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 Querelle (1953)

  233 I QUERELLE might tum out to be more exciting than his own. In any case, not being attached to Gil any longer, Roger could move about unscathed and participate in festivities from which he, Gil, was excluded, in the rooms of the brothel where the two brothers came and went, from one room to another (whose arrangement and furnishings he mistakenly visualized as corresponding to the dilapidated fa�de of the building), looking for each other, finding each other (and their meeting would give rise to a command) only to part again, to lose themselves and look for each other in the great to-and-fro of women dressed in veils and lace. Gil managed to see the two brothers. standing there, holding hands and smiling at the boy. They had the same smile. They extended an ann to reach for the boy, who came along willingly, and held him between themselves for a moment. At home, Roger could never n1ention the two brothers, couldn't talk about a pimp and a thief. One word about such people and his sister would have reported it to his mother. His infatuation, however, created such violent pressure inside him that he was running the risk of giving himself away at any moment. In any case, he thought about them in such awkward and childlike terms; one day he exclaimed : "The Gallant Knights!", But he found it hard to imagine himself involved in numer ous deeds of derring-do in their company. Only certain images formed in his mind, and in these he saw himself offering the re united brothers something-he did not know what it was, only that it belonged to the most precious part of himself. He even had the notion of transmitting a double image of his own face and body to Jo and Robert, on a mission to make them accept this friendship the unique and essential person, who remained in his room all the wh ile, was offering them. Querelle returned one evening when he knew Roger would not be there. "Well, old hoss, \ve're all set. Everything's ready. I got you a ticket to Bordeaux. The only thing is, you have to catch that train at Quimper."

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Night had fallen by then, and the world was a smooth black sheet. Across the road and across the fields, they could make out the yellow-orange light in a house as narrow as Simon’s. The yard was patchy with snow and ice. The goats had bedded down in their pen in the back, though sometimes their calls lifted up and swept overhead like the softening static at the start of a radio station. More distantly, Hartjes could hear whining, baying, and felt a flurry of homesickness. When he had lived with his grandparents during the murky middle years of his childhood, he had raised three dogs into brilliant hunters, Gristle, Bone, and Marrow. He had run his hand along their spines, teaching them to be still, to be quiet, to wait. He’d felt their hearts beating, slowing, growing inured to the length of time it took for the world to show its belly. They had been mutts when he found them, three butterscotch pups clinging to life, drenched in ants and beetles. But he’d rinsed them clean and loved on them the way nobody had loved on him. He had taught them to hunt, to be keen and swift as they stalked and waited. He’d taught them to fetch at first with dolls and dummies filled with clay and rocks, realistic weights, and later they’d brought him the real thing, ducks wet and warm with blood. Pheasant. Squirrel. Whatever Hartjes trained his rifle on, they pinned and cornered and stalled. They could tree anything, the three of them, even turkeys, frothing with rage, bodies humming, ready to take flight. But the dogs calling in the distance were not his dogs. The dogs baying in the distance slept inside and ran from their shadows. Gristle, Bone, and Marrow would have eaten those dogs alive, because Hartjes had loved them enough to teach them how to fight, how to maim, how to kill, and the people here, in this place, let their dogs sleep in their beds, as though that were love. They ate slowly because the venison was hot. Hartjes dug his spoon into the soft potatoes and the carrots. A light dangled overhead, and in the surface of the broth he saw their shadowed, inverted selves. Hartjes had on his flannel coat, and Simon had wrapped himself in a green wool blanket. The heater, on its lowest setting, droned like cicadas. There was just enough heat to remind them how cold it was. Simon’s spoon clacked against the side of his bowl. He coughed into his shoulder. Hartjes studied the flaking skin along his jaw, the rosettes of sores spotting his cheeks and the primitive cliff of his forehead. “Do you ever get lonely out here?” “You ask that every time.” “Because you never answer,” Hartjes said. “Sometimes.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Years later, I saw a movie about a prostituted woman in Paris who saves money to take her young daughter on a vacation by the sea. As their train full of workers rounds a cliff, the shining limitless waters spread out beneath them—and suddenly all the passengers begin to laugh, throw open the windows, and toss out cigarettes, coins, lipstick: everything they thought they needed a moment before. This was the joy I felt as a wandering child. Whenever the road presents me with its greatest gift—a moment of unity with everything around me—I still do. —ANOTHER TRUTH OF MY EARLY WANDERINGS is harder to admit: I longed for a home. It wasn’t a specific place but a mythical neat house with conventional parents, a school I could walk to, and friends who lived nearby. My dream bore a suspicious resemblance to the life I saw in movies, but my longing for it was like a constant low-level fever. I never stopped to think that children in neat houses and conventional schools might envy me. When I was ten or so, my parents separated. My sister was devastated, but I had never understood why two such different people were married in the first place. My mother often worried her way into depression, and my father’s habit of mortgaging the house, or otherwise going into debt without telling her, didn’t help. Also, wartime gas rationing had forced Ocean Beach Pier to close, and my father was on the road nearly full time, buying and selling jewelry and small antiques to make a living. He felt he could no longer look after my sometimes-incapacitated mother. Also, she wanted to live near my sister, who was