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 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.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He wouldn’t be able to see Jane much at all once Sylvia got back. He thought of his wife getting on the plane in her green-and-white dress, the handle of her wicker suitcase in hand, her gray hair wound into an elegant bun that displayed her graceful neck and gently erect shoulders. Her smile was beautiful when she turned to wave good-bye. He pictured Sylvia sitting in her favorite armchair across from him. She would be relaxed but sitting up straight on the tautly stuffed, salmon-colored cushions. Her legs would be crossed at the ankle. She would have her pale beige glasses on her nose, she would be in a trance over her latest book catalogues. If he stood up and put his hand on her shoulder, he would feel how slender and strong she still was, how well defined her small bones were. He thought of her collection of rare books, arranged and locked in the glass cabinet in a sunny corner of her study. They were beautiful to look at and extremely expensive; other book dealers had offered her thousands of dollars for some of them. Every time he looked at them, he felt depressed. One Christmas, he bought Sylvia a book entitled Beautiful Sex. It made him unhappy to remember that night when, with Beautiful Sex lying open on their bed to reveal a series of glossy pink-and-white photos, she cooperatively arranged herself into one of the more conventional positions illustrated, sighing as she did so. “Now, honey,” she said, “tell the truth. Don’t you feel foolish doing this?” He clicked off the TV and left the room, making a mental note to put the plates in the dishwasher before he went to bed. — The next day he drove to Manhattan right after work, without stopping at home for a shower. Perhaps Jane would notice the vague animal smell on him. She might ask him about it and he could tell her the truth about what he did.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I was twenty-one and she admitted to be thirty-six. Every time I looked at her I said to myself—when I am thirty she will be forty-five, when I am forty she will be fifty-five, when I am fifty she will be sixty-five. She had fine wrinkles under the eyes, laughing wrinkles, but wrinkles just the same. When I kissed her they were magnified a dozen times. She laughed easily, but her eyes were sad, terribly sad. They were Armenian eyes. Her hair, which had been red once, was now a peroxide blonde. Otherwise she was adorable—a Venusian body, a Venusian soul, loyal, lovable, grateful, everything a woman should be, except that she was fifteen years older . The fifteen years’ difference drove me crazy. When I went out with her I thought only—how will it be ten years hence? Or else, what age does she seem to have now? Do I look old enough for her? Once we got back to the house it was all right. Climbing the stairs I would run my finger up her crotch, which used to make her whinny like a horse. If her son, who was almost my age, were in bed we would close the doors and lock ourselves in the kitchen. She’d lie on the narrow kitchen table and I’d slough it into her. It was marvelous. And what made it more marvelous was that with each performance I would say to myself—This is the last time . . . tomorrow I will beat it! And then, since she was the janitress, I would go down to the cellar and roll the ash barrels out for her. In the morning, when the son had left for work, I would climb up to the roof and air the bedding. Both she and the son had T.B. . . . Sometimes there were no table bouts. Sometimes the hopelessness of it all got me by the throat and I would put on my things and go for a walk. Now and then I forgot to return. And when I did that I was more miserable than ever, because I knew that she would be waiting for me with those large sorrowful eyes. I’d go back to her like a man who had a sacred duty to perform. I’d lie down on the bed and let her caress me; I’d study the wrinkles under her eyes and the roots of her hair which were turning red. Lying there like that, I would often think about the other one, the one I loved, would wonder if she were lying down for it too, or. . . Those long walks I took three hundred and sixty-five days of the year!—I would go over them in my mind lying beside the other woman. How many times since have I relived these walks! The dreariest, bleakest, ugliest streets man ever created. In anguish I relive these walks, these streets, these first smashed hopes.