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 Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  In retrospect, I realize that Mr. Kamiyama appealed to me because he was very different from my father. He was a visionary. He had a great deal of power and status. My father, a simple businessman, had repeatedly told me that no one person could ever change the world. Kamiyama very much believed that one person could make a huge difference. He was very religious and emotionally expressive. My father, a sincere, intense man in his own quiet way, was not. In looking back and analyzing the relationship, I see that Kamiyama became a surrogate father figure. The verbal approval and physical affection I wanted from my father was given to me by this man, who used this emotional leverage to motivate and control me. As it turned out, I was the first new person to join the center in Queens. Just a month earlier, the big center in Manhattan had been divided into eight satellite centers spread out in different boroughs. Since I was the first, Mr. Kamiyama said it was a sign that I was meant to become a great leader. He made me one of his 12 American disciples and oversaw everything I did. I never attended a 7-, 21- or 40-day workshop—the normal sequence. I was groomed very carefully by Kamiyama and Moon. Although I had never liked being in groups before, my elite status in this group made me feel special. Because of my relationship with Kamiyama, I would even have access to the Messiah himself—Sun Myung Moon—who was a projection of the ultimate father figure. Life With “Father”: Get Closer To Moon Sun Myung Moon was a short, stocky man who had more than the average share of charisma. He was born in 1920 in what is now North Korea. He carried himself like a small sumo wrestler in a extremely expensive business suit. He was a shrewd manipulator and communicator, particularly with those who were indoctrinated to believe he was the greatest man ever to walk the face of the Earth. Moon usually spoke either Korean or Japanese and used a translator. I was told he did so for “spiritual” reasons. During my membership, I was present at more than 100 of his lectures and participated in about 25 leadership meetings with him.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  So, on the ovarian trolley there was this voyage of man and bullfrog composed of identical stuff, neither better nor less than Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely the meaning of anything, the other knowing too precisely the meaning of everything, hence both lost and confused through beginnings and endings, finally to be deposited at Java or India Street, Greenpoint, there to be carried back into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of sawdust molls with twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety. What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing . It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the thing-in-itself—not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration. Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me. If this was perverse it was also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world which was springing up about me. Soon I too would become like these objects which I venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society. I was definitely dated, that was certain. And yet I was able to amuse, to instruct, to nourish. But never to be accepted, in a genuine way. When I wished to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum of society, and make him listen to me. I could hold him spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magican, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was in me. At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable. I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression. But I underestimated the profession.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I wanted to hear it all over again, in minute detail. Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend’s own lips. It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same environment. He had managed it because he had rich friends—and because he knew how to save his money. I had never known any one who was rich, who had traveled, who had money in the bank. All my friends were like myself, drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future. O’Mara, yes, he had traveled a bit, almost all over the world—but as a bum, or else in the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met who I could truly say had traveled. And he knew how to talk about his experiences. As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby. What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real. Sometimes, after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacré Cœur, through the Rue Laffitte, in the last flush of twilight. Just a Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men. But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my being here today. Most of the places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps never see. But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them in our rambles through the park. Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of Lawrence’s work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence’s ideas. Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence’s words. Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it did.