finishing college in Massachusetts, and now I was old enough to be her companion. We rented a house in a small town, and spent most of one school year there. It was the most conventional life we would ever lead. After my sister graduated and left for her first grown-up job, my mother and I moved to East Toledo and an ancient farmhouse where her family had once lived. As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun. What once had been countryside was crowded with the small houses of factory workers. They surrounded our condemned and barely habitable house on three sides, with a major highway undercutting its front porch and trucks that rattled our windows. Inside this remnant of her childhood, my mother disappeared more and more into her unseen and unhappy world. I was always worried that she might wander into the streets, or forget that I was in school and call the police to find me—all of which sometimes happened. Still, I thought I was concealing all this from my new friends.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Besides horizontal travel across the country, you will find two other kinds: vertical travel into the past of this North American continent that you and I are walking around on, and cultural travel between and among very different people and places. Because this book is all about stories, I hope some here might lead you to tell your own and also to get hooked on the revolutionary act of listening to others. I wish I could imitate the Chinese women letter writers of at least a thousand years ago. Because they were forbidden to go to school like their brothers, they invented their own script—called nushu, or “women’s writing”—though the punishment for creating a secret language was death.5 They wrote underground letters and poems of friendship to each other, quite consciously protesting the restrictions of their lives. As one wrote, “Men leave home to brave life in the outside world. But we women are no less courageous. We can create a language they cannot understand.” This correspondence was so precious to them that some women were buried with their letters of friendship, yet enough survive for us to see that they wrote in a slender column down the center of each page, leaving wide margins as spaces for a correspondent to add her own words. “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel,” as Ursula Le Guin wrote, “but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page. [image "My father, Leo Steinem, in his favorite photograph, 1949. From Gloria Steinem’s personal collection" file=Image00007.jpg] MY FATHER, LEO STEINEM, IN HIS FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPH, 1949. FROM GLORIA STEINEM’S PERSONAL COLLECTION [image "I." file=Image00008.jpg] My Father’s FootstepsI come by my road habits honestly. There were only a few months each year when my father seemed content with a house-dwelling life. Every summer, we stayed in the small house he had built across the road from a lake in rural Michigan, where he ran a dance pavilion on a pier over the water. Though there was no ocean within hundreds of miles, he had named it Ocean Beach Pier, and given it the grandiose slogan “Dancing Over the Water and Under the Stars.” On weeknights, people came from nearby farms and summer cottages to dance to a jukebox. My father dreamed up such attractions as a living chess game, inspired by his own love of chess, with costumed teenagers moving across the squares of the dance floor. On weekends, he booked the big dance bands of the 1930s and 1940s into this remote spot. People might come from as far away as Toledo or Detroit to dance to this live music on warm moonlit nights. Of course, paying the likes of Guy Lombardo or Duke Ellington or the Andrews Sisters meant that one rainy weekend could wipe out a whole summer’s profits, so there was always a sense of gambling.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They put their heads down over their blue books. There were five rows of five desks each, and the boys had spread out across the room in a weird sequence. One row was filled entirely, then the next left empty, and then a couple in the third and fourth rows, and the last row also filled. It was like a riddle or SAT question: 5, 0, 2, 3, 5. Out of habit, Lionel shifted the numbers around, first in increasing order, then decreasing order. He calculated the sum, the average, the sum of squares, the sum of cubes, the standard deviation. He leaned against the table at the front of the room, running the numbers through a string of permutations. It made him homesick for math—for the library where he’d worked through his first-year coursework in the graduate program, going through two or three legal pads of calculations a week, checking his work against WolframAlpha, graphing ridiculous functions and sending screenshots to the friend who had hosted the potluck last night. He missed the cramped TA office the math department had provided to him and the others who taught Calc I, and if they were unlucky, remedial algebra—those sullen, unhappy faces of the probationary students who didn’t know even the most basic of things. Lionel longed for that period of his life, when he made grilled cheeses and sat in the back patio of his building, trying to solve the problems that were sometimes pinned to the bulletin board in the department office. That smell like burning coffee when someone had left the machine on in the shared kitchen, the hum of the big printer and scanner. He missed the long talks with his advisor, Dr. Lauk, who had taken Lionel in after that summer program because Lionel was also interested in complex differential geometry, though Lionel didn’t like analysis and had struggled through his analytic geometry class. He even missed the mean, brutal hours of Dr. Nonan’s seminar on geometric isoforms and topology, the one class where he had gotten the minimum required B. Lionel remembered staring at the grade with great incredulity. No one in grad school got Bs unless something had gone wildly wrong. He remembered being summoned when that fall semester’s grade posted, and hearing Dr. Lauk say, with kindness that verged on condescension, “He can be a challenging instructor. You’ll do better next time.” The implication being that Lionel must retake the course and get an A because the subject matter intersected so deeply with his advisor’s specialty. There were moments in the spring semester when Lionel wondered if it was for his own benefit that he was retaking the class or if it was because he was being moved around a chessboard he couldn’t see, his graduate education a pawn passed between two egos. But even that he missed—the messy, ridiculous departmental politics, the rituals, all of it. But in his second year, Lionel had tried to kill himself. And now that was over.