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Again I was strongly aware of my mother’s presence, of the big puffy sleeves of her fur coat, of the cruel swiftness with which she had whisked me through the street years ago and of the stubborn tenacity with which I had feasted my eyes on all that was new and strange. On the occasion of this second visit I seemed to dimly recall another character out of my childhood, the old housekeeper whom they called by the outlandish name of Mrs. Kicking. I could not recall her being taken ill but I did seem to recall the fact that we were paying her a visit at the hospital where she was dying and that this hospital must have been near Humboldt Street which was not dying but which was radiant in the melting snow of a winter’s noon. What then had my mother promised me that I have never since been able to recall? Capable as she was of promising anything, perhaps that day, in a fit of abstraction, she had promised something so preposterous that even I with all my childish credulity could not quite swallow it. And yet, if she had promised me the moon, though I knew it was out of the question, I would have struggled to invest her promise with a crumb of faith. I wanted desperately everything that was promised me, and if, upon reflection I realized that it was clearly impossible, I nevertheless tried in my own way to grope for a means of making these promises realizable. That people could make promises without ever having the least intention of fulfilling them was something unimaginable to me. Even when I was most cruelly deceived I still believed; I believed that something extraordinary and quite beyond the other person’s power had intervened to make the promise null and void. This question of belief, this old promise that was never fulfilled, is what makes me think of my father who was deserted at the moment of his greatest need. Up to the time of his illness neither my father nor my mother had ever shown any religious inclinations. Though always upholding the church to others, they themselves never set foot in a church from the time that they were married. Those who attended church too regularly they looked upon as being a bit daffy. The very way they said—“so and so is religious”—was enough to convey the scorn and contempt, or else the pity, which they felt for such individuals. If now and then, because of us children, the pastor called at the house unexpectedly, he was treated as one to whom they were obliged to defer out of ordinary politeness but whom they had nothing in common with, whom they were a little suspicious of, in fact, as representative of a species midway between a fool and a charlatan.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He walked the unusual route again. Again he saw her, in almost exactly the same place. This time she looked directly at him and even showed a slight smile on her face. She nodded shyly at him. Not meeting her look, he half nodded and she was gone. Her severely bobbed hair was pretty, but not as pretty as her long hair had been. — He had lunch with Cecilia that afternoon. They ate their corned beef on rye and cream cheese with lox in a diner peopled by waiters who looked like they’d met with utter disappointment and became attached to it. Cecilia was reassuring. She was not small or theatrical. Her shoulder-length hair was blond, her plump body calm. She had a long way of saying her words, a relaxed but vaguely predatory way of turning her head. She came from a wealthy family, and he supposed that was where she got her assurance. Her background was part of what made her attractive to him. He wasn’t after her money (although he wouldn’t mind, certainly, if one day she spoke to her parents about financing a film project of his own); there was simply something foreign and delightful about this rich girl who had been safely surrounded by money all her life. The perfume of wealth graced her casually, like grass stains on the skin of a lazy child sleeping in a garden. He pictured her as an adolescent, lounging on her huge unmade, canopied and silk-sheeted bed. She was in her underwear, she was reading Tolstoy, occasionally scratching herself and eating from a box of chocolates, although he knew that Cecilia didn’t like candy and never had. “It’s so interesting,” she said. “Now that I’m closer to success, I’ve become much less interested in it. I’ve always known that I would be successful, that I just had to work for it. But it was always out of reach, so I obsessed about it all the time. It was a goal. 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.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  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. He saw her sitting across a table, a sauce-red shrimp in her fingers, chatting about her experience as a hooker, oblivious to stares from the next table. She appeared seated in the dark of the film auditorium, her hand at her jaw, her booted legs tossed over the next few chairs, her tongue snapping sarcastically. “It’s so dishonest, it’s so middle-class. Who does he think he’s shocking? It’s such a reaction to convention. It’s babyish.” “You don’t understand the concept of subversion,” he said. “I know more about subversion than anybody else in this stupid town,” she said. The clips sped up and blurred into glimpses. Her melancholic paleness in the dark, the sheets rumpled to reveal her gray-tinged mattress. The stark lumpiness of her spine and shoulder blades as she reached across him to snatch a “snot rag” from its box. The dry toughness of her heels. The nervous stickiness of her fingers. “Hurt me,” she said. “Hurt me.