Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  However, a beautiful, hazy pre-war sort of day—lunch at the Club with Driberg, who was very flattering & said he thought I only looked 42. He told me about some of his exploits, though I was perhaps a shade reticent about mine: with him one simply doesn’t know where they’ll end up—careless talk etc. We lamented the still frequent attacks & insults meted out to coloured servicemen, by the English though mainly of course by the Yanks. It seems all Driberg’s attempts to counter the foul American laws, in Parliament & out, have been unsuccessful. Never mind, he said, he tried to make it up to them personally. Afterwards I wandered through Soho & then in Charing Cross Road saw three black GIs loitering along rather idyllically, smoking cigarettes & looking at girls. They had that touching quality which off-duty soldiers so often do have, as if they knew they ought to be up to something but didn’t quite know what it was. There was a fat one, a thin one & an inbetween one with a lost, ingenuous expression which was decidedly heart-stopping. He was clearly the butt of his two smart friends’ humour & had an infinitely tolerant, good-hearted glow about him. I walked beside them to pick up their talk, & then went on & took up an insouciant pose on the other side of Oxford Street, by the Lyon’s Corner House. By some sublime, birthday miracle they split up on the corner opposite, Fat & Thin turning back down Charing Cross Rd as if to have a second, more determined go at something they had funked or got wrong the first time, while my friend crossed over & then crossed again, to the far side of Tottenham Court Road. When I strolled over myself he was looking at the posters at the little cinema there. He appeared uncertain about the prospect of an afternoon of This Happy Breed and something else with Jack Hulbert in. He asked me if I’d seen these films, & I said I had (which I hadn’t) and that they were unutterably tedious. It seemed to me that if he cd be kept out of the cinema then there were possibilities: I wasn’t going to go in with him & sit it out expectantly in the dark for hours on end, smoking American cigarettes. I said why didn’t he come & have a swim at the Corinthian Club, that’s what I was going to do.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I imagined a life consecrated to the image of Luc, a shuttered house, the icon of his extraordinary face candlelit in each room—until I saw with a shiver that I had killed him off already, perhaps too high a price for either of us to pay. I went upstairs in search of Jane, standing aside at the first turning for the couple who had come in before me, and overhearing their firm Cheshire distaste for what they had walked all this way to see; I warmed to them and despaired of them at the same moment; then past the door of Paul Echevin's office, which was slightly open in approved Orstian style, his voice heard on the phone, trying to wind up a conversation. And there Jane was. She wasn't entirely alone: other figures and various beasts paced and waited in the starry twilight, the jewelled Hades that she inhabited. But she was always the one on whom the drama turned or the mood centred. In a big triptych, hinged like an altarpiece, you saw only her ringed left hand scooping a train of crumpled satin, like a bride entering a carriage, but you knew it was her. In other pictures, cropped in similar startling ways, you were given only the firm-jawed lower half of her face and the hair spread out, or gathered round her like a shroud. A conversation-piece, where half a dozen women lazed on a terrace with tea and sewing and cigarettes while sunset waned through trees and spires beyond, turned out to be all Jane—full face, once smiling, once pensive, both profiles, a chicly bustled rear view, stretching, hands pressed to the small of the back, and a tender profil perdu, which spoke of intimacy and oblivion; in the mannered vastness of the flat gold frame, the words "Leal Souvenir" were inscribed in red. Just by repetition the face began to emanate a kind of power, though this was nothing to do with character or expression. Jane Byron might have been a versatile actress but all the roles Orst cast her in were engimatic or monumental—the seer, the sufferer, the sphinx. Even the domestic scenes, depicted with photographic refinement, had an air of suspended animation, and seemed reports from a world of dreams. The face itself was a mask, heavy, almost matronly at times, and while I didn't warm to it in itself I was oddly excited by its pale proliferation. though the pictures showed no concern at all with men (the occasional epicene boy was always in the end a Hebe or a bosomless girl-child) there was none the less something perverse about them which did almost as well.