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “You might run a vacuum over it if you’ve got one, but I think you’ll live.” Charles leaned down to kiss Lionel then, gripped the backs of his thighs and lifted him easily. “Your knee,” Lionel said. “You’re not a physio.” Lionel wrapped his legs around Charles and let himself be carried back to bed. Charles stomped in the boots. “Stay,” Lionel said later, when Charles was getting dressed. “Can’t,” Charles said. “I have to go.” “Stay.” “I’ll be back,” Charles said. He kissed Lionel’s forehead and then his mouth and he was gone out the door. Lionel drew his blanket around himself and lay down. “I have to go anyway,” Lionel said, and the only answer was the quiet of his apartment, the soft rattle of snow striking the kitchen sink. LITTLE BEAST Sylvia has blown up her life. She slices potatoes into screaming hot water and chants, “Take it back, take it back, take it back.” Out in the living room: regular thudding. She has agreed to let the twins have fries for lunch if they are quiet and good while they color. The boy’s whine trails each of the thuds. She’s been played. Sylvia drains the hot water, and then plunges the sliced potatoes into an ice bath. The water numbs her fingers and wrists. Starch turns the water hazy, and the potatoes go slick like something hauled out of the sea. When her hands turn white, she pours off the cold water and blots the potatoes dry. Then she rubs them down with salt and garlic butter she made herself. And into the oven. She feels productive, virtuous. Her reward is to close her eyes for just a moment. She dips into the brief dark of her eyelids, feels that woozy elation like holding her breath and letting it go. She drifts, sways. She considers, not for the first time this week, Hammond, the breakup. The doomed trip they took up to see her mother last month, how they’d they fought all the way there and back. The farm had done nothing to ease their splintering. All they’d done was move the location of the argument, not defuse the argument itself. Then she’d left him and that was that. But now, standing in the kitchen, she considers the permanence of that choice and how easy it had been to make in the end. So swift. Like a bolt of lightning. There and gone, but behind it an acrid, burning trail.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I remember years ago, the day I started working at the cannery in Buffalo and you had already been there a few months, and how your eyes caught mine and played with me before you set me free. I was supposed to be following the foreman to fill out some forms but I was so busy wondering what color your hair was under that white paper net and how it would look and feel in my fingers, down loose and free. And I remember how you laughed gently when the foreman came back and said, “You comin’ or not?” All of us he-shes were mad as hell when we heard you got fired because you wouldnt let the superintendent touch your breasts. I still unloaded on the docks for another couple of days, but I was kind of mopey. It just wasn t the same after your light went out. I couldnt believe it the night I went to the club on the West Side. There you were, leaning up against the bar, your jeans too tight for words and your hair, your hair all loose and free. And I remember that look in your eyes again. You didnt Just know me, you liked what you saw. And this time, ooh woman, we were on our own turf. I could move the way you wanted me to, and I was glad Id gotten all dressed up. Our own turf... ‘Would you dance with me?” You didnt say yes or no, just teased me with your eyes, straightened my tie, smoothed my collar, and took me by the hand. You had my heart before you moved against me like you did. Tammy was singing “Stand By Your Man,” and we were 2. Leslie Feinberg changing all the he’ to she’s inside our heads to make it fit right. After you moved that way, you had more than my heart. You made me ache and you liked that. So did I. The older butches warned me: if you wanted to keep your marriage, dont go to the bars. But I've always been a one-woman butch. Besides, this was our community, the only one we belonged to, so we went every weekend. There were tvo kinds of fights in the bars. Most weekends had one kind or the other, some weekends both. There were the fist fights between the butch women—full of booxe, shame, jealous imsecurity. Sometimes the fights were awful and spread like a web to trap everyone in the bar, like the night Heddy lost her eye when she got hit upside the head with a bar stool.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “What finally made you decide to let me in?” Ruth squeezed my hand. “The color of my hair is my declaration to the world that ’'m not hiding. It’s a hard color to stand behind, but I do it to celebrate my life and my decisions. Most people are embarrassed by the color of my hair. It took a very special person to compare it to the color of sumac.” I laughed and picked at my salad. “Do you know if I’m a man or a woman?” “No,” Ruth said. “That’s why I know so much about you.” I sighed. “Did you think I was a man when you first met me?” She nodded. “Yes. At first I thought you were a straight man. Then I thought you were gay. It’s been a shock for me to realize that even I make assumptions about sex and gender that aren’t true. I thought I was liberated from all of that.” I smiled. “T didn’t want you to think I was a man. I wanted you to see how much mote complicated I am. I wanted you to like what you saw.” Ruth brushed my cheek with her fingertips. I shivered. “Well, I didn’t understand right away, but I thought you were awfully cute and handsome and interesting-looking,” Even Ruth’s words were gifts. I dropped my eyes so she couldn’t see my Stone Butch Blues 277 hunger for her attention. “Oh, Ruth. I wish we had out own words to describe ourselves, to connect us.” Ruth stood up and opened the broiler. “I don’t need another label,” she sighed. “T just am what I am. I call myself Ruth. My mother is Ruth Anne; my grandmother was Anne. That’s who I am. That’s where I come from.” I shrugged. “I don’t want another label either. I just wish we had words so pretty we'd go out of our way to say them out loud.” As Ruth set the plate down I stared at the steak. “What are these little sprigs of things on top?” I asked. “Sage.” She spooned tiny carrots and miniature squash onto my plate. She opened the oven door and served me steaming bread and sweet butter. Every bit tasted like music in my mouth. “Now we'll have the wonderful dessert you brought,” Ruth said. She filled two earthen bowls with blueberries, drizzled them with heavy cream, and sprinkled them with sugar. I blinked away tears and squeezed her arm. “Ruth ...” The words got stuck in my throat. She covered my hand with hers. “I know all about hunger, Jess.” She lifted her mug. “To friendship?” 