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  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. He saw her sitting across a table, a sauce-red shrimp in her fingers, chatting about her experience as a hooker, oblivious to stares from the next table. She appeared seated in the dark of the film auditorium, her hand at her jaw, her booted legs tossed over the next few chairs, her tongue snapping sarcastically. “It’s so dishonest, it’s so middle-class. Who does he think he’s shocking? It’s such a reaction to convention. It’s babyish.” “You don’t understand the concept of subversion,” he said. “I know more about subversion than anybody else in this stupid town,” she said. The clips sped up and blurred into glimpses. Her melancholic paleness in the dark, the sheets rumpled to reveal her gray-tinged mattress. The stark lumpiness of her spine and shoulder blades as she reached across him to snatch a “snot rag” from its box. The dry toughness of her heels. The nervous stickiness of her fingers. “Hurt me,” she said. “Hurt me.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  She walks over things, on, on, with eyes wide open and staring into space. No past, no future. Even the present seems dubious. The self seems to have left her, and the body rushes forward, the neck full and taut, white as the face, full like the face. The talk goes on, in that low, throaty voice. No beginning, no end. I’m aware not of time nor the passing of time, but of timelessness. She’s got the little womb in the throat hooked up to the big womb in the pelvis. The cab is at the curb and she is still chewing the cosmological chaff of the outer ego. I pick up the speaking tube and connect with the double uterus. Hello, hello, are you there? Let’s go! Let’s get on with it—cabs, boats, trains, naphtha launches; beaches, bedbugs, highways, byways, ruins; relics, old world, new world, pier, jetty; the high forceps, the swinging trapeze, the ditch, the delta, the alligators, the crocodiles, talk, talk, and more talk; then roads again and more dust in the eyes, more rainbows, more cloudbursts, more breakfast foods, more creams, more lotions. And when all the roads have been traversed and there is left only the dust of our frantic feet there will still remain the memory of your large full face so white, and the wide mouth with fresh lips parted, the teeth chalk white and each one perfect, and in this remembrance nothing can possibly change because this, like your teeth, is perfect. . . . It is Sunday, the first Sunday of my new life, and I am wearing the dog collar you fastened around my neck. A new life stretches before me. It begins with the day of rest. I lie back on a broad green leaf and I watch the sun bursting in your womb. What a clabber and clatter it makes! All this expressly for me, what? If only you had a million suns in you! If only I could lie here forever enjoying the celestial fireworks! I lie suspended over the surface of the moon. The world is in a womblike trance: the inner and the outer ego are in equilibrium. You promised me so much that if I never come out of this it will make no difference. It seems to me that it is exactly 25,960 years since I have been asleep in the black womb of sex. It seems to me that I slept perhaps 365 years too many. But at any rate I am now in the right house, among the sixes, and what lies behind me is well and what lies ahead is well. You come to me disguised as Venus, but you are Lilith, and I know it. My whole life is in the balance; I will enjoy the luxury of this for one day. Tomorrow I shall tip the scales.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She was probably sick of him. He remembered dating well enough to know that women didn’t like to be pursued too closely. It could seem sappy, he supposed, to come grinning in there after her every single night. The next night he would stay home, and read or watch television. He enjoyed making dinner for himself. There were still a lot of good things left in the refrigerator—herring, a chunk of potato salad that was only slightly rancid, cream cheese, a jar of artichoke hearts, egg bread. It was too messy to eat in the kitchen—the counter was covered with encrusted plates and pans filled with silverware and water. He arranged the slices and oily slabs on two different plates and carried the stuff into the living room to put on the coffee table. He clicked on the TV with his remote-control device, flicked the channels around a few times and then ignored it. He ate with his fingers and a plastic fork, mentally feeling over the events of the day, like a blind person groping through a drawer of personal effects. There had been the usual parade of cats and dogs, and one exotic bird with a mysterious illness. He had no idea what to do with the crested, vividly plumed thing, which was apparently worth a lot of money. He had pretended that he did, though, and the bird was sitting in his kennel now, gaping fiercely at the cats with its hooked beak. Then there was the dog that he had had to put to sleep, a toothless, blind, smelly old monster with toenails like a dinosaur’s. He thought the dog was probably grateful for the injection, and he said so, but that didn’t console the homely adolescent girl who insisted on holding it right up until the end, tears running from under her glasses and down her pink, porous face. Poor lonely girl, he thought. He had wanted to say, “Don’t worry, dear, you’re going to grow up to be a beauty. You’re going to get married and have lots of wonderful children.” Except it probably wasn’t true. He picked up his remote-control device and switched channels thoughtfully. What would Jane think when he didn’t show up? Would she think he’d gotten bored with her, that he was never coming back? Would she go home wondering what had happened? He tried to picture her in her apartment.