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom vou cannot live. And this is how our lives arc changed, and this is how we are redeemed. NOTHING PERSONAL 7 0 5 What a journey this life is! dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never sec Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, air lanes, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win. I know we often lose, and that the death or destruction of another is infinitely more real and unbearable than one's own. I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, on pain of death, one can never remain where one is. The light. The light. One will perish without the light. I have slept on rooftops and in basements and subways, have been cold and hungry all my life; have felt that no fire would ever warm me, and no arms would ever hold me. I have been, as the song says, 'buked and scorned and I know that I always will be. But, my God, in that darkness, which was the lot of my ancestors and my own state, what a mighty fire burned! In that darkness of rape and degradation, that fine, flying froth and mist of blood, through all that terror and in all that helplessness, a living soul moved and refused to die. We really emptied oceans with a home-made spoon and tore down mountains with our hands. And if love was in Hong Kong, we learned how to swim. It is a mighty heritage, it is the human heritage, and it is all there is to trust. And I learned this through descending, as it were, into the eyes of my father and my mother.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  As vital as it is unruly, The Folding Star shines bright."— Chicago Tribune Copyright © 1994 by Alan Hollinghurst All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018. Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for. "There's Nothing Like Marriage for People" by Ira Gershwin and Arthur Schwartz, © 1959, 1993 by Ira Gershwin Music and Arthur Schwartz Music. All rights on behalf of Ira Gershwin Music administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. First published in the United States in hardcover by Pantheon in 1994 First published in the United States in paperback by Vintage in 1995 This Bloomsbury paperback edition published in 2005 eISBN: 978-1-59691-810-8 To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com . Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters . Chapter 4 "I saw you in the street." "When was that?" "Saturday, at the market." Luc's manner was warily reasonable and left him room to retreat if his first signal of friendship was rejected. I stared at the long, transparent miracle of his face, the slithering stack of hair, eyelashes still stuck with sleep, that brutally vulnerable lip. He was a slightly kitsch piece of work from an artist who carved in alabaster like flushed hard honey. The sleep-creases, a wisp of towel-fluff on a not yet daily razored jaw. "I love you." He looked down at his exercise book and aligned his red, black and blue felt-tip pens with its upper edge. I pumped off a few more rounds of silent "I love you"s—it took two or three seconds only. "You should have said hello." "I'm afraid there was no time." Had he sensed the clumsy semi-panic of my sudden stride across the square? "I was with my friends." Oh his friends . . . I thought of that well-favoured, self-admiring trio and of the trite intimacy of the shorter, darker boy and girl with my Luc, and was almost on the point of telling him about my friends. He mustn't see me as this lonesome crackpot.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Upstairs at the back was an old-fashioned sunroom, with a view that must clear the dunes through wide salt-bleared windows, at each of which a pale Venetian blind was lowered and closed. On the hard standing below, a small sailing-boat lay upside-down on bricks; I twisted my head to read the blistered freehand lettering: L'Allegro, and wondered idly if its sister-vessel was laid up next door. Perhaps Luc was half-heartedly caulking it right now. My heart raced when I heard footsteps coming up behind: it was Matt, hair still wet from swimming (though quilled and looped a bit by the breeze), and sand drying in the dark hairs on his calves. "You've been ages," I said. "couldn't you find them? Perhaps they're all in the house." "No, I found them." He half-turned from me, pushed down his waistband and pissed fiercely into the bushes; then stood for a while slapping his dick in his palm as a doctor smacks a vein he wants to rise; then with a snarl of regret stuffed the stiff thing back so that it jutted awkwardly and then slowly slumped. I was hungry to know what had happened, and also just plain hungry. It was high lunchtime. "Shall we go up to that bar and get something to eat?" "Yeah, you go," he said. "I had a beer and a sandwich on the beach." "Oh. Well, thanks for bringing me some." He strolled off a pace or two and stood with hands on hips looking up at the house. "I'll tell you something," he said. "That boy is wild." A shot of pain and acclamation went through me. "Well, I told You," I pointed out. "I told you he was a golden dream made solid flesh." "No, not the golden dream one," he said. "Well, he's okay, he's a bit skinny, a bit weird . . . those lips? No, the other kid, Patrick." Matt looked at me and shook his head. "I'll tell you something, that boy has got a whopper. A total fucking monster between his legs." "How do you know?" "Man, you only have to be a hundred yards away to see that. He's running round in these little swimming-things, he's got this big fat strong arse sticking out the back and this unbelievable package out front. The whole beach was just, like, fixated on it." Matt gripped himself between the legs and shivered. "I'm glad you've enjoyed yourself," I said tartly but truthfully too. The lesson was working. "I'd like to see him myself. What was Luc wearing?" "What? Oh, sort of trousers, like sailing trousers, long trousers but short." "He wasn't swimming in long trousers?" "He was reading a book." Oh, my obedient Luc, taking my instructions so simply to heart. "Are they still out there?" "Yes, they'll be there for a bit. Then they're probably going to take a boat out this afternoon. They've got this nice little dinghy." "Mm. I shouldn't let your imagination run away with you."