278 = Leslie Feinberg I clinked my mug against hers. “Yes,” I answered, “to our friendship.” I shopped for used furniture, the first sign of my own spring thaw. Ruth seemed more excited than I did

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  At 3:30 I pulled my bike up in front of the supermarket. I wished I had a second helmet. Edna looked my Harley up and down and smiled, as though she liked what she saw. Then she looked at me the same way. “It’s good to see you, Jess. How long has it been?” I could have asked her when she broke up with Jan, but I thought better of it. “Well, my hand was in that contraption and we were on strike. I think it was 67, so it’s been twelve years. ’m almost thirty, can you believe itr” Edna nodded. “That means you’re just about the age I was when you thought I was such an old woman.” I shook my head. “That’s not fair, Edna. The problem was I was so young, I never thought you were old.” Edna took my face in her hands. I felt my cheeks flush. “Pm sorry,” she said, “that was my feat.” I offered her my helmet. She swung her leg over the bike and settled behind me. Her body felt so damn good against mine. “Where are we going?” she asked. “T don’t know.” I gently popped the clutch. We ended up at the zoo. The air smelled fresh there, washed by the rain. We walked on a bed of wet leaves, under a latticework of branches. I ached to hold her hand. We tried to make small talk, but there wasn’t anything either of us said that seemed insignificant. I tried to wait before I asked the question clenched in my throat, but I couldn’t put it off any longer. I turned to her. “I can’t take another step till I ask you a question.” She shook her head shyly. “No.” “No, I can’t ask you a question?” She smiled. “No, ?’'m not with anyone.” A grin spread across my face, then I checked it. “T was just wondering.” We stood and faced each other under a maple tree. “How about you? Are you with anyone?” she asked. I shook my head. The maple seeds whirled around us. I caught one on my palm. “We used to call these helicopters,” I said, as I let it twirl to the ground. Edna ran her fingertips across the beard stubble on my cheek. I wished I had shaved before I’d gone to the gym. She touched my lips, my hair, my neck— as though she was searching for me with her hands. “Have I changed so much?” I asked her, afraid to hear her answer. She smiled and shook her head. “No. In a way I don’t know how anyone in the world could think you're a man, especially if they looked into your eyes.”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  When it was my turn to read the next day, I brought my math book with me up to the front of the room. At the beginning of the semester I’d made a cover for the textbook out of a brown grocery bag and copied a poem by Poe across the inside flap. I cleared my throat and looked at Mrs. Noble. She smiled and nodded at me. I read the first eight lines: From childhood'’s hour I have not been AAs others were—lI have not seen Ass others saw—lI could not bring My passions from a common spring. From the same source I have not taken My sorrow; I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone; And all I lov, I lovad alone. I tried to read the words in a flat sing-song tone without feeling, so none of the kids would understand what his poem meant to me, but their eyes were already glazed with boredom. I dropped my gaze and walked back to my seat. Mrs. Noble squeezed my arm as I passed, and when I looked up I saw she had tears in her eyes. The way she looked at me made me want to cry, too. It was as though she could really see me, and there was no criticism of me in her eyes. The whole world was in motion, but you’d never have known it from my life. The only way I heard about the Civil Rights movement was from the copies of LIFE magazine that came to our house. Every week I was the first one in the family to read the newest issue. The image burned into my mind was one of two water fountains labeled Colored and White. Other photos let me see brave people—dark-skinned and light—try to change that. I read their picket signs. I saw them bloodied at lunch counters in Greensboro, facing down steely-faced troops in Little Rock. I saw their clothes ripped from their bodies by fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham. I wondered if I could ever be that brave. I saw a picture from Washington, D.C., of more people than I ever could have imagined coming together in one place. Martin Luther King told them about his dream. I wished I could be part of it. I studied my parents’ faces as they calmly read the same magazines. They never said a word about it. The world was turning upside down and they quietly leafed through the pages as though they were skimming a Sears catalog, “T wish I could go down South on a Freedom Ride,” I said out loud one night at dinner. I watched my parents exchange a complex series of looks across the table. They continued to eat in silence. My father put down his fork. “That has nothing to do with us,” he firmly closed the subject.