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Without the slightest premeditation I climbed the stairs to the dance hall, went directly to the little window of the booth where Nick, the Greek, sat with a roll of tickets in front of him. Like the urinal below and the steps of the theater, this hand of the Greek now seems to me a separate and detached thing—the enormous hairy hand of an ogre borrowed from some horrible Scandinavian fairy tale. It was the hand which spoke to me always, the hand which said “Miss Mara will not be here tonight,” or “Yes, Miss Mara is coming late tonight.” It was this hand which I dreamt of as a child when I slept in the bedroom with the barred window. In my fevered sleep suddenly this window would light up, to reveal the ogre clutching at the bars. Night after night the the hairy monster visited me, clutching at the bars and gnashing its teeth. I would awake in a cold sweat, the house dark, the room absolutely silent. Standing at the edge of the dance floor I notice her coming toward me; she is coming with sails spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on the long, columnar neck. I see a woman perhaps eighteen, perhaps thirty, with blue-black hair and a large white face, a full white face in which the eyes shine brilliantly. She has on a tailored blue suit of duveteen. I remember distinctly now the fullness of her body, and that her hair was fine and straight, parted on the side, like a man’s. I remember the smile she gave me—knowing, mysterious, fugitive—a smile that sprang up suddenly, like a puff of wind. The whole being was concentrated in the face. I could have taken just the head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night, on a pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, the whole being glowed from them. There was an illumination which came from some unknown source, from a center hidden deep in the earth. I could think of nothing but the face, the strange, womblike quality of the smile, the engulfing immediacy of it. The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife. This smile, this face, was borne aloft on a long white neck, the sturdy, swanlike neck of the medium—and of the lost and the damned. I stand on the corner under the red lights, waiting for her to come down. It is about two in the morning and she is signing off. I am standing on Broadway with a flower in my buttonhole, feeling absolutely clean and alone. Almost the whole evening we have been talking about Strindberg, about a character of his named Henriette. I listened with such tense alertness that I fell into a trance. It was as if, with the opening phrase, we had started on a race—in opposite directions. Henriette!

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He sat at his desk, looked through yesterday’s mail and then, bracing himself, he got on the phone. He spent a great deal of time calling student film groups and guilds across the country, trying to interest them in Ariel films. He had always been very good at it, but now he had to fend off the idea that it might be depressing. One of the women he currently went out to dinner with also did most of her work on the phone. She had once said to him, in her nervously irritated way, that doing most of her business by phone had begun to seem strange to her. “Think about it,” she said, gripping her noodle-bearing fork in tight, elegant fingers. “All day long you’re in that room by yourself, talking to disembodied voices. Hundreds of ’em during the year. You’re immersed in floating utterances. You don’t know these people, you don’t even know what they look like. There’s no handshake, nothing. Just a pattern of sounds coming out of a plastic thing with holes.” “You’re exaggerating,” he said. “For comic effect.” “Barely. I never should’ve taken this job. I’ve always hated talking on the phone.” Why was he always attracted to these small, dramatic women? He got on the phone and began selling Ariel’s latest release—an American film he disliked and didn’t want to distribute. The plot was ridiculous; he was surprised when it was met with such a friendly critical response. It concerned a young Chinese woman working in a Japanese geisha bar in San Francisco, who is trying to find a relative she has never seen, an uncle who disappeared shortly after a murder that took place during a meeting of an obscure, crackpot Chinese political group. The woman never finds her uncle, although someone keeps leaving photos of him in her path, along with impossible excerpts from the I Ching. It was idiotic, but popular with college students. “It’s not a political film per se, although there is a political element present. It’s more about communal identity and illusion,” he said to buyers. After lunch there was a meeting about several new films under consideration. One of them was based on a novella by a famous South American writer about a child forced into prostitution by her grandmother. Listening to the discussion of the film reminded him again of the girl he had passed on the street that morning. The subject of child prostitution almost always did, even after all this time. This was because she had told him, almost on meeting him, that she had left home at the age of fifteen and had, when she was sixteen, become a hooker for two months. She was a twenty-two-year-old college junior when they met, but the information had formed a fascinating gauze that floated over her for the entire time that he knew her.