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  From where I stood now I could see the path we had taken, my friend and I, and I remembered too how he had pointed to this beach, telling me that in summer very late at night you could find men here, that there were sheltered places in the rocks where you could go with them. I wondered if I would want that now, if there were men to be had. Shortly after R. had told me he wanted to end things I had gone to the city center, seeking I don’t know what. For almost two years I had been with no one but R., and for the past three months I hadn’t been with anyone at all; I went out in search of feeling, I suppose, or maybe the absence of feeling. I descended the flights of stairs to the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, though for so long I imagined I had left them behind, that I had been lifted out of them, as I was in the habit of putting it to myself, into a new life. I had thought that before, when I sat in that room in Boston with the priest, I had thought in precisely those terms, I am being lifted out of it, not by my own agency but by some intervening force: God, love, edno i sushto , one and the same. But we are never lifted out of such places, I think now, and so I went back to the bathrooms beneath NDK, I had never stopped thinking about them; even as I lay with R., flooded with love, there was a part of me untouched by him, a part that longed to be back here. My hands shook as I undid my belt at the urinals, out of excitement or dread, I felt I could hardly breathe. Almost immediately a man stepped up next to me, nineteen or twenty perhaps, very beautiful, his large cock already hard. Possibly he was a hustler, he was so eager, though he didn’t make any demands as I reached over and took him in my hand, feeling the thick warmth of him as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to discern what I wanted, knowing how easy it would be to take him into the neighboring room with its stalls. I heard him whisper Iskash li , do you want it, and though I did want it I let him go, I hid away my own hardness and fled. It was a beautiful night, the nearly full moon casting its light upon the water, and I wanted to be with them now, these people I hardly knew who seemed so at ease with one another.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He had accepted it, but more and more he was dreaming and thinking about walking. He prayed every night after the visitors left. He closed his eyes and dreamed of being on his feet again. Sometimes the American Legion group from his town came in to see him, the men and their wives and their pretty daughters. They would all surround him in his bed. It would seem to him that he was always having to cheer them up more than they were cheering him. They told him he was a hero and that all of Massapequa was proud of him. One time the commander stood up and said they were even thinking of naming a street after him. But the guy’s wife was embarrassed and made her husband shut up. She told him the commander was kidding—he tended to get carried away after a couple of beers. After he had been in the hospital a couple of weeks, a man appeared one morning and handed him a large envelope. He waited until the man had gone to open it up. Inside was a citation and a medal for Conspicuous Service to the State of New York. The citation was signed by Governor Rockefeller. He stuck the envelope and all the stuff in it under his pillow. * * * None of the men on the wards were civilian yet, so they had reveille at six o’clock in the morning. All the wounded who could get on their feet were made to stand in front of their beds while a roll call was taken. After roll call they all had to make their beds and do a general clean-up of the entire ward—everything from scrubbing the floors to cleaning the windows. Even the amputees had to do it. No one ever bothered him, though. He usually slept through the whole thing. Later it would be time for medication, and afterward one of the corpsmen would put him in a wheelchair and push him to the shower room. The corpsman would leave him alone for about five minutes, then pick his body up, putting him on a wooden bench, his legs dangling, his toes barely touching the floor. He would sit in the shower like that every morning watching his legs become smaller and smaller, until after a month the muscle tone had all but disappeared. With despair and frustration he watched his once strong twenty-one-year-old body become crippled and disfigured. He was just beginning to understand the nature of his wound. He knew now it was the worst he could have received without dying or becoming a vegetable. More and more he thought about what a priest had said to him in Da Nang: “Your fight is just beginning. Sometimes no one will want to hear what you’re going through. You are going to have to learn to carry a great burden and most of your learning will be done alone. Don’t feel frightened when they leave you.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I guess all of us, the whole country, watched it like a big football game. Down the street the black horses came and his little boy saluting the way he did, the perfect way he did. Soon after he died there was a memorial picture of him that went up in the candy store down the block. At the bottom of it it said he had been born in 1917 and had died in 1963. It stayed up in the candy store on the wall for a long time after we all went to the war. * * * That spring before I graduated, my father took me down to the shopping center in Levittown and made me get my first job. It was in a supermarket not far from the marine recruiting station. I worked stacking shelves and numbing my fingers and hands unloading cases of frozen food from the trucks. Working with Kenny each day after school, all I could think of, day after day, was joining the marines. My legs and my back ached, but I knew that soon I would be signing the papers and leaving home. I didn’t want to be like my Dad, coming home from the A&P every night. He was a strong man, a good man, but it made him so tired, it took all the energy out of him. I didn’t want to be like that, working in that stinking A&P, six days a week, twelve hours a day. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to make something out of my life. I was getting older now, I was seventeen, and I looked at myself in the mirror that hung from the back of the door in my room and saw how tall and strong I had suddenly become. I took a deep breath, flexing my muscles, and stared straight into the mirror, turning to the side and looking at myself for a long time. * * * In the last month of school, the marine recruiters came and spoke to my senior class. They marched, both in perfect step, into the auditorium with their dress blue uniforms and their magnificently shined shoes. It was like all the movies and all the books and all the dreams of becoming a hero come true. I watched them and listened as they stood in front of all the young boys, looking almost like statues and not like real men at all. They spoke in loud voices and one of them was tall and the other was short and very strong looking. “Good afternoon men,” the tall marine said. “We have come today because they told us that some of you want to become marines.” He told us that the marines took nothing but the best, that if any of us did not think we were good enough, we should not even think of joining.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  But reports of same- sex love’s demise have been much exaggerated. Clinias is presented as a sympathetic fi gure, even if his lessons nearly lead Clitophon and Leucippe into irreversible trouble. His erotic style looms over the fi rst two books of the romance, culminating in a famous rhetorical set- piece on a boat that Leucippe and Clitophon have taken to elope. After noting that “male- love has somehow become the current fashion,” Clitophon and one of the passengers, Menelaus, debate the relative merits of loving women and loving boys. Clitophon professes that his sexual experience has been T H E M O R A L I T I E S O F S E X I N T H E R O M A N E M P I R E  limited to “the women who sell Aphrodite,” but, as Menelaus notes, he certainly sounds like no novice. In fact, Clitophon delivers the most elaborate encomium on the female orgasm that the ancient world has left to us. Th e frantic, gasping delight of the woman is integral to his case for the superiority of female lovers. Like other advocates of women, such as Plutarch, Clitophon emphasizes the promise of mutual plea sure in heterosexual aphrodisia to contrast it with the presumptive one- way plea sure of pederasty. But where Plutarch focused on the warm companionship that could arise from sexual familiarity, the erotic novel describes the transport of sexual ecstasy experienced by men and women— even, if Clitophon has not been misled, by the vendors of Aphrodite. Menelaus, by contrast, marshals a highly conventional case against women, centered on their softness and artifi ciality. He extols the sharp, if brief, pleasures of loving boys, “whose very evanescence makes the plea sure so much greater.” He develops a contrast between feminine contrivance and the “naturalness” of male kisses. Unlike other “contests of the loves,” no win-ner is declared aboard the boat in the novel of Achilles. Nevertheless, the author’s position is implicit, both in the narrative placement of the contest and in the fate of the same- sex amours. Th e fi rst two books are full of failed love, most notably Clitophon’s disastrous near- seduction of Leucippe, carried out under the advisement of Clinias. More revealing, both Clinias and Menelaus, the lovers of boys, experience the early death of their beloveds in tragic accidents for which they are indirectly responsible. In Leucippe and Clitophon, same- sex love can bring plea sure, but only mutual eros culminating in marriage receives the protection of the gods. Same- sex love is perishable, whereas the universe was built so that the rapturous delights of heterosexual aphrodisia would have a place. Th e love of boys, in the romance, was not sinful or abnormal, but it was transitory and tragic, for it had no happy resolution in a story destined to end with marriage. Th

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Such dissent was surely inevitable. Nowhere did the moral expectations of the Jesus movement stand in such stark contrast to the world in which its adherents moved. Corinth in par tic u lar was not famous for its sexual virtue. In recent de cades the reputation of Roman Corinth has enjoyed the sort of undeserved rehabilitation that comes only when generations of gross exaggeration allow overcorrection to pass as healthy revision. It is true that Corinth had fi rst earned its notoriety in centuries long past. But the laxity of the Corinthians in venereal aff airs was not just hoary legend. In the words of a second- century admirer, Corinth was a city “more dear to Aphrodite than all cities that exist or have existed.” Th e eroticized atmosphere of Corinth was the predictable attribute of a wealthy, imperial crossroads; even against the indulgent backdrop of late pagan sensuality, Corinth stood out as louche. It is unsurprising that the inchoate sexual code of the Christian gospel— terse yet austere— came to a head here. More surprising are the extremes around which members of the Corinthian community had polarized, in full belief that their radically divergent views were consistent with the demands of the messianic religion. Such fundamental confl ict was to characterize Christian thinking on sex into the fourth century, even as Paul’s views would exert a continuous and irresistible pull toward the compromise he forged in his fateful response to the crisis in Corinth. Paul’s approach in First Corinthians was shaped by his decision to steer a middle course between an element within the Christian church who tended toward libertinism  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N and another group who espoused strict continence as an urgent ideal. Between those who said “All things are lawful for me” and others who insisted “It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” Paul sought a defensible middle ground. Paul’s reply, because it is an epistolary intervention rather than a treatise on sexual ethics, assumes more than it reveals. In some sense the entire Christian conversation on sexuality has been a search for the unstated assumptions of Paul’s delicate guidance in the three central chapters of First Corinthians. At the core of Paul’s thought is the term porneia, fornication, a word packed with connotations less obvious to us than to his contemporary audience. Porneia is the cornerstone of the sexual ethics of First Corinthians. Paul’s whole attitude toward sex— not to mention his place in Jewish tradition and his distinctiveness against the backdrop of the Roman Empire— is