoughts deserted Bill (though I still looked at him), and fled on down the rails to Phil. We were nearly at Tottenham Court Road, where Bill would have to change for the Northern Line, when he said, with tense cheeriness: ‘How’s young Phil getting on these days?’ I didn’t know how much he knew. Phil and I had been discreet, though together, at the Corry; but it was hard to tell what, in the crowded complex of the Club, had been seen, guessed or overheard. I gave a smile which could be read as a happy admission or an amiable ignorance. ‘All right, I should say,’ I offered neutrally. The old bashful earnestness crossed Bill’s face, and as the train fiercely slowed and the inertia carried him towards me he said bravely: ‘I loves that boy.’ His innocence and embarrassment were revealed in the relish he summoned up in his tone, and even more in the tortured affectation of saying loves. The train abruptly stopped, tilting him backwards as he rose, and he bustled off with a sad and hasty goodbye. June 9, 1925 : Back in London after nearly 2 years, & everyone complaining about the heat. Unable to wear shorts, open shirt & topi, I begin to see what they mean. The town, after Cairo & then Alexandria, is strikingly brisk & convenient—also much smaller, in detail if not in plan, than I’d expected; I’ve been going about with the sort of pleasure I used to have on getting back to Oxford after the vac, checking that it’s all there (which in fact it isn’t). At Brook St, Sandy had called already before I got in, & left a message, in his inimitable style, on a page torn out of a book; it was in French, & highly, if florally & indirectly, improper, about how ‘il y a une chose aussi bruyante que la souffrance, c’est le plaisir’, & so on. I was tantalised at the end of the page & only then turned to the message, which was florally and indirectly improper, but in English.