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I heard the morning noises: the toilet, the coughing, Donna’s hostile muttering. Often, in the past, I had woken early and lain in bed listening to my family clumsily trying to organize itself for the day. Often as not, their sounds made me feel irrational loathing. This morning, I felt despair and a longing for them, and a sureness that we would never be close as long as I lived. My nasal passages became active with tears that didn’t reach my eyes. My mother knocked on the door. “Honey, aren’t you going to be late?” “I’m not going to work. I feel sick. I’ll call in.” “I’ll do it for you, just stay in bed.” “No, I’m going to call. It has to be me.” I didn’t call in. The lawyer didn’t call the house. I didn’t go in or call the next day or the day after that. The lawyer still didn’t call. I was slightly hurt by his absent phone call, but my relief was far greater than my hurt. After I’d stayed home for four days, my father asked if I wasn’t worried about taking so much time off. I told him I’d quit, in front of Donna and my mother. He was dumbfounded. “That wasn’t very smart,” he said. “What are you going to do now?” “I don’t care,” I said. “That lawyer was an asshole.” To everyone’s discomfort, I began to cry. I left the room, and they all watched me stomp up the stairs. The next day at dinner my father said, “Don’t get discouraged because your first job didn’t work out. There’re plenty of other places out there.” “I don’t want to think about another job right now.” There was a disgruntlement all around the table. “Come on now, Debby, you don’t want to throw away everything you worked for in that typing course,” said my father. “I don’t blame her,” said Donna. “I’m sick of working for assholes.” “Oh, shit,” said my father. “If I had quit every job I’ve had on those grounds, you would’ve all starved. Maybe that’s what I should’ve done.” “What happened, Debby?” said my mother. I said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and I left the room again. — After that they may have sensed, with their intuition for the miserable, that something hideous had happened. Because they left the subject alone. I received my last paycheck from the lawyer in the mail. It came with a letter folded around it. It said, “I am so sorry for what happened between us. I have realized what a terrible mistake I made with you. I can only hope that you will understand, and that you will not worsen an already unfortunate situation by discussing it with others. All the best.” As a P.S. he assured me that I could count on him for excellent references.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Susan opened her eyes and contemplated the maniacal outline of a feathered hat hanging on Bobby’s coatrack. In retrospect she had to admit that part of her anger had come from the element of truth in Leisha’s last accusation. But Stef and Anna had been interesting to her at the time; and anyway, how dare she indeed? Susan turned over in bed. Their fantasies had changed, their tastes in props had diverged, and neither one could satisfy the other’s needs any longer. Since what they were inside didn’t matter, they separated. Susan had ended a chapter in her life, and doubtless it had felt the same to Leisha, who probably saw their friendship as a symbol of bad living and delusion. Leisha had sent Susan the engraved wedding invitation a week after their discussion. (“The honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of…”) Susan had said “How beautiful” to her empty apartment and summarily shredded the card. Susan turned over again. Still, she wished she knew where Leisha was. She would like to talk to her. She remembered the time they had gone dancing one summer. They had danced for hours in a hot, damp place, until they collapsed in each other’s arms, Leisha’s small, sweating, palpitating chest pressed against hers. She remembered having the almost tangible sensation that they were creatures with delicate invisible feelers waving between them, sending tenderness and warmth from one to the other. She sat up and turned on the bedside light. She could reach Leisha. She probably still had friends in Manhattan who knew where she was. After a minute’s thought, she remembered the last names of two of Leisha’s friends. Dialing information, she discovered that one of them no longer lived in the city and the other was unlisted. She called the restaurant where Leisha had worked; it was still open, but no one remembered her. The only possibility was the man they had both dated; the last Susan had heard, he was living in New York, but they hadn’t spoken for years and it was after two o’clock in the morning. She had to pace the room for fifteen minutes before she developed the courage to call. When he finally answered he was too surprised to be nasty, until she asked him if he knew where Leisha was. “I really don’t know. I heard that they moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago, but that might’ve been a rumor. You called me at two-thirty in the morning to ask about Leisha?”