destined to remain opaque unless we demystify the word porneia. It is not easy to do so, and a cottage industry has been devoted to unlocking the meaning of this primary Christian term. To translate it as “fornication”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Assar, my Caucasian guide, chopped through the ice to water our horses at dusk. These animals were, by the way, one of our most useful points of contact with the barbarians: a kind of friendship grew up over the trading and endless bargaining, and out of the respect felt on each side for some act of prowess in horsemanship. At night the campfires lit up the extraordinary leaping of the slender-waisted dancers, and their extravagant bracelets of gold. Many a time in spring, when the melting snows let me venture farther into the interior, I would turn my back on the southern horizon, which enclosed the seas and islands that we know, and on the western horizon likewise, where at some point the sun was setting on Rome, and would dream of pushing still farther into the steppes or beyond the ramparts of the Caucasus, toward the north or to uttermost Asia. What climates, what fauna, what races of men should I have discovered, what empires ignorant of us as we are of them, or knowing us at most through some few wares transmitted by a long succession of merchants, and as rare for them as the pepper of India or the amber of Baltic regions is for us? At Odessos a trader returning from a voyage of several years' time made me a present of a green stone, of translucent substance held sacred, it seems, in an immense kingdom of which he had at least skirted the edges, but where he had noted neither customs nor gods, grossly centered upon his profit as he was. This exotic gem was to me like a stone fallen from the heavens, a meteor from another world. We know but little as yet of the configuration of the earth, though I fail to understand resignation to such ignorance. I envy those who will succeed in circling the two hundred and fifty thousand Greek stadia so ably calculated by Eratosthenes, the round of which would bring us back to our point of departure. In fancy I took the simple decision of going on, this time on the mere trail to which our roads had now given way. I played with the idea. . . . To be alone, without possessions, without renown, with none of the advantages of our own culture, to expose oneself among new men and amid fresh hazards. . . . Needless to say it was only a dream, and the briefest dream of all. This liberty that I was inventing ceased to exist upon closer view; I should quickly have rebuilt for myself everything that I had renounced. Furthermore, wherever I went I should only have been a Roman away from Rome. A kind of umbilical cord attached me to the City.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  According to Dio, the wrangling would continue right up to the ceremony itself. He off ers a hostile description of an ordinary reality. In the letters of Pliny, in less caustic words, we can catch glimmers of this very same pro cess at work. Pliny acted as a go- between, writing what amounts to a marital letter of recommendation on behalf of a young man. He extols the virtues of the potential groom and, with aff ected reluctance, passes along the vital information that the promising fellow was also rich.  Th at material considerations were primary in the marriage market is unsurprising. Th e need to camoufl age this obvious fact is more revealing. A transparently venal or ambitious engagement was unseemly. Moralists in- sisted that virtue should guide the choice of a partner. For a fi fteen- year- old bride, a reputation for good character can have consisted in little more than the absence of a reputation for anything else. What is truly interesting about the moralizing literature— which, it must be said, is unusually vapid— is the absence of romance. Th e commentators have little to say, good or bad, about the place of love in the choice of marriage, so distant was the heart from the workings of the marriage market. And yet there are slight but signifi cant signs that aff ection might pull two lovers toward marriage. After all, the novels are an entire genre of literature built on the idea that two  FROM SHAME TO SIN superhumanly beautiful creatures might fall in love with each other at the sight of each other’s body and eventually wed. Although the novels cele- brate the reconciliation of the lovers’ passion with the civic order of mar- riage, in reality the untamed love of young people could disturb the pater- nalist forces shaping the reproduction of society. In the Roman period we hear ever more of abduction marriages in which the girl engineered, or at least allowed, for her lover to take her without her father’s approval. Th e great physiognomist Polemo, with his uncanny ability to read faces, crows that he had foreseen the abduction of a girl, contrived by her own design, on the very day of her wedding— twice!  By the time evidence for Roman marriage becomes meaningfully thick, around the age of Cicero, a revolution in material life had already turned a sleepy, agrarian economy into the most prosperous, urbanized civilization the premodern world would ever know.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  When we returned five hours later, she was still asleep. She was obviously exhausted. When she got up, her face had a lot more color. We ordered room service. It was clear that she was not used to eating so well or to being served in such a nice hotel. She thoroughly enjoyed it. After dinner we started up a conversation. It began with talk of pleasant childhood memories. Then her sisters started talking about how they missed her, and how they felt robbed of the sister they loved so much. Tears started to flow and people shared long hugs. Then the discussion turned to the children and their future. Was this the way Margaret had always envisioned raising a family? Was Tom her vision of an ideal husband? The time seemed ripe. “Hey, listen, Margaret,” said one of her sisters. “How would you like to come back with us to Connecticut?” “Oh my gosh, I’d love that!” Margaret answered excitedly. But then she sank back into the couch and said, “Oh, I can’t do that.” “Why not?” Lisa asked. “Because I just can’t.” I stepped in. “Is it because you believe God wouldn’t like it if you did?” “Yes,” she said. “Besides, Tom would never do it, unless he was told to by Elias.” Elias was their elder. This was the first time Margaret had mentioned this aspect of the group to her sisters. “What would you like to do?” I asked again. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can,” she said with a tone of disgust. I asked her, “What would happen if God told you to go back to Connecticut?” “He would never do that,” she answered. “But what if He did?” I pressed. “What if He told you in a loud clear voice that His will was to take the children and go to Connecticut for a few months? Would you be obedient?” My voice rose. “Where is your commitment: to God or to the group?” She thought about it for a while. Then she answered, “If God told me to go to Connecticut, then I would go.” “Even if your husband or another member told you to stay?” I asked insistently. I was pushing it, but I wanted to see how far I could get. “If God told me to go, I would go, even if others told me to stay,” she declared. Very good, I thought. Now for the next step. I asked her “How would you know if God wanted you to go, if you don’t pray and ask Him what He wants you to do? Have you ever asked God a question like this one?” “No, but I will tonight. But I don’t think He wants me to go to Connecticut.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  And it was, until a pleasant conversation she thought she was having turned into a nasty argument, before she ever saw the turn, about whether or not bisexual women are lying cowards. Then she staggered home. At twelve o’clock the next day she answered the phone, making her voice as feeble and throaty as possible, the better to parry Babette with a muddled excuse. She didn’t recognize his voice right away, not even when he mentioned Christine’s, and he was beginning to sound insulted when she finally said, “Oh, hi ,” her voice wobbling pleasingly (to her) and making her feel like a tousle-haired, mascara-smeared movie babe in a rumpled bed. He was in the neighborhood, and he wanted to meet her for lunch. “Gosh, I’d like to, but I was out late last night, I’m still in bed and I look awful.” “Well, I’m disappointed, but maybe some other time.” “Well, maybe I could…where are you?” Half an hour later she was sitting with him in an expensive eggs Benedict place, with waiters in black pants mincing about as a piped-in symphony identified this as a haven of Western civilization. “I tried to call you before, but you weren’t at home and then I got incredibly busy. There’s been a lot of fuss over a particular couple of blocks in the Village.” “I’ve heard,” she said. “Actually, I wish they weren’t doing that to the Village. It’s going to be awfully sterile soon.” “That may be,” he said easily. “But it would be sterile, not to say precious, if the old neighborhood were artificially maintained.” “Letting a place alone isn’t the same thing as artificial maintenance. Anyway, this is artificially accelerated development.” She argued with him happily, pointing out that he was contradicting an earlier-expressed belief that the government should manipulate the economy to protect the poor. “Yes, I suppose you’re right about that,” he said after her short speech. His indifferent capitulation left her forceful argument charging foolishly toward a vanishing target, and she changed the subject, telling him about the previous night. He especially liked the drunken argument with the lesbian, and said “fabulous” three times. Their eggs came in oblong dishes. The piped-in woodwinds sang stirringly of decency and order. “What are you doing now that you’ve left Christine’s?” he asked. “Are you working or writing?” “Neither one, really.” She thought: I’m trying to re-form my personality. “I’m looking for a job, probably some clerical thing. Maybe something part time.” “Have you considered something in an editorial capacity?” “I tried that when I first came here and it didn’t work out.” “Why not?” She shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t really interested enough.” She thought of trying to explain herself further, but ate her eggs instead. She remembered herself newly arrived in New York, nervously planning her future. She saw the ensuing events as a series of comic-strip pictures separated by dark borders.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They were both standing with their hips out and one of them—Magdalen, I guess —had her foot perched up on something. They looked so blond and confident.” Virginia thought of the pictures she had seen of Anne’s family. In a group, they looked huddled together and meek, even when they were all smiling brightly. They looked as though they were strangers to the world outside their family, as if they had come out blinking, wanting to show their love and happiness, holding it out like a shy present. Anne’s daughters were pretty in a different way from Magdalen or Camille. She remembered a picture of Lily and her sister Dawn crouching in a sandbox in frilly red sunsuits. Their brown hair just reaching their shoulders, and the bashful smiles on their bright, thin lips seemed heartbreakingly, dangerously fragile to her. “Well, you all looked darling to us,” she said. “We could tell you were sweet as pie.” Virginia left the highway and took Lily for a drive through the mountains. She drove to the top of a hill that looked down on a lake and some old dull- colored green pines. They were near a convent, and the woods were planted with white daisies and small purple flowers. They got out and walked until Virginia felt a light sweat on her skin. Then they sat on a stone bench near the convent and told each other family stories. Virginia liked Lily. She was intrigued by her. She wondered why such an intelligent child could not do well in school. — They went home and Virginia made them cups of tea. Charles and Daniel came home from school. They were surprised to see Lily, and to hear that she was coming to live with them. They sat at the table and Virginia served them pieces of coconut cream pie. The three children had a short, polite conversation. Charles said, “That’s a cool knapsack. My sister Magdalen has one like that.” When the boys went upstairs, Virginia began to worry. Jarold was coming home, and she still hadn’t thought of what to say to him. She decided to take a shower and put on a pretty blouse. She told Lily to make herself at home, and went upstairs. When she came down again, she found Jarold in the kitchen; he had left work early. He was standing at the table, his face red and bitterly drawn about the eyes. He looked at Virginia like she was his enemy. Lily looked at her too, her face stiff and puzzled. Jarold walked out of the room. — She and Jarold talked about it that night. Apart from the intrusion, Jarold did not like Lily. “She’s weird,” he said. “She has no social graces.