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  And a dazzling frieze on La Brea: Creek statues, painted like movie stars, lounge among L.A. palmtrees; The Thinker, unusually muscular, is tanned bronze. And four thousand and forty-three and seven-tenths acres of land donated to Los Angeles by, bless him, Colonel Griffith J. Griffith. Griffith Park in the midst of the great city, acres of forested hills, miles of driving roads and hiking paths. Golf courses, tennis courts, sex haunts, meandering horse trails, merry-go-round, springs, picnic areas, exhibitionistic heaven, train rides, Travel Town, Mineral Wells, flowers, voyeurs' delight, wild trees, squirrels, sexual paradise, wild deer, bird-watching; and a saintly hermit lived in the park undetected for months. There's a makebelieve sky at Griffith Park Observatory. Every hour they create a star-spilled sky on a magic cyclorama. The sky that used to be. On the beach, a man plants an exotic red cloth poster decorated with magazine pictures of Coca-Cola bottles, Marlboro men, Volkswagen vans, refrigerators, furniture. In a booming voice he gathers tanned bodies about him on the sand. Beard and hair scratching at the sea wind, he prophesies: “I predict the sun will set tonight, and I predict the night will come, I predict the night will fade at dawn, and the sun will rise again, I predict people will die and new ones will be born.” Acceptance as prophecy. Survival as habit. 2:12 P.M. Griffith Park. The Road. Another Hill. B ACK ON THE main road—and a new wave of men has poured into the tide already in the park—the two muscular men smile at each other. Both hesitate to enter their cars, resisting the ancestral pull to become strangers again after the intimacy; each waits as if for the other to extend the connection into another time, another place, another level. But neither can, that ancestral fear of rejection pulls. Still smiling, still hesitating, still looking back, they inch toward their cars, slowly, wait at open doors—and then they drive away. As superb as the sexual sharing was only moments earlier, Jim is aware immediately of an instant panicked emptiness. Only one moment of time was conquered, the experience ending when it began. Another eternity challenges him. So he drives to another side of the park, to another hill in the arena. Suddenly the fragment of a broken memory cuts.… Danny. The sun's heat laps at the park and him as he climbs the rocky barren hill. Only at the top are there trees. The brush is sear, brittle, weedy along the jagged “paths.” Almost at the top, Jim looks up and sees a copper-tanned, tall man standing naked on a rock. Because he's attracted to him—and because others are here, wandering the area, in trunks, or clothed, or lying nude in depressed clearings of rocks-Jim turns away sharply, obviating even the barest possibility of rejection; but he makes himself available like this: He slides under a gathering of trees nearby. A man is blowing another.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  They’re at the edge of the woods now. The park is a series of gentle green slopes, trees, paths, and farther on, a playground of sorts. In the distance, he sees a couple of people with dogs tossing colored disks in the low light of evening. The sound of traffic from the nearby road washes in like the sound of the ocean. “Don’t cry, man,” Nolan says, and Milton almost screams. “Shut up,” he says. “Are you gonna cry about it?” “Cry about what, Nolan?” “Hell if I know, you won’t tell me anything.” “Well, that should tell you everything, shouldn’t it? What’s to tell?” • • • WHEN THEY REACH GLAD HILL, people are gathered around an orange fire in a barrel. Music plays from a portable speaker nearby. Milton doesn’t recognize anyone except for Tate and Abe, of course, and one or two others. Abe is enormous, well over six feet and bulky. He resembles a large, white bull, with a massive head and a forehead that juts forward. Tate is almost hilariously thin, reedy and short. He has crooked teeth but a good, kind face. He is neither good nor kind, however, and his favorite act of violence is to burn holes into people’s clothes when they aren’t looking. Compared with Nolan, they are rough and dull. But then, compared with Nolan, anyone would seem lesser, made of inferior stuff, Milton included. Abe and Tate bring out the worst in Nolan, excite the animal part in him. The last time they were all together, smoking in the woods and drinking cheap beer, Tate gripped Nolan’s arm, hauled him up, and punched him. Not a hard punch. Tate could never hurt Nolan. But the surprise of the act, the vicious courage of it, made Nolan stagger. Milton was up off the ground in an instant, gripping Tate’s throat, but Nolan pushed him aside, and head-butted Tate one hard time. And then, in the evening, they were all over each other, he and Tate and Abe and Milton, throwing fists and elbows. They fought for what felt like hours, but for what must have been only minutes, biting and scratching and punching. After that fight, Abe and Tate went home together, shouting and shoving. Nolan reached for Milton’s raw, ugly hand. The scabbed edges of their fingertips brushed once, and then no more. Here, tonight, with the fire going loud and brilliant, Milton tightens up. Abe cracks a loose grin. “Millie,” he says. “Fuck you, Abraham.” Abe smiles—a cold dagger in the night. “ ’Sup, No Dick?” Nolan gives Abe the finger, which elicits a hoot. Abe slaps his hand against his thick thigh and then stands up. “Beer’s in the cooler, ladies.” “God, I hate him,” Nolan says with a shake of his head. “Could have fooled me,” Milton says. “Well.” There’s nothing to say. They’re here.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Dede turned his head, signaling a last farewell from the comer of his eye, but his friend took this to be a wink of complicity at Dede's own mirror image. Dede had scarcely closed the door when he felt his muscles melt, his extremities soften as in the execution of a graceful bow. It was the same feeling he had experienced while playing around Mario's face : he had been overcome by a weakness, quickly restrained, that had awakened in him a longing-his neck already bending forward, languidly-to rest his head on Mario's thick thigh. "Dedet" He opened the door again. 