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.

Page 53 of 170 · 20 per page

• 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)

  They talked about music, college, people they knew in common and drugs they used to take as teenagers. She said that when she had taken LSD, she had often lost her sense of identity so completely that she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror. This pathetic statement brought back her attractiveness in a terrific rush. She noted the quick dark gleam in his eyes. “You should’ve let me beat you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hurt you too much.” “That’s not the point. The moment was wrong. It wouldn’t have meant anything.” “It would’ve meant something to me.” He paused. “But you probably would’ve spoiled it. You would’ve started screaming right away and made me stop.” The construction workers at the next table stared at them quizzically. She smiled pleasantly at them and returned her gaze to him. “You don’t know that.” He was so relieved at the ease between them that he put his arm around her as they left the restaurant. She stretched up and kissed his neck. “We just had the wrong idea about each other,” she said. “It’s nobody’s fault that we’re incompatible.” “Well, soon we’ll be in Manhattan, and it’ll be all over. You’ll never have to see me again.” He hoped she would dispute this, but she didn’t. They continued to talk in the car, about the nature of time, their parents and the injustice of racism. She was too exhausted to extract much from the pedestrian conversation, but the sound of his voice, the position of his body and his sudden receptivity were intoxicating. Time took on a grainy, dreamy aspect that made impossible conversations and unlikely gestures feasible, like a space capsule that enables its inhabitants to happily walk up the wall. The peculiar little car became a warm, humming cocoon, like a miniature house she had, as a little girl, assembled out of odds and ends for invented characters. She felt as if she were a very young child, when every notion that appeared in her head was new and naked of association and thus needed to be expressed carefully so it didn’t become malformed. She wanted to set every one of them before him in a row, as she had once presented crayon drawings to her father in a neat many-colored sequence. Then he would shift his posture slightly or make a gesture that suddenly made him seem so helpless and frail that she longed to protect him and cosset him away, like a delicate pet in a matchbox filled with cotton. She rested her head on his shoulder and lovingly regarded the legs that bent at the knee and tapered to the booted feet resting on the brakes or the accelerator. This was as good as her original fantasy, possibly even better. “Can I abuse you some more now?” he asked sweetly. “In the car?” “What do you want to do?” “Gag you? That’s all, I’d just like to gag you.” “But I want to talk to you.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The window is there, but no Melisande; the garden too is there, but no sheen of gold. Pass and repass, the window always vacant. The evening star hangs low; Tristan appears, then Fidelio, and then Oberon. The hydra-headed dog barks with all his mouths and though there are no swamps I hear the frogs croaking everywhere. Same houses, same car lines, same everything. She is hiding behind the curtain, she is waiting for me to pass, she is doing this or doing that. . . . but she is not there, never, never, never . Is it a grand opera or is it a hurdy-gurdy playing? It is Amato bursting his golden lung; it is the Rubaiyat , it is Mount Everest, it is a moonless night, it is a sob at dawn, it is a boy making believe, it is Puss in the Boot, it is Mauna Loa, it is fox or astrakhan, it is of no stuff and no time, it is endless and it begins over and over, under the heart, in the back of the throat, in the soles of the feet, and why not just once, just once, for the love of Christ, just a shadow or a rustle of the curtain, or a breath on the windowpane, something once, if only a lie, something to stop the pain, to stop this walking up and down, up and down. . . . Walking homeward. Same houses, same lampposts, same everything. I walk past my own home, past the cemetery, past the gas tanks, past the car barns, past the reservoir, out into the open country. I sit beside the road with my head in my hands and sob. Poor bugger that I am, I can’t contract my heart enough to burst the veins. I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock. Meanwhile the other one is waiting. I can see her again as she sat on the low stoop waiting for me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale and trembling with eagerness. Pity I always thought it was brought me back, but now as I walk toward her and see the look in her eyes I don’t know any more what it is, only that we will go inside and lie together and she will get up half weeping, half laughing, and she will grow very silent and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask me what is torturing me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the one thing she dreads to know. I don’t love you! Can’t she hear me screaming it? I don’t love you! Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred in my heart, with despair, with hopeless rage. But the words never leave my lips. I look at her and I am tongue-tied. I can’t do it. . . .