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Whenever I try to explain to myself the peculiar pattern which my life has taken, when I reach back to the first cause, as it were, I think inevitably of the girl I first loved. It seems to me that everything dates from that aborted affair. A strange, masochistic affair it was, ridiculous and tragic at the same time. Perhaps I had the pleasure of kissing her two or three times, the sort of kiss one reserves for a goddess. Perhaps I saw her alone several times. Certainly she could never have dreamed that for over a year I walked past her home every night hoping to catch a glimpse of her at the window. Every night after dinner I would get up from the table and take the long route which led to her home. She was never at the window when I passed and I never had the courage to stand in front of the house and wait. Back and forth I passed, back and forth, but never hide nor hair of her. Why didn’t I write her? Why didn’t I call her up? Once I remember summoning enough pluck to invite her to the theater. I arrived at her home with a bunch of violets, the first and only time I ever bought flowers for a woman. As we were leaving the theater the violets dropped from her corsage, and in my confusion I stepped on them. I begged her to leave them there, but she insisted on gathering them up. I was thinking how awkward I was—it was only long afterwards that I recalled the smile she had given me as she stooped down to pick up the violets. It was a complete fiasco. In the end I ran away. Actually I was running away from another woman, but the day before leaving town I decided to see her once again. It was midafternoon and she came out to talk to me in the street, in the little areaway which was fenced off. She was already engaged to another man; she pretended to be happy about it but I could see, blind as I was, that she wasn’t as happy as she pretended to be. If I had only said the word I am sure she would have dropped the other fellow; perhaps she would even have gone away with me. I preferred to punish myself. I said good-by nonchalantly and I went down the street like a dead man. The next morning I was bound for the Coast, determined to start a new life. The new life was also a fiasco. I ended up on a ranch in Chula Vista, the most miserable man that ever walked the earth. There was this girl I loved and there was the other woman, for whom I felt only a profound pity. I had been living with her for two years, this other woman, but it seemed like a lifetime.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He was just driving me crazy and I guess I was driving him crazy too.” “I don’t know anymore how much a relationship can be based on what comes from the inside,” said Susan. “With Steve and me, it’s all based on us, and it’s very genuine and very sweet but sometimes it seems as if we’re involved in a fantasy that has nothing to do with the real world. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t know, but it can begin to feel solipsistic.” She remembered what her father had said to her during an argument when she was fifteen years old: “You want to suck people dry, you expect them to pour out their guts to you and you to them over and over and over until you know everything, and it just doesn’t work that way. Relationships are built from ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ and ‘I’m fine.’ ” He had said this last word like a stake was being driven through his heart. “Do you remember Leisha?” “I sure do. The nutty one with the musician boyfriend. Why?” “I thought I saw her on the street today. There was this bag lady who looked just like her.” “Oh, my God.” “I didn’t realize that it wasn’t her until I was an inch from her face.” “What did you do?” “Gave her five dollars.” — She lay on Bobby’s futon and thought of Steve. He was a quiet man whom she considered brilliant. He worked in the public relations department of a magazine neither one respected. They saw each other almost every night, they had keys to each other’s apartment. They had private jokes and several cute nicknames apiece. Sometimes it seemed as if they spoke a language foreign to other people, that there was something closeted and defeated in their closeness. But they made each other happy. There was, in magazine-speak, a “real connection.” She opened her eyes. “Connection” was a vague word when applied to humans. What did it mean? She remembered a man she’d had a short affair with before she’d met Steve. He was a sweet, practical person who never read books, rarely went out, and didn’t seem to care strongly about anything except a few close friends and a martial art he practiced with fanatic zeal. They had nothing in common. In most ways he bored her. Yet when she touched him she felt a sensitivity in his body, a sense of receptivity that she rarely encountered in men. When he held her against his chest, she felt secure and protected in a way that had nothing to do with his muscular body. She felt that they were nourishing each other in some important, invisible way. But they could barely hold a conversation.