56 I JEAN GENET "What is it?" Mario came toward him, looked him straight in the eye. He said, in a gentle whisper: "You know I trust you, don't you, buddy?" Surprise in his eyes, mouth half--open, Dede looked at the detective without answering, without seeming to understand. "Come back in for a minute . . ." Gently Mario drew him into the room and shut the door. "I know you'll do your best to find out what's going on. But, as I said, I trust you. Nobody must get to know that I am here in your room. All right?" The detective put his large, gold-beringed hand on the little informer's shoulder, then pulled him close to his chest: "We've been working together for quite some time now, eh, buddy? Now you're on your own. I count on you." He kissed him on the side of the head and let him go. This was only the second time since they had gotten to know one another that he had called the boy �'buddy." Mario considered this fairly low-class language, but it was effective in sealing their friendship. Dede took off do'Yn the stairs. Natural young tough that he was, it did not take him long to shake off his gloom. He stepped out into the street. Mario had listened to his familiar footfall-bouncy, sure and steady-as he descended the wooden staircase of the miserable little hotel. In two strides, for the room was small and Mario a big man, he was by the window. He pulled aside the thick tulle curtain, yellowed by smoke and dirt. Before him were the narrow street and the wall. It was dark. Tony's power was growing. He was turning into every shadow, every patch of the thickening fog into which Dede was now plunging. Querelle jumped ashore from the patrol boat. Other sailors came after him, Vic among them. They were coming from Le Vengeur. The boat would be there to take them back on board sllortly before eleven. The fog was very dense, so substantial that it seemed as if the day itself had taken on material form. 57 I QUERELLE

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  If they stayed for seeing his shadow, as I opine, enough is answered: let them do him honour and he may be precious to them.” Ne’er saw I flaming vapours 2 so swiftly cleave the bright sky at early night, or August clouds at setting sun, but that they returned upward in less, and, arrived there, with the others wheeled round to us, like a troop that hastes with loosened rein. “This people that presses on to us is many, and they come to entreat thee,” said the poet; “but go thou ever on and, while going, listen.” “O soul, that goest to be glad with those members which thou wast born with,” they came crying, “arrest a while thy step. Look if e’er thou sawest any one of us, so that thou mayst bear tidings of him yonder: ah, wherefore goest thou? ah, wherefore stayest thou not? We were all slain by violence and sinners up to the last hour: then light from heaven made us ware so that, repenting and pardoning, we came forth from life reconciled with God, who penetrates us with desire to behold him.” And I: “How much soever I gaze in your faces, I recognize none; but if aught I can do may please you, ye spirits born for bliss, speak ye; and I will do it for the sake of that peace, which, following the steps of such a guide, makes me pursue it from world to world.” And one 3 began: “Each of us trusts in thy good offices without thine oath, if only want of power cut not off the will. Wherefore I, who merely speak before the others, pray thee, if e’er thou see that country which lies between Romagna and that of Charles, that thou be gracious to me of thy prayers in Fano, so that holy orison be made for me, that I may purge away my heavy offences. Thence sprang I; but the deep wounds whence flowed the blood wherein my life was set, were dealt me in the bosom of the Antenori, there where I thought to be most secure. He of Este had it done, who held me in wrath far beyond what justice would. But if I had fled towards La Mira, when I was surprised at Oriaco, I should yet be yonder where men breathe. I ran to the marshes, and the reeds and the mire entangled me so, that I fell; and there saw I a pool growing on the ground from my veins.” Then said another: “Prithee,—and so be that desire satisfied which draws thee up the lofty mount—with kindly pity help my desire.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  aliquanto longius video frondosi nemoris convallem 144 BOOK IV WHEN noon was come, and now the broiling heat of the sun had most power, we turned into a village to certain old men of the thieves' acquaintance and friends, for verily their meeting and embracing together did give me (poor ass) cause to deem the same: and they took the truss from my back, and gave them part of the treasure that was in it, and they seemed to whisper and tell them that it was stolen goods ; and after that we were unladen of our burdens they let us loose into a meadow to pasture, but I would not feed there with my own horse and Milo's ass, for that I was not wont to eat hay, but I must seek my dinner in some other place. Where- fore I leaped into a garden which was behind the stable, and being well nigh perisbed with hunger, although I could find nothing there but raw and green salads, yet I filled my hungry guts therewithal abundantly, and praying unto all the gods, I looked about in every place if I could espy any roses in the gardens by, and my solitary being alone did put me in good hope, that if I could find any remedy, being far from the public road and hidden by the bushes, I should presently out of the low gait of a beast be changed out of every one's sight into a man walking upright. Now while I tossed on the flood of these cogita- tions, V looked about, and behold I saw afar off a K 145 LUCIUS APULEIUS umbrosam, cuius inter varias herbulas et laetissima virecta fulgentium rosarum mineus color renidebat : iamque apud mea non usquequaque ferina prae- cordia Veneris et Gratiarum lucum illum arbitra- bar, cuius inter opaca secreta floris genialis regius nitor relucebat. Tunc invocato hilaro atque pro- spero Eventu cursu me concito proripio, ut Hercule ipse sentirem non asinum me, verum etiam equum currulem nimio velocitatis refectum. Sed agilis atque praeclarus ille. conatus fortunae meae scaevitatem anteire non potuit; iam enim loco proximus non illas rosas teneras et amoenas, madidas divini roris et nectaris, quas rubi felices beatae spinae generant, at ne convalem quidem usquam, nisi tantum ripae fluvialis marginem densis arboribus saeptam video: hae arbores in lauri faciem prolixe foliatae pariunt in modum floris inodori porrectos caliculos modice puni- cantes, quos equidem fragrantes minime rurestri vocabulo vulgus indoctum rosas laureas appellant, 3 quarumque cuncto pecori cibus letalis est Talibus fatis implicitus et iam ipsam salutem recusans sponte illud venenum rosarium sumere gestiebam ; sed dum cunctanter accedo decerpere, iuvenis quidam, ut mihi videbatur, hortulanus, cuius omnia prorsus holera vastaveram, tanto damno cognito, cum grandi baculo furens decurrit, arreptumque me totum plagis obtundit adusque vitae ipsius periculum, nisi