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Then I realized that I was standing in the sight of hun dreds of incarcerated women. Behind those bars and windows, I don't know how many pairs of female eyes were riveted on the one male in that courtyard. I could dimly see their faces at the windows all up and down that wall; and they did not 396 NO NAM E IN THE STREE T make a sound. For a moment I thought that I would never be able to persuade my feet to carry me away from that un speakable, despairing, captive avidity. My first night in Montgomery, I, like a good reporter, de cided to investigate the town a little. I had been warned to be very careful how I moved about in the South after dark indeed, I had been told not to move at all; but it was a plea sant evening, night just beginning to fall: suppertime. I walked a ways, past dark porches which were mostly silent, yet one felt a presence, or presences, sitting deep in the dark, some times silh ouetted-but rarely-in the light from an open door, or one saw the ember of a cigarette, or heard a child's voice. It was very peaceful, and, though it may sound odd, I was very glad that I had come South. In spite of all that could have divided us, and in spite of the tact that some of them looked on me with an inevitable suspicion, I felt very much at home among the dark people who lived where I, if so much had not been disrupted, would logically have been born. I felt, beneath everything, a profound acceptance, an unfamiliar peace, almost as though, after despairing and debilitating jour neys, I had, at last, come home. If there was, in this, some illusion, there was also some truth. In the years in Paris, I had never been homesick for anything American-neither waffles, ice cream, hot dogs, baseball, majorettes, movies, nor the Empire State Building, nor Coney Island, nor the Statue of Liberty, nor the Daily News, nor Times Square. All of these things had passed out of me as naturally and simply as taking a leak, and even less self -consciou sly. They might never have ex isted for me, and it made absolutely no difference to me if I never saw them again. But I had missed my brothers and my sisters, and my mother-t hey made a difference. I wanted to be able to sec them, and to see their children.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I stayed where I was, at last confident of disaster. This was an older house than the others, maybe the first that had been built out on the dunes below the village. It was shuttered and weather boarded, and at the bottom of the neglected garden another gate under a rustic arch gave on to the beach. Matt had moved the car to the park, where it looked fractionally less conspicuous and almost sensible—a fun-truck, a beach-buggy high on testosterone. Anyone who saw it there would know at once that it belonged to some sporty young fools miles down the beach with a ghetto-blaster and a badminton set. And here we were, stalking through the prickly shrubbery, peering into the back garden of Les Goelands. There seemed to be a whitewashed wall in the way, and nearer the house a dark shed with a tarred roof. You just couldn't see in, and you couldn't hear anything, either. I gave Matt as accurate a description as I could of the little group. "They're all beautiful," I said. "Sibylle is small and self-contained, with glossy reddish-brown hair, and Patrick is stocky and square-faced and unhurried, with short dark hair that sprouts out at different angles; and Luc . . . well, I've told you all about Luc." "You certainly have," said Matt, with a stylish little sarcasm he didn't normally rise to. I sat at the end of the garden whilst he cruised off down the beach in his black swimming-shorts and a singlet. It was like teaching, in a way, knowing how to catch his imagination, to set him tasks he might take to for the pleasure of them. Now he was my eyes, he had to find and recount for me, and my mind's eye followed him over the loose horizon of the sandhills and into the field of play I absurdly couldn't enter. I kicked around in a low-walled patio overgrown with grass and bindweed, with built-in benches warped by sun, and the black griddle of a barbecue that might have been used quite recently: maybe parties stole in from the beach—there were beer-bottles tumbled in a corner and holding their slant few inches of rain. I smoked a cigarette and fizzed the stub into one of them. It was very still, with the lull and whisper of the sea nearby but out of view, and hot sunshine that was a miracle in which the Three uncannily took part: they had known of it in advance, and known, almost without thinking, what to do. I unbuttoned my shirt and lay on one of the benches, breathing the seedy vanilla smell of a bush on which half a dozen late bees still dropped and toppled. Later I walked round the house, and peered in at a couple of places where the shutters were broken, but my own head cut out the light I needed to see by.