• 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)

  It’s a question of what time and where to meet and how will we go about it, because, as she lets drop just before we reach the door, she’s got a husband who s a traveling salesman and she’s got to be careful. I agree to come back and to meet her at the corner in front of the candy store at a certain hour. If I want to bring a friend along she’ll bring her girl friend. No, I decide to see her alone. It’s agreed. She squeezes my hand and darts off into a dirty hallway. I beat it quickly back to the elevated station and hasten home to gulp down the meal. It’s a summer’s night and everything flung wide open. Riding back to meet her the whole past rushes up kaleidoscopically. This time I’ve left the book at home. It’s cunt I’m out for now and no thought of the book is in my head. I am back again this side of the boundary line, each station whizzing past making my world grow more diminutive. I am almost a child by the time I reach the destination. I am a child who is horrified by the metamorphosis which has taken place. What has happened to me, a man of the Fourteenth Ward, to be jumping off at this station in search of a Jewish cunt? Supposing I do give her a fuck, what then? What have I got to say to a girl like that? What’s a fuck when what I want is love? Yes, suddenly it comes over me like a tornado. . . . Una, the girl I loved, the girl who lived here in this neighborhood, Una with big blue eyes and flaxen hair, Una who made me tremble just to look at her, Una whom I was afraid to kiss or even to touch her hand. Where is Una? Yes, suddenly, that’s the burning question: where is Una? In two seconds I am completely unnerved, completely lost, desolate, in the most horrible anguish and despair. How did I ever let her go? Why? What happened? When did it happen? I thought of her like a maniac night and day, year in and year out, and then, without even noticing it, she drops out of my mind, like that, like a penny falling through a hole in your pocket. Incredible, monstrous, mad. Why all I had to do was to ask her to marry me, ask her hand—that’s all. If I had done that she would have said yes immediately. She loved me, she loved me desperately. Why yes, I remember now, I remember how she looked at me the last time we met. I was saying good-by because I was leaving that night for California, leaving everybody to begin a new life. And I never had any intention of leading a new life.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Maybe every word she uttered was a lie! Not an ordinary lie, no, something worse, something indescribable. Only sometimes the truth comes out like that too, especially if you think you’re never going to see the person again. Sometimes you can tell a perfect stranger what you would never dare reveal to your most intimate friend. It’s like going to sleep in the midst of a party; you become so interested in yourself that you go to sleep. And when you’re sound asleep you begin to talk to someone, someone who was in the same room with you all the time and therefore understands everything even though you begin in the middle of a sentence. And perhaps this other person goes to sleep also, or was always asleep, and that’s why it was so easy to encounter him, and if he doesn’t say anything to disturb you then you know that what you are saying is real and true and that you are wide-awake and there is no other reality except this being wide-awake asleep. Never before have I been so wide-awake and so sound asleep at the same time. If the ogre in my dreams had really pushed the bars aside and taken me by the hand I would have been frightened to death and consequently now dead, that is, forever asleep and therefore always at large, and nothing would be strange any more, nor untrue, even if what happened did not happen. What happened must have happened long ago, in the night undoubtedly. And what is now happening is also happening long ago, in the night, and this is no more true than the dream of the ogre and the bars which would not give, except that now the bars are broken and she whom I feared has me by the hand and there is no difference between that which I feared and what is, because I was asleep and now I am wide-awake asleep and there is nothing more to fear, nor to expect, nor to hope for, but just this which is and which knows no end. She wants to go. To go. . . . Again her haunch, that slippery glide as when she came down from the dance hall and moved into me. Again her words . . . “suddenly for no reason at all, he bent down and lifted up my dress.” She’s slipping the fur around her neck; the little black bonnet sets her face off like a cameo. The round, full face, with Slavic cheekbones. How could I dream this, never having seen it? How could I know that she would rise like this, close and full, the face full white and blooming like a magnolia? I tremble as the fullness of her thigh brushes me. She seems even a little taller than I, though she is not. It’s the way she holds her chin. She doesn’t notice where she’s walking.