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She had told him it was very small, only one room with a tiny bathroom. She said the bathroom had big windows and a skylight, and that she had so many plants in there that you couldn’t use the toilet without arranging yourself around the plants. She said she didn’t have a chair or a couch, that she sat on the floor to eat. When she came home from work she often ordered Chinese food and ate it straight from the cardboard boxes set out on the floor between her spread legs. “What do you have for breakfast?” he asked. “Ice cream, sometimes. If it’s warm.” “What do you find to do in that little room?” “I read a lot.” “What do you like to read?” She named a few writers, one that he’d been forced to read in college and others he’d never heard of. He picked up a tiny bit of herring and mashed it with the edges of his front teeth. Maybe he could start seeing Jane in her apartment. It would be more money for her certainly. He would like to spend time in that funny little place. He could buy her a chair. Maybe even a table. He wouldn’t be able to see Jane much at all once Sylvia got back. He thought of his wife getting on the plane in her green-and-white dress, the handle of her wicker suitcase in hand, her gray hair wound into an elegant bun that displayed her graceful neck and gently erect shoulders. Her smile was beautiful when she turned to wave good-bye. He pictured Sylvia sitting in her favorite armchair across from him. She would be relaxed but sitting up straight on the tautly stuffed, salmon-colored cushions. Her legs would be crossed at the ankle. She would have her pale beige glasses on her nose, she would be in a trance over her latest book catalogues. If he stood up and put his hand on her shoulder, he would feel how slender and strong she still was, how well defined her small bones were. He thought of her collection of rare books, arranged and locked in the glass cabinet in a sunny corner of her study. They were beautiful to look at and extremely expensive; other book dealers had offered her thousands of dollars for some of them. Every time he looked at them, he felt depressed. One Christmas, he bought Sylvia a book entitled Beautiful Sex.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Johanna was one of the popular girls. Her best friend was Zaheera. Johanna was beautiful. Zaheera was stunning. Zaheera was colored, Cape Malay. She looked like Salma Hayek. Johanna was out and about and kissing boys, so the guys were all into her. Zaheera, as beautiful as she was, was extremely shy, so there weren’t as many guys after her. Johanna and Zaheera were always together. They were one grade below me, but in terms of popularity they were three grades above me. Still I got to hang out with them because I knew Johanna and we had this thing from being in different schools together. Dating girls may have been out of the question for me, but talking to them was not, because I could make them laugh. Human beings like to laugh, and lucky for me pretty girls are human beings. So I could relate to them in that way, but never in the other way. I knew this because whenever they stopped laughing at my jokes and stories they’d say, “So how do you think I can get Daniel to ask me out?” I always had a clear idea of where I stood. Outwardly, I had carefully cultivated my status as the funny, nonthreatening guy, but secretly I had the hugest crush on Zaheera. She was so pretty and so funny. We’d hang out and have great conversations. I thought about her constantly, but for the life of me I never considered myself worthy of dating her. I told myself, I’m going to have a crush on her forever, and that’s all that’s ever going to happen. At a certain point I decided to map out a strategy. I decided I’d be best friends with Zaheera and stay friends with her long enough to ask her to the matric dance, what we call our senior prom. Mind you, we were in grade nine at this point. The matric dance was three years away. But I decided to play the long game. I was like, Yep, just gonna take my time. Because that’s what happens in the movies, right? I’d seen my American high school movies. You hang around long enough as the friendly good guy and the girl dates a bunch of handsome jerks, and then one day she turns around and goes, “Oh, it’s you. It was always you. You’re the guy I was supposed to be with all along.” That was my plan. It was foolproof. I hung out with Zaheera every chance I got. We’d talk about boys, which ones she liked and which ones liked her. I’d give her advice. At one point she got set up with this guy Gary. They started dating. Gary was in the popular group but kind of shy and Zaheera was in the popular group but kind of shy, so his friends and her friends set them up together, like an arranged marriage. But Zaheera didn’t like Gary at all. She told me. We talked about everything.