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He pointed out how the theme of constancy was one which recurred in Orst's work, and the disturbing way in which the artist seemed to admire the constancy of the Chaplain's obsession with the Lady, more than that of the Lady's love for her husband. She was the focus of all the engravings, white-faced, pale-eyed, swirled in her own hair—a premonition of the Jane Byron figure. The first picture was simply an icon of her, though formally displaced, her head at the top left-hand corner, the rest filled with the oscillations of her hair and the vertical plunge of her gown. In the second she was sewing with her (oddly similar) women and the dark folds of the tapestry lifted in their hands set off the mystic pallor of her face as she paused and stared. In the third she lay on the brink of death in a kind of skewed pieta, the wings of the Knight's cloak sheltering her; his face, though, was out of the picture and the black figure of the Chaplain rose exaltedly behind, with upraised hands and eyes. It was a very fin-de-siecle subversion of an old tale going back to the thirteenth century, and found beyond Flanders in French fabliaux and Italian collections. Its unusual ending attracted Orst, and he had simply had his way with it, giving a hint of perverse sexual triumph to the shaven phallic upright of the priest, and the supine surrender of the female, lips parted, eyelids lowering over eyes that still cast an ecstatic light. Note too the use of the fortified tower of St Vaast as a basis for the sketch of a castle which forms the cul-de-lampe: a word that disturbed me for a moment, Luc being a backward offering of cul, Luc's cul a dream palindrome—the two round cheeks of it and the lick of the s between: I was nonsensing and spoonerising it in my mouth all day long. I paused to note the publisher's colophon, achevé March 13, 1897: Editions Guillaume Altidore, and the monogram, a Secessionist GA conjured into a hoop, that I had passed by unsuspectingly amid the exquisite discretion of the cover. "So," I thought, closing the book and laying my hand on it. It felt very remote from Luc, but at the same time gave me the illusion of closeness to him, a share in the glamour of the family history he felt so surprisingly proud and bitter about. My love-struck need for shapes and portents was eased by the curving together of two stories. "Have some lunch here," suggested Paul a bit later. "Lilli's away, we'll have to throw ourselves on the mercy of the fridge." We went through the door between the houses and into their austere little drawing-room, still coloured for me by an obscure sense of social discomforts, of embarrassments probably only I remembered. "As you must have realised, she's very much a country person.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I took no notice, and doubled down the side lane that led into Long Street. It was only a quick couple of minutes and I was standing across the way from the tall house, gazing up reverently, like a young man in a Schubert song, at the sleeping beloved's window. Not that I knew which window was his. Curtains were closed at every one, and the discreet illumination of an old-fashioned lamp, highlighting the black shine of the front door, lost the upper floors to the night. Where I had been shy before, I gazed hungrily now, with anxious exhilaration, at each shadowed opening, up to the dim roofline and the stars that stood beyond. "What's this?" said Matt, coming up beside me. "In there, a beautiful seventeen-year-old boy is asleep." Matt shook his head. "Is that all we've come to see? Or do we get the seventeen-year-old boy as well?" "Please!" I grinned at the Altidore residence and somehow brought Luc to light in my mind, dreaming, lips parted, in near-darkness—pyjamas, for some reason, but the jacket unbuttoned and twisted under him, an arm across his stomach unconsciously repulsing the possessive duvet. I spoke to Matt for a while, incoherently, trying to bring him into my mood, but glad in the end that he wasn't drunk or romantic enough to get there, and that I possessed it unviolated. He had a hand round my waist, under my jacket where I was a bit fat above the belt; when a taxi came by the driver commented on us to his fare—and when they had gone the silence left me awkwardly alert to the noise we must have been making. I remembered nights at home woken by drunks, passing or stopping for half an hour outside our gate, loud and heedless with drink, sometimes women's wild recriminations . . . I pictured Luc stumbling, half-cross, half-curious, to tweak back the curtain, seeing us propped up and talking rubbish in the doorway opposite. Then Matt started undoing my fly. Chapter 1 A man was waiting already on the narrow island of the tramstop, and I asked him falteringly about the routes. He explained politely, in detail, as if it were quite an interest of his; but I didn't take it in. I was charmed by his grey eyes and unnecessary smile, and the flecks of white paint on his nose and his dark-blond hair. I nodded and smiled back, and he fell into a nice pensiveness, hands in pockets, looking out down the empty street. I decided I would follow him. The tram made its noiseless approach, headlamps on although the sky was still bright: the No 3, the Circular. We clambered up the steps together, I sought his help with the ticket-franking machine, which pinged as though I had won a prize.