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  One experience involved a caring person I met by chance. During my first year as a cult member, I was fundraising on a steamy summer day in Manhattan. I approached a man who must have been in his sixties, and asked if he wanted to buy some flowers. “What are you selling flowers for, young man?” he asked with a warm smile. “For Christian youth programs,” I answered, hoping I could sell him a dozen carnations. “My, my, you look very hot,” he said. “Yes, sir. But this cause is very important, so I don’t mind.” “How would you feel if I took you inside this coffee shop and bought you something cold to drink?” he asked. I thought, This guy is nice, but he has to buy some flowers; otherwise he won’t have a connection to Father. Then I remembered Jesus saying that anyone who gives water to a thirsty person is doing the will of God. “Just for five minutes,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “It will refresh you, so you’ll be able to sell even more flowers.” “Okay. Thank you very much.” We walked into the air-conditioned shop. It felt so good to be out of the sun. When we sat down at a table, he said, “So, tell me a little about yourself.” “Well, I grew up in a Jewish family in Queens.” “Oh, so you’re Jewish,” he said with a warm smile. “Me, too,” I thought that perhaps God had sent this person for me to “witness to” (a term we used for recruit). We had been instructed that while fundraising, we should never spend more than a couple of minutes with any one person. But since my main job was recruiting, and I had been sent out on Saturday to fundraise, maybe it was okay to spend a few extra minutes with him. In the end, I must have spent at least half an hour with him. He got me to do most of the talking. During that time I became incredibly homesick—not only for my family and friends, but for playing basketball, writing poetry and reading books. Before I left, he insisted that I call home and walked me to the phone. He put in the dime himself. I remember feeling that this man reminded me of my grandfather, someone I loved dearly. I didn’t have the willpower to refuse. Besides, it would look bad for the group if I refused to talk to my parents. I spoke with my mom for a few minutes. After that, I felt that I had to pry myself away from this man. My cult identity was strongly exerting itself. I started to feel guilty that I hadn’t been out raising money and allowing people to “pay indemnity” and connect themselves to the Messiah. But I was “spaced out” and couldn’t sell for the rest of the day.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Ernest was glad too that he had supported and complimented Halston rather than voicing any doubts about the authenticity of the dramatic recall of the Artemis evening. Ernest wasn’t sure how to evaluate what he had just heard. He knew, of course, of sudden returns of repressed memories, but he had had little personal experience with such phenomena in his clinical work. Though relatively common in post-traumatic stress disorder, to say nothing of Hollywood portrayals of therapy, it was rare in Ernest’s quotidian psychotherapy. But all of Ernest’s self-congratulatory impulses passed quickly, as did all of his benevolent thoughts about Halston. What really captured his attention was Artemis. The more he thought about it, the more horrified he was by Halston’s behavior toward her. What kind of monster would make love, fantastic love, to a woman and then abandon her with no explanation, no note, no phone call? It was beyond belief. Ernest’s heart went out to Artemis. He knew exactly how she must have felt. Once, fifteen years ago, he had arranged a weekend rendezvous with Judy, an old girlfriend, at a New York hotel. They had spent a lovely night together, or so Ernest believed. In the morning he had left for a brief appointment and returned with a huge, grateful bouquet of flowers. But no Judy. She had left without a trace. Packed her bags and absconded—no note, and no response to his later phone calls or letters. No explanation, ever. He had been devastated. Psychotherapy had never entirely erased his pain, and even now, all these years later, the memory still stung. Above all, Ernest hated not knowing. Poor Artemis: she had given so much to Halston, taken such risks, and in the end been so shabbily treated. Over the next few days Ernest thought occasionally about Halston but dwelled often upon Artemis. In his fantasy she became a goddess—beautiful, giving, nurturing but badly wounded. Artemis was a woman to revere, honor, treasure: the idea of debasing such a woman seemed hardly human to him. How tormented she must be by not knowing what had happened! How many times must she have relived that night, trying to understand what she had said, what she had done, to drive Halston away. And Ernest knew he was in a privileged position to help her. Aside from Halston, I am, he thought, the only one who knows the truth of that night. Ernest had often been awash in grandiose fantasies of rescuing distressed damsels. He knew that about himself. How could he not know? Again and again his analyst, Olive Smith, and his supervisor, Marshal Strider, had rubbed his nose in it. Rescue fantasies played a role both in his personal relationships, where he often overlooked warning signals of obvious incompatibility, and in his psychotherapy, where his countertransference sometimes ran wild and he became overinvested in curing his female patients.