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

  Leucippe’s freedom is a key to the way the novels work and the way they can guide us through the sexual landscape of the high Roman Empire. Her freedom referred at once to her social status and her subjective agency. Of course, the fact that she invokes her freedom at the exact moment when she seems most constrained underscores the extent to which the individual’s agency was limited. The novels are fatalistic romances, stories of the overpowering, divine force of erotic love. They are unusually aware of the external forces—nature and society—bearing on the individual and determining his or her fate. Here is the novels’ most authentic level of representation, and the greatest opportunity they afford to explore the relationship between erotic ideologies and social structure in the late classical period. They preserve for us something of the vitality, complexity, and chaos of sexual life in the second-century empire. Because Leucippe and Clitophon deliberately offers a panoramic vision of eros and its place in the world, we follow Achilles Tatius and consider the sexual experience of the high empire from various angles—same-sex eroticism, the expectations placed on women, the sexual life-course of men, the dynamics of marriage, the attitudes of the philosophers. Throughout, our goal is to find the interface between sexual energy and prevailing morality, the points of contact between the circulation of pleasures and the regulatory force of sexual norms. In the age of the romance, eros flourished unawares, serenely confident in its eternal powers, and if we did not know that Christianity was stirring in the hills, we might never have believed that the first icy gusts of denial could be felt sweeping across the ancient valleys. THE CURRENT FASHION: SAME-SEX EROS IN THE HIGH EMPIRE

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Let’s get on with it—cabs, boats, trains, naphtha launches; beaches, bedbugs, highways, byways, ruins; relics, old world, new world, pier, jetty; the high forceps, the swinging trapeze, the ditch, the delta, the alligators, the crocodiles, talk, talk, and more talk; then roads again and more dust in the eyes, more rainbows, more cloudbursts, more breakfast foods, more creams, more lotions. And when all the roads have been traversed and there is left only the dust of our frantic feet there will still remain the memory of your large full face so white, and the wide mouth with fresh lips parted, the teeth chalk white and each one perfect, and in this remembrance nothing can possibly change because this, like your teeth, is perfect. . . . It is Sunday, the first Sunday of my new life, and I am wearing the dog collar you fastened around my neck. A new life stretches before me. It begins with the day of rest. I lie back on a broad green leaf and I watch the sun bursting in your womb. What a clabber and clatter it makes! All this expressly for me, what? If only you had a million suns in you! If only I could lie here forever enjoying the celestial fireworks! I lie suspended over the surface of the moon. The world is in a womblike trance: the inner and the outer ego are in equilibrium. You promised me so much that if I never come out of this it will make no difference. It seems to me that it is exactly 25,960 years since I have been asleep in the black womb of sex. It seems to me that I slept perhaps 365 years too many. But at any rate I am now in the right house, among the sixes, and what lies behind me is well and what lies ahead is well. You come to me disguised as Venus, but you are Lilith, and I know it. My whole life is in the balance; I will enjoy the luxury of this for one day. Tomorrow I shall tip the scales. Tomorrow the equilibrium will be finished; if I ever find it again it will be in the blood and not in the stars. It is well that you promise me so much. I need to be promised nearly everything, for I have lived in the shadow of the sun too long. I want light and chastity—and a solar fire in the guts. I want to be deceived and disillusioned so that I may complete the upper triangle and not be continually flying off the planet into space.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  They spent some moments regarding the people around them. They were short on material. There were only a few customers in the bar; most of them were men in suits who sat there seemingly enmeshed in a web of habit and accumulated rancor that they called their personalities, so utterly unaware of their entanglement that they clearly considered themselves men of the world, even though they had long ago stopped noticing it. Then a couple walked through the door, carrying luggage. The woman’s bright skirt flashed with each step. The man walked ahead of her. He walked too fast for her to keep up. She looked harried. Her eyes were wide and dark and clotted with makeup; there was a mole on her chin. He paused, as though considering whether he would stop for a drink. He decided not to and strode again. Her earrings jiggled as she followed. They left a faint trail of sex and disappointment behind them. Beth watched the woman’s hips move under her skirt. “There was something unpleasant about them,” she said. “Yes, there was.” It cheered her to find this point of contact. “I’m sorry I’m not more talkative,” she said. “That’s all right.” His narrow eyes became feral once again. “Women should be quiet.” It suddenly struck her that it would seem completely natural if he lunged forward and bit her face. “I agree,” she said sharply. “There aren’t many men around worth talking to.” He was nonplussed by her peevish tone. Perhaps, he thought, he’d imagined it. He hadn’t. — They had more drinks on the plane. They were served a hunk of white-frosted raisin pastry in a red paper bag. He wasn’t hungry, but the vulgar cake appealed to him so he stuck it in his baggage. They had a brief discussion about shoes, from the point of view of