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

  Before the breakup Larry had not been an aggressive child. He was quiet and withdrawn, a loner at school. His favorite activity at home was to spend long hours lying on his parents’ bed watching TV together with his father. Undoubtedly he missed this close connection and mourned the loss of his father’s companionship. For Larry, his father was an admired and beloved parent and he did not see the serious flaws that led to the divorce. He could not fathom his mother’s experience in this violent marriage. But the appeal of his role as stand-in for his departed father had roots that extended beyond his fear of abandonment and his genuine longing for his father. At age seven a little boy is in the process of identifying with his father and is still engaged in separating from the protective mother of his preschool years. Larry’s longing for his father as a little boy was not only built on his relationship with his father during the marriage but was also rooted in his own developmental need for his father at this time in his life. When the divorce happened, he was still an at-home little boy who had not yet entered the rougher world of play with other little boys. Had his father stayed, Larry would have been able to move gradually into this bigger, more dangerous realm. But the abrupt loss of his father pushed him forward before he was ready. Larry was not comfortable on the playground, but he could not go back to a more childish relationship with his mother. Although there’s never a good time to lose one’s father, it’s especially perilous for six-and seven-year-old boys who still have their footing in the home and are just beginning to feel comfortable in school and on the playground. It wasn’t until adolescence and adulthood, however, as I was to learn, that the destructive elements of Larry’s identification with his father clearly emerged.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I believe many of them died. And all this going on nearly in my lifetime! The sheer evil of it oppressed my heart as I went through the village, putting things to right, rewarding & punishing & laying down the law. At least our justice is felt to be justice. Even so, these days I halt the lash in mid-air, am ready almost to extend a comradely hand instead. Not to be too friendly —that was poor old Fryer’s constant caveat. There’s a great deal in it—not to be the schoolmaster mocked for his absurdity who only wants to be loved. At sundown I went up to the little police parade-ground to see the famous stones—famous, at any rate, to us, & talked about from time to time in Khartoum. There they were, most unmomentous like many famous things, two short pillars of reddish rock, buffed up, & often touched one felt, so that they have a glow like marble. The story as I had heard it was that an Egyptian officer, posted out here for a long time, had gone crazy with the sun & the isolation, shot a colleague & then turned his revolver on himself. It was viewed, certainly, as a warning, but in fact it intrigued me & made me the keener to come, partly because I thrive on the very solitude & emptiness it was meant as a warning against; but also because I never believed the story. Heat & loneliness may have played their part, but for the young man to kill his comrade there must have been some deeper, odder, fiercer reason to it. I see it romantically—one of those intense, amorous Mohammedan friendships that no one talks of or even guesses at in England, but which flourish here with an almost startling luxuriance. One sees them everywhere, in town, among the tribesmen, in my own little retinue, of course … poetical, chivalrous amitiés which none the less must operate on some principle quite beyond the European mind. Perhaps it is just my European mind that insists on this heated little mélodrame —but I see a passion & a festering discontent, a flaring noonday of violence, the remoteness of these stony hills, these fingers & fists thrust up out of the desert, threatening the unspoken balance & courtliness of the affair … Well, we shall never know. The stones were erected in their memory, which suggests that their fellow officers responded to something deeper & more poetic in the case.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Also last night, a dream of Winchester (the events are vague to me now, but the mood was powerful); & all day I have been haunted by it, & felt the intensity of its passions all over again. Not the forgettable saturnalia (which of course I have not forgotten) but the adoration and devotion. I thought mainly, needless to say, of Strong & of Webster. If the truth be told it is them that I think of most often, when I turn out the light, when I wake here, in the hour or so before dawn, when all the night warmth has gone, & for a short spell, until the light begins, the cool wind blows & I unroll the blanket at the foot of the bed. At the same time my memory of them warms me, stealing out from somewhere within and permeating my person. Though it is usually accompanied by excitement, it is not in essence a sexual thing (that is Ross or Van Orde in Mob Lib, or Chancey Brough out at Burford or B. Howard in my rooms after the Commem Ball—or any of the others who stock my private case of lust—its dog-eared pages!) No, with Strong & (more) with sweet Webster, it was the dumb love, the somehow utterly graceful restraint … I wonder often, having no idea, having dreaded even to find out, what all those boys are doing now, hate to think that I remember them alone, while they—Brough where?, in the City? Webster doubtless in some easy colonial office—pass their days among casual acquaintances, returning home by train or trap in the evening to young wives, working out their plans …

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Luc was quite amused by this, he liked to show himself un-shocked, and not being young was a lifetime away. He smiled self-confidently, sexily from under Cherif's tweedy peak. I blinked away