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  But how I envied the way their mothers sat on their beds and asked what they were thinking. My mother was not in the least bit curious about me. I often wondered what she thought I was, a dog she could tie in front of the store, a parrot on her shoulder? I never told her that I wished I had a father, that I wanted to go to camp in summertime, that sometimes she scared me. I was afraid she would fly away, and I would end up alone, living in some place where there were too many children, too many smells, where beauty and silence and the intoxication of her words rising in air would be as far away as Saturn. Out the window, the glow of the Hollywood sign was slightly blurred with June fog, a soft wetness on the hills raising the smell of sage and chamise, moisture wiping the glass with dreams. SHE CAME HOME at two when the bars closed, alone, her restlessness satisfied for the moment. I sat on her bed, watched her change clothes, adoring each gesture. Someday I would do this, the way she crossed her arms and pulled her dress over her head, kicked off her high heels. I put them on, admiring them on my feet. They were almost the right size. In another year or so, they would fit. She sat down next to me, handed me her brush, and I brushed her pale hair smooth, painting the air with her violets. “I saw the goat man again,” she said. “What goat man?” “From the wine garden, remember? The grinning Pan, cloven hooves peeping out from under his pants?” I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields. “He stared at me the entire time,” she said. “Barry Kolker. Marlene says he’s a writer of personal essays.” Her fine lips turned into long commas of disapproval. “He was with that actress from The Cactus Garden, Jill Lewis.” Her white hair, like unbleached silk, flowed through the boar bristle brush. “With that fat goat of a man. Can you imagine?” I knew she couldn’t. Beauty was my mother’s law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren’t, you just didn’t exist. She had drummed it into my head since I was small. Although I had noticed by now that reality didn’t always conform to my mother’s ideas. “Maybe she likes him,” I said. “She must be insane,” my mother said, taking the brush away from me and brushing my hair now, bearing down on the scalp hard.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He carried it to work with him for several days before and after Valentine’s Day. He decided dozens of times to give it to her, and changed his mind every time. He examined it daily, wondering if it was good enough. When he decided it was perfect, he thought perhaps it would be better to keep it in his drawer, where he alone knew it existed for her. Finally, he said, “I have a valentine for you.” She pattered around his desk, smiling greedily. “Where is it?” “In my drawer. I don’t want to give it to you yet.” “Why not? Valentine’s Day was a week ago. Can’t I have it now?” She put her fingers on his shoulders like soft claws. “Give it to me now.” When he handed it to her, she hugged him and pressed against him. He giggled and put his arm around her. He sadly let go of his shadow captive. — That night he couldn’t eat his spinach salad. The radish, gaily flowering red and white, was futile enticement. Diane sat across from him, stonily working her jaws. She sat rigidly straight-backed, her throat drawn so taut it looked as if it would be hard for her to swallow. He picked at the salad, turning the clean leaves this way and that. He stared past her, sighing, his dry eyes hot in their sockets. “You look like an idiot,” she said. “I am.” The next day he took Daisy out to lunch, although he couldn’t eat. He ordered a salad, which appeared in a beige plastic bowl. It was littered with pale carrot curls and flats of radish that accused him. He ignored it. He watched her eat from her dish of green and white cold noodles. They were curly and glistened with oil, and were garnished with bright pieces of slippery meat and vegetables. Daisy speared them serenely, three curls at a time. “You can’t imagine how wonderful this is for me,” he said. “I’ve watched you for so long.” She smiled, he thought, uncertainly. “You’re so soft and gentle. You’re like a delicate white flower.” “No, I’m not.” “I know you’re probably not. But you seem like it, and that’s good enough for me.” “What about Diane?” “I’ll leave Diane.” She put down her fork and stared at him. The chewing movement of her jaws was earnest and sweet. He smiled at her. She swallowed, a neat, thorough swallow. “Don’t leave Diane,” she said. “Why not? I love you.” “Oh, dear,” she said. “This is getting out of hand. Why don’t you eat your salad?” “I can’t. I’m medicated.” “You’re what?” He forced himself to eat the pale leaves and shreds of carrot.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “What are your reservations?” “I don’t think people in these circumstances can act like people having a relationship.” “Well, maybe you’re right about that. But still it might be fun. I’d love to talk to you about a movie we’d seen or…” “I think you’d be surprised if you found out what I’m like outside of here.” “I can’t believe I wouldn’t like you.” “You’d think I was weird.” “I’m not as closed-minded as you think.” “It’s just that we might not have anything to talk about.” She didn’t notice the animal smell. — He waited for half an hour at their appointed meeting place. He wasn’t surprised when she stood him up. He was somewhat surprised when he called the escort service to make an appointment and they told him she’d quit. She’d often told him she hated it and that she was going to quit soon, but girls talked like that all the time and stayed for months, even years. Sylvia returned the next day, smiling and suntanned, happy to wash the dishes on the kitchen counter and pick up the damp, scrunched-up towels that were wadded