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She paced a bit more and then settled down in the living area, where she stared into space. She remembered a story she’d read once in which the main character, an older woman who was pining to see a boy she’d likely never see again, found accidental solace in late-night TV, where she saw an actor who looked like an older version of her young heartthrob. Leisha had, after all, wanted to be an actress at one point. Susan found the remote-control unit and flicked on the TV. It was on the pornographic cable station. No one there resembled Leisha. Neither did anyone on Get Smart, Love That Bob or the Japanese horror movie. The last channel she tried revealed a nameless old Italian thing about international espionage, which had a murky, kinky sexual flavor that held her interest for several minutes. And, in fact, there was a dark, intense woman who was playing an intellectual slut. If Leisha had ever become an actress, this was probably the kind of role she’d get, but Susan doubted she had the tenacity to land roles even like this one. She flicked off the TV. It embarrassed her to hold such a low opinion of Leisha’s ability, but it wasn’t a reflection of contempt. Leisha was simply meant to feel and be, not to do. But what an arrogant thing to close off Leisha’s possibilities like that. After all, no one who knew Susan six years before could have predicted exactly where she would wind up, and some people had been surprised. She put her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. She imagined Leisha as an actress in a sci-fi movie, playing a tiny queen in silver lamé. She saw her as a mother in a blue-and-white-checked blouse, kneeling on the floor to play a game with her child. She saw her as an aging hipster in a bar, her eyes made up in flames of black and silver, complaining about her current relationship to whoever would listen. She saw her as a bag lady. Then the images peeled away and she saw her standing in empty space, wearing the tight Capri pants she used to wear, a dreamy, half-smiling girl, her intensity momentarily muted by some inner reflection. She looked at this girl and realized that, with all the falseness and silliness between them, she had cared for her, and been cared for in return. She wanted to talk to her, and tomorrow she would try again. She sat in the living area for almost an hour thinking about what she might say to her, and what Leisha might say back.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The window is there, but no Melisande; the garden too is there, but no sheen of gold. Pass and repass, the window always vacant. The evening star hangs low; Tristan appears, then Fidelio, and then Oberon. The hydra-headed dog barks with all his mouths and though there are no swamps I hear the frogs croaking everywhere. Same houses, same car lines, same everything. She is hiding behind the curtain, she is waiting for me to pass, she is doing this or doing that. . . . but she is not there, never, never, never . Is it a grand opera or is it a hurdy-gurdy playing? It is Amato bursting his golden lung; it is the Rubaiyat , it is Mount Everest, it is a moonless night, it is a sob at dawn, it is a boy making believe, it is Puss in the Boot, it is Mauna Loa, it is fox or astrakhan, it is of no stuff and no time, it is endless and it begins over and over, under the heart, in the back of the throat, in the soles of the feet, and why not just once, just once, for the love of Christ, just a shadow or a rustle of the curtain, or a breath on the windowpane, something once, if only a lie, something to stop the pain, to stop this walking up and down, up and down. . . . Walking homeward. Same houses, same lampposts, same everything. I walk past my own home, past the cemetery, past the gas tanks, past the car barns, past the reservoir, out into the open country. I sit beside the road with my head in my hands and sob. Poor bugger that I am, I can’t contract my heart enough to burst the veins. I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock. Meanwhile the other one is waiting. I can see her again as she sat on the low stoop waiting for me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale and trembling with eagerness. Pity I always thought it was brought me back, but now as I walk toward her and see the look in her eyes I don’t know any more what it is, only that we will go inside and lie together and she will get up half weeping, half laughing, and she will grow very silent and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask me what is torturing me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the one thing she dreads to know. I don’t love you! Can’t she hear me screaming it? I don’t love you! Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred in my heart, with despair, with hopeless rage. But the words never leave my lips. I look at her and I am tongue-tied. I can’t do it. . . .