expense and aesthetics. They talked about intelligence and art. There were large gaps of silence that were disheartening to both of them. She began talking about old people, and how nice they could be. He had a picture of her kneeling on the floor in black stockings and handcuffs. This picture became blurred, static-ridden, and then obscured by their conversation. He felt a ghastly sense of longing. He called back the picture, which no longer gave him any pleasure. He superimposed it upon a picture of himself standing in a nightclub the week before, holding a drink and talking to a rather combative girl who wanted his number. “Some old people are beautiful in an unearthly way,” she continued. “I saw this old lady in the drugstore the other day who must’ve been in her nineties. She was so fragile and pretty, she was like a little elf.” He looked at her and said, “Are you going to start being fun to be around or are you going to be a big drag?”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I wander aimlessly, trying to gain a solid, unshakable foothold whence I can command a view of my life, but behind me there lies only a welter of crisscrossed tracks, a groping, confused, encircling, the spasmodic gambit of the chicken whose head has just been lopped off. Whenever I try to explain to myself the peculiar pattern which my life has taken, when I reach back to the first cause, as it were, I think inevitably of the girl I first loved. It seems to me that everything dates from that aborted affair. A strange, masochistic affair it was, ridiculous and tragic at the same time. Perhaps I had the pleasure of kissing her two or three times, the sort of kiss one reserves for a goddess. Perhaps I saw her alone several times. Certainly she could never have dreamed that for over a year I walked past her home every night hoping to catch a glimpse of her at the window. Every night after dinner I would get up from the table and take the long route which led to her home. She was never at the window when I passed and I never had the courage to stand in front of the house and wait. Back and forth I passed, back and forth, but never hide nor hair of her. Why didn’t I write her? Why didn’t I call her up? Once I remember summoning enough pluck to invite her to the theater. I arrived at her home with a bunch of violets, the first and only time I ever bought flowers for a woman. As we were leaving the theater the violets dropped from her corsage, and in my confusion I stepped on them. I begged her to leave them there, but she insisted on gathering them up. I was thinking how awkward I was—it was only long afterwards that I recalled the smile she had given me as she stooped down to pick up the violets. It was a complete fiasco. In the end I ran away. Actually I was running away from another woman, but the day before leaving town I decided to see her once again. It was midafternoon and she came out to talk to me in the street, in the little areaway which was fenced off. She was already engaged to another man; she pretended to be happy about it but I could see, blind as I was, that she wasn’t as happy as she pretended to be. If I had only said the word I am sure she would have dropped the other fellow; perhaps she would even have gone away with me. I preferred to punish myself.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He looked away. He squeezed the laminated menu between his fingers. He read the description of cold pasta three times. He turned his head and stared at her. She’d grown her hair out and was wearing it up in a ponytail that looked like a ball of brown wool. Even with her hand blocking her face, he could see that she wore almost no makeup, that her skin looked fresh and rosy in daylight. She was wearing an old cream-colored sweater with pink and blue tulips woven into it. He stared at the boy who sat across the table from her. He was a homely kid in his early twenties with a thick thatch of badly cut sandy hair that roared up over his forehead in a hideous bush. His crooked tortoiseshell glasses had one arm held on by a piece of grayish masking tape, and he wore a brown sweater thick enough to be a coat. His complexion was ruddy and coarse, his expression horribly cheerful. On a cruel impulse, he leaned forward and leered at the kid. The boy glanced at him affably and buried his spoon in the bowl of stew he had before him. “Yeah,” he said. “Simone’s been experiencing a lot of rejection from her old friends.” “I’m not really rejecting her,” said Jane. “I just want to put some distance between us emotionally. Enough so that she doesn’t feel compelled to call me every time her psychotic girlfriend starts slapping her around.” She was going to sit there and continue her conversation. “How many times has it been now?” asked the ugly kid through a mouthful of stew. “Five, counting the last girlfriend, three times at six in the morning. I mean, my God, where does she find these women? I didn’t think lesbians were into beating each other up.” A waitress in a short black leather skirt and leopard-skin tights charged his table. “Are you ready to order?” “No, no, not yet.” She smiled and roared off. He lowered his head to the plastic menu. He was not sure why this experience was such an unpleasant one. “I mean, her life is her life,” said Jane. “But the last time she called she actually got me over there to mediate between her and this crazed, muscle-bound black belt in God knows what, and they’re screaming at each other and Simone is threatening to cut her wrist, and oh, it was a mess.” “It sounds very theatrical.” “It’s like not only is she going to be a masochistic asshole, she wants an audience. I know I’m being cruel.” “I don’t think you’re cruel. Most people wouldn’t have put up with it as long as you did.” “It’s so tragic, though. She’s such a great person. And I know at least two really attractive, charming girls who’re dying to get into her pants, but she’s not interested. She likes bitches.”