up on every rack in the bathroom. She told him nice stories about the Arizona desert and the book fair she’d gone to there. He made love to her in a quiet, respectful way. She put her slender arms around his shoulders and held him tight. But when he tried to show her some of the things he’d done with Jane, he could feel her body become docile and patient. — He drove into Manhattan about once a month to pay for girls. He went to different establishments each time, hoping to find Jane. Every time he saw a new girl he suffered from nostalgia and the irritating nag of unfavorable comparison. When he thought of her he didn’t feel love or anything like it. He felt a sort of painful fondness. He remembered having a similar feeling when he ran into a girl he’d been crazy about in college and saw that she’d gotten fat and was buying a box of Pampers. It was strange to be having that feeling now for someone he met in a brothel.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Now it’s more like a natural outcome, another element of my life to be experienced. It’s not even important anymore. There are so many other things in life. It’s silly to be so narrow.” “That’s easy for you to say,” he said. “Things are always less important once you’re assured of having them.” “It’s not that it isn’t important, it’s just that I’m not focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else. But I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when it happens. If anything, it’s more real to me now, not like something I’m going to acquire.” He chewed without answering, and she flicked the corners of her mouth with her tongue. “I think I’m going to Italy in a few months,” she said. “I’m really excited about it. I want to meet an Italian film producer and have an affair with him.” “My roommate is in Italy,” he said. “You told me.” In a few months he would say, “My friend Cecilia is in Italy.” He looked at her serene face, her resting throat, her slightly upturned chin. He had slept with her for almost two years. She had sucked him off with that mouth. He thought: My friend, Cecilia. My friend. — When he returned to his office he got on the WATS line and called Wilson. Wilson had been a close friend while they were in Ann Arbor. Now he was stuck teaching undergraduates in a geology department in Washington, D.C. Joel called him about twice a month to gossip about other people they’d gone to school with. He knew Wilson kept in touch with the woman he’d seen again this morning. “Do you know what Sara’s doing? Do you know where she’s working?” There was a breath of silence before Wilson answered. “She’s all right. I think she’s still working in a bar in the East Village.” “Has she gotten anywhere with her painting?” “I don’t think so. Not since the little show she was in at that club. Why?” “I’ve seen her twice on the street this week. We haven’t had a chance to talk. I just wondered what she was up to.” Wilson had disapproved of Joel’s relationship with Sara, even though he’d been morbidly fascinated by it. Even though it had raised Joel in his esteem. Joel got off the phone and gazed at the morose buildings standing in a clump outside his window. Interrupted, static-ridden commercials for memories of Sara flitted mutely through his mind, chopped up and poorly edited—Sara before he knew her, a small slender person walking down State Street with her books, wearing jeans and fawn-colored boots. She had a very stiff walk despite her round hips, a tight sad mouth and wide abstracted eyes. She was always alone whenever he saw her, and always appeared vaguely surprised by everything around her. He saw her propped up in his bed, reading a book about South Africa.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was almost a year later when he went into Manhattan one afternoon to do Christmas shopping. The city had a different quality during the day. When he thought of daytime Manhattan, the first thing he imagined was a pretty young woman with dark, wavy hair and an unnatural burst of red on both cheeks, walking down the wide, crowded sidewalks more quickly and sharply than anyone had to, her worn, brightly colored shoes marching in close, narrow steps, her cheap, fashionable jacket open to show her belted waist, her handbag held tightly under her arm, her head turned away from anyone who might look at her, turned so she could skim the window displays as she clipped by, one hand jammed into a pocket of her jacket, nothing swinging loose. And then he thought of a lumbering, middle-aged man in a suit, his glasses on the tip of his nose, a lace of greasy crumbs on his lapels, his briefcase clutched at his side, rolling down the street as fast as his plump body would go, jacket flapping open, his bored eyes skimming quickly over the girl and every other girl like her as he rushed to the office. There was something sad and poignant about this image, but that didn’t prevent him from spending as much time staring at girls as he spent shopping. At the end of the day he’d found only two gifts—a sweater-guard made of twin silver bunnies for a teenaged niece and, for Sylvia, an elegant old-fashioned wristwatch from a Village watch shop. By the time he had found these gifts it was late afternoon and he was hungry. The watch shop was close to a particular café he liked because the food was good and because he enjoyed looking at the strangely dressed young people who often went there. The hostess, a tall girl with a high, perspiring forehead and pleasantly freckled cheeks, smiled as she ran toward him with a long plastic menu, and immediately raced him to a corner table that had yellow flowers in a green bottle on it. “Enjoy,” she panted, and ran off. He shook off his heavy coat and looked over the crowd with relish. He picked up the menu and glanced at the table on his left. From then on the rest of the people in the room became a herd of anonymous colored shapes that could’ve been eating their fingers for all he cared. Jane was sitting next to him. She was with a boy. She glanced at him too quickly for him to see her expression. She immediately put her elbow on the table and her hand to her face.