• 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 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 did it adroitly, without too much heat, but letting him understand all the while that I wasn’t to be put out of the way so easily. When he picked up the telephone and demanded the general manager I thought it was just a gag, that they were going to pass me around like that from one to the other until I’d get fed up. But the moment I heard him talk I changed my opinion. When I got to the general manager’s office, which was in another building uptown, they were waiting for me. I sat down in a comfortable leather chair and accepted one of the big cigars that were thrust forward. This individual seemed at once to be vitally concerned about the matter. He wanted me to tell him all about it, down to the last detail, his big hairy ears cocked to catch the least crumb of information which would justify something or other which was formulating itself inside his dome. I realized that by some accident I had really been instrumental in doing him a service. I let him wheedle it out of me to suit his fancy, observing all the time which way the wind was blowing. And as the talk progressed I noticed that he was warming up to me more and more. At last some one was showing a little confidence in me! That was all I required to get started on one of my favorite lines. For, after years of job hunting I had naturally become quite adept: I knew not only what not to say, but I knew also what to imply, what to insinuate. Soon the assistant general manager was called in and asked to listen to my story. By this time I knew what the story was. I understood that Hymie—“that little kike,” as the general manager called him—had no business pretending that he was the employment manager. Hymie had usurped his prerogative, that much was clear. It was also clear that Hymie was a Jew and that Jews were not in good odor with the general manager, nor with Mr. Twilliger, the vice-president, who was a thorn in the general manager’s side. Perhaps it was Hymie, “the dirty little kike,” who was responsible for the high percentage of Jews on the messenger force. Perhaps Hymie was really the one who was doing the hiring at the employment office—at Sunset Place, they called it. It was an excellent opportunity, I gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to take down a certain Mr. Burns who, he informed me, had been the employment manager for some thirty years now and who was evidently getting lazy on the job. The conference lasted several hours. Before it was terminated Mr. Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me the boss of the works.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Maybe there wouldn’t be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million billion varieties, maybe there wouldn’t even be glass in the windows, maybe you’d have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn’t be French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn’t be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn’t be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because there wouldn’t be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months and years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn’t need a visa or a passport or a carte d’identité because you wouldn’t be registered anywhere and you wouldn’t bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn’t make any difference since you wouldn’t own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free? During this period when I was drifting from door to door, job to job, friend to friend, meal to meal, I did try nevertheless to rope off a little space for myself which might be an anchorage; it was more like a life buoy in the midst of a swift channel. To get within a mile of me was to hear a huge dolorous bell tolling. Nobody could see the anchorage—it was buried deep in the bottom of the channel. One saw me bobbing up and down on the surface, rocking gently sometimes or else swinging backwards and forwards agitatedly. What held me down safely was the big pigeonholed desk which I put in the parlor. This was the desk which had been in the old man’s tailoring establishment for the last fifty years, which had given birth to many bills and many groans, which had housed strange souvenirs in its compartments, and which finally I had filched from him when he was ill and away from the establishment; and now it stood in the middle of the floor in our lugubrious parlor on the third floor of a respectable brownstone house in the dead center of the most respectable neighborhood in Brooklyn. I had to fight a tough battle to install it there, but I insisted that it be there in the midmost midst of the shebang. It was like putting a mastodon in the center of a dentist’s office. But since the wife had no friends to visit her and since my friends didn’t give a fuck if it were suspended from the chandelier, I kept it in the parlor and I put all the extra chairs we had around it in a big circle and then I sat down comfortably and I put my feet up on the desk and dreamed of what I would write if I could write.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  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. At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete. During the months that her friendship with Leisha was beginning to wane, she would think, Well, I can’t talk to her and I don’t respect her, but she has a beauty that can perhaps only be appreciated on a nonintellectual level. Like a sudden flame of piercing movement in an unexceptional dancer, or the grace and spirit of an animal. She remembered them walking down St. Marks together doing an acting-class exercise. One person would say something and the other person would repeat it, with slight changes in words or expression.

• 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 remembered an image of her bicycling down the block in unconcerned leggy nakedness, her hair catching the sunlight. The dream then took an unfortunate turn. She was chased by a host of anxious neighbors, all trying to drape her with garments. They caught her and wrested her from his care with accusations of indecency and child molestation. The dream left him with a sense of irrational discouragement and a mosquito-bite feeling of loss. He moped as he brushed his teeth. He wished his roommate would come back from Italy. He had never been to Europe or anywhere else, and was sick of people going. 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.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  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.” He could feel his eyes become clouded with privacy as he slipped discreetly into a sheltering cave of sexual fantasy. His focus wobbled, he slipped out again. In Ann Arbor he had pierced his ear, he had worn a beret sometimes. He had written articles in the student paper on labor unions. He had brought Andy Warhol to Cinema I. He saw himself drunk on the curb outside the Del Rio, talking with Wilson and vomiting. They were talking about politics and sex, Wilson mainly talking politics, since he rarely fucked anybody. Joel had just met Sara. “She’s great. She’s every man’s dream. I can’t tell you how, because she made me promise not to.” He turned and barfed. Everything was so important in Ann Arbor, so fraught with the tension held tight in the bud of fantasy before it bursts into gaily striped attempt. “I have this fantasy of becoming an anarchist on the Left Bank,” he said to Sara. “Throwing bombs and creating a disturbance.” “I want to become a good painter,” she said. “Or a great painter.” “Listen,” he said, raising himself above her on his elbow. “I want you to be strong. You’ve come so far in spite of everything. I want you to be successful.” “I am strong,” she said. Her eyes were serene. “I’m stronger than anyone else I know.” He cleared his eyes and looked once more at the querulous buildings sweating in the afternoon heat. Of course, she hadn’t been strong at all. He remembered the tremulous whine coming out of the phone during their last conversation. “I’m scared,” she’d wept. “I feel like I don’t exist, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  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. 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.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There was always somebody around to take care of a corpse. Especially if the bereaved were an attractive young blonde with sparkling blue eyes. I wondered if she’d go back to her job in the restaurant. If she hadn’t known Greek and Latin I would never have been mixed up with her. But my curiosity got the better of me. And then she was so goddamned poor, that too got me. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if her hands hadn’t smelled greasy. That was the fly in the ointment—the greasy hands. I remember the first night I met her and we strolled through the park. She was ravishing to look at, and she was alert and intelligent. It was just the time when women were wearing short skirts and she wore them to advantage. I used to go to the restaurant night after night just to watch her moving around, watch her bending over to serve or stooping down to pick up a fork. And with the beautiful legs and the bewitching eyes a marvelous line about Homer, with the pork and sauerkraut a verse of Sappho’s, the Latin conjugations, the odes of Pindar, with the dessert perhaps The Rubaiyat or Cynara . But the greasy hands and the frowsy bed in the boarding house opposite the marketplace—Whew! I couldn’t stomach it. The more I shunned her the more clinging she became. Ten-page letters about love with footnotes on Thus Spake Zarathustra . And then suddenly silence and me congratulating myself heartily. No, I couldn’t bring myself to go to the Grand Central Station in the morning. I rolled over and I fell sound asleep. In the morning I would get the wife to telephone the office and say I was ill. I hadn’t been ill now for over a week—it was coming to me. At noon I find Kronski waiting for me outside the office. He wants me to have lunch with him . . . there’s an Egyptian girl he wants me to meet. The girl turns out to be a Jewess, but she came from Egypt and she looks like an Egyptian. She’s hot stuff and the two of us are working on her at once. As I was supposed to be ill I decided not to return to the office but to take a stroll through the East Side. Kronski was going back to cover me up. We shook hands with the girl and we each went our separate ways. I headed toward the river where it was cool, having forgotten about the girl almost immediately. I sat on the edge of the pier with my legs dangling over the string-piece. A scow passed with a load of red bricks. Suddenly Monica came to my mind. Monica arriving at the Grand Central Station with a corpse. A corpse f. o. b. New York! It seemed so incongruous and ridiculous that I burst out laughing. What had she done with it?

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  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. 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.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And from the dead cock of this sad specimen arose the giant skyscraper with its express elevators and observation towers. We are the last decimal point of sexual calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate of straw. Now for the aluminum wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells. Everything goes forward like oiled clocks; for each minute of the dial there are a million noiseless clocks which tick off the rinds of time. We are traveling faster than the lightning calculator, faster than starlight, faster than the magician can think. Each second is a universe of time. And each universe of time is but a wink of sleep in the cosmogony of speed. When speed comes to its end we shall be there, punctual as always and blissfully undenominated. We shall shed our wings, our clocks and our mantelpieces to lean on. We will rise up feathery and jubilant, like a column of blood, and there will be no memory to drag us down again. This time I call the realm of the super-cunt, for it defies speed, calculation or imagery. Nor has the penis itself a known size or weight. There is only the sustained feel of fuck, the fugitive in full flight, the nightmare smoking his quiet cigar. Little Nemo walks around with a seven-day hard on and a wonderful pair of blue balls bequeathed by Lady Bountiful. It is Sunday morning around the corner from Evergreen Cemetery. It is Sunday morning and I am lying blissfully dead to the world on my bed of ferroconcrete. Around the corner is the cemetery, which is to say—the world of sexual intercourse. My balls ache with the fucking that is going on, but it is all going on beneath my window, on the boulevard where Hymie keeps his copulating nest. I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy. She didn’t know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there on the farthest rim of the universe. She thought it was sheer laziness that kept me riveted to the bed. She threw the bucket of water over me: I squirmed and shivered a bit, but I continued to lie there on my ferroconcrete bed.