tandem sapienter alioquin ipse mihi tulissem auxilium: nam lumbis elevatis in altum, pedum posterioribus calci- 146 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Their footsteps throw up a soft rustle as they move across the bed of leaves and sticks. Milton feels his way ahead with his feet, searching for hidden dangers. Nolan bumps against him occasionally, and Milton commits these nudges to memory along with the shape of the mountain pressing against the night sky. “Who are you texting anyway? Abe?” “No, not Abe. Nobody, really.” “Somebody,” Milton teases. “Can’t be nobody, can it?” “None of your business, anyway, is it?” “None of my business,” Milton repeats. “Sure.” “Do you really want to know? That’s weird, right? But I’ll tell you if you want to know.” “If you wanted to tell me, you would have.” There is more meaning to Milton’s voice than he intends, but he cannot deny the truth of it or how much it bothers him. Perhaps it’s that soon he’ll be gone and whoever is on the other end of that phone will remain. That even when Milton’s gone, Nolan will be able to speak to this other person, and so this moment may be the last time he and Nolan will walk together through these woods, among the shadows of their history. He grins, pushes at Nolan’s shoulder. “Don’t be so sensitive.” “We’re almost there,” Nolan says. Milton catches the tilt of the sky through the trees overhead. The incline underfoot pitches higher. “Yeah.” “Man, look. You got something to say, then say it. You hate me? What?” “Hate you?” “I mean, you know, if you’re sick of my shit, I get it. I don’t think it’s fair, but I get it.” “I don’t even know what that means, Nolan.” “It means if you’re sick of my shit, I get it. I would be.” “I’m not sick of your shit,” Milton says, but Nolan isn’t looking at him. He’s back on his phone, scrolling. “Sure, okay.” “Because I didn’t jump up right away to go hang out with fucking Abe? Come on.” “Why do you hate him so much?” “I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody,” Milton says. They’re at the edge of the woods now. The park is a series of gentle green slopes, trees, paths, and farther on, a playground of sorts. In the distance, he sees a couple of people with dogs tossing colored disks in the low light of evening. The sound of traffic from the nearby road washes in like the sound of the ocean. “Don’t cry, man,” Nolan says, and Milton almost screams. “Shut up,” he says. “Are you gonna cry about it?” “Cry about what, Nolan?” “Hell if I know, you won’t tell me anything.” “Well, that should tell you everything, shouldn’t it? What’s to tell?” • • •

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The last time that he’d spoken to Sophie was at the end of the summer. They were sleeping in his bed, her body tight to his. The fan drew the heavy air through the window, animated it slightly, and cooled their skin. They slept naked on top of his thin sheet. Sophie’s hair writhed in the fan’s breeze, and he lay there, watching her sleep. He had sensed a distancing between them for a couple of weeks, ever since they had seen Charles at the bonfire that night after the concert in the park. Sophie left Alek’s lap to speak to Charles, and he had been forced to watch it all unfurl. Charles, thick, as if cut from the side of a mountain. Charles with his decent but unremarkable technique. Charles with his curls and handsome face—he and Sophie had gone around together for as long as Alek had known them both, but Sophie had surprised him by letting him kiss her the night after the cough began. Sophie had let him put his hand on her lower back and draw her to him, had let him feel so much bigger for it, in control of both of their bodies. It was like partnering, how one only appears to surrender to the illusion of grace. And then he’d thought, perhaps, that she liked him enough, that he was enough for her. That she and Charles were done. They made small dinners. They spoke together in low voices outside the practice hall. They held hands in the casual, easy way that comes to people in relationships. Alek had begun to imagine a lifetime of such minor joys, small intimacies, which were all he could manage. They would be dancers and in love. But when she left him by the fire to stand next to Charles, he had known that the thing between them, for all its easiness and the joy it brought him, would end. And so for weeks he had watched her recede. Watched her from the back of morning exercises, from the back of the library as she looked over old choreography. Watched her over dinner and coffee, even watched her buy cigarettes from the corner store, waiting for her to turn to him and smile and shrug. Waiting and watching. The last time he spoke to Sophie was some morning, when she was putting on her clothes and tying up her hair, shrugging. He watched the expanse of her back vanish into her shirt, and she turned, kissed his palm, and said she would call him later. But she didn’t. • • •

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I see phantoms in relationships sometimes; certain ways people are with each other that I can’t be. I wonder if maybe I would have wanted kids, if none of this had happened. Maybe I wouldn’t—maybe that part would have been the same and it would have just been clearly not for me. But I think I might have, and that life is a ghost for me, haunting, distant, just out of reach across the line of my life. For me, it got better and worse and better again. I lost some of the most important people in my life because they could not stand by me while I was walking into darkness. Others said they would, and then did not, and that changes a person. I am less trusting now. When people say they’ll be there, I think, We’ll see. But there are rarely days that lay me out, now. It’s hard to knock me down for long. This many years into living with these scars, into being a person who carries this thing with me, I am fairly adept at it. I can shift the weight of it around, I know what it looks like on different days, how it moves with me through the seasons, through the years. I own my identity. I am a survivor, and I am out as a survivor, and I keep coming out as one over and over again. I am not shy about it, and I am not ashamed. But if people want details, if they want the easily consumable tragedy so that they can file me away somewhere and not have to think about it again, they are not going to get it from me. This story is in the bedrock of me. It’s in my bones, what happened, and I have grown around it and over it, and you can’t have it. It’s mine. Picture PerfectSharisse TraceyDADDY MOVED US OUT TO CALIFORNIA WHEN I WAS FIVE; Mommy didn’t like it there. I hated being there as an only child mostly because, if I’d had a brother or sister, I would’ve had someone to play with. Daddy said that I was spoiled, but I worked more at thirteen than he did; like Cliff Huxtable, he was home a lot while Mommy worked at the phone company. My dad was a freelance photographer who worked steady for a while until he got too sick with sickle cell. I never really saw him in a photo shoot with models (or women wanting to be models), but I sure saw the results in his albums. My mom didn’t seem to mind about the pictures—or, if she did, I didn’t know. I never heard them arguing about his photography or the women in the shots.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Farnland wet his lips as though he had received something appetizing. Charles watched his eyes go glossy and distant. It was the same expression that came across Farnland’s face during rehearsals when he watched Viktor shadow Charles, learning the overly emotive choreography of the middle section. It was supposed to be drawn from The Four Temperaments but lacked that piece’s emotional reserve. On Viktor, Farnland’s choreography was hectic, scattered. On Charles, because he lacked Viktor’s speed, it had a certain gravitas. Or so Charles liked to think. But during rehearsal last week, he had looked up to see Farnland watching Viktor as he made some adjustments to the ending combination. That same distant, wantful gloss of the eyes, the subtle shifting of the lips as the music wound up to its slow conclusion. “Well, just remember, we’re all after the same thing.” “Right. Pathos.” “Fucker,” Farnland said, but then he smiled, showing Charles his teeth, gnarly and green-yellow. Charles smiled back. Pathos was what Farnland had called his “dumb number.” It was, he said often during rehearsal, art’s most noble pursuit. One evening, one of the other dancers had jokingly said, What about ethos? And Farnland, from a seated position, had flung a hard-shell water bottle at her head. Then he’d shouted them all down for ten minutes about making snide little remarks and the terrors of their generation. What did any of them know about art? About anything? Charles half wished that Farnland would make a scene now. That he’d do something. But he didn’t. Farnland waved him off and pushed out into the hall. The noise from the class next door, the music, filled the room briefly, and then was gone. Charles flexed his fist and worked over his knee. Little old man, full of spite. But Charles had done nothing to stop him. • • • CHARLES CUT THROUGH THE COURTYARD, scattering a group of smoking students. They trailed white smoke, legible in the piercing daylight. His sweat had turned to a chalky crust, and he could feel it breaking up when he moved, cold sneaking in against his skin. The class had done its work. His muscles were warm, and he felt pliant, alive. He’d pulled the brace on to give his knee some relief. On the other side of the courtyard, he slipped into the dance library. Sophie often haunted the upper levels of the library in the media room, looking over old choreography. She could have streamed it on her phone in high definition, but she liked browsing through the years of archival footage, poring over little-known, minor dancers, taking bits here and there from everyone like a magpie. He found her sitting on the floor with an enormous album covering her entire lap. She was running her finger up and down the list, deciding which to take out.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Everyone went out into the backyard, even though it had started to snow; there was nothing to see but the glare of the lampposts through the trees and the bright blue light from the neighbors’ shed. They passed around a joint someone had brought. “Analog vaping,” the host said. “Love it.” Lionel reached out through the porch railings and combed through the fat flakes of snow that drifted downward through the night. Their delicacy as they melted made him want to cry. The host smelled like wine and pot, sweet and a little musky. He squatted next to Lionel, and they bumped shoulders. “Do you want to stay over tonight?” the host asked. “To properly celebrate.” Lionel knew he meant Do you want to have sex? He asked it loud enough for others to hear, but quiet enough to suggest that there was some seriousness to the query. Lionel looked out at the other people’s faces and wondered what they would do if he said yes. “Hmm,” he said instead. There, with their faces pressed close and the smell of smoke in his hair, Lionel felt that if things had been slightly different he might easily have said yes and let himself be pulled under. If only for the possibility that the host’s good luck and good life might rub off on him. Charles sat on a stool and Sophie leaned down against his back. She had her arms around his neck, but she was watching Lionel. She was not quite smiling at him. No, not that. But there was warmth beneath her expression. In the porch light, she glowed. Charles stroked her arm with his finger. They could go on forever that way, Lionel thought. They knew what to do to each other. How to be together. That business in the kitchen had been an aberration, or maybe just the prelude to this tenderness. Sophie kissed the top of Charles’s head and pulled away from him. She sat next to Lionel in her thick gray tights and corduroy skirt. She had a purple jacket over her shoulders and a green hat that someone had knit for her. As everyone had been getting ready to go outside, she had passed the hat around, clearly proud of it, like a family heirloom. “Rough going at dinner. I see you and Charlie made up, though.” She propped her chin on her hand. Charlie. “Yeah,” Lionel said. “We’re old buddies now.” Sophie’s face shifted subtly under the porch light, like a figure from myth or a trailer for an ominous horror movie. Charles leaned forward on the stool and braced his arms on the banister. In the yard, the others had begun to spin in slow circles with their heads back and their arms out in Christ pose. “He’s good at enjoying himself,” Sophie said. “I’m afraid I’m out of my depth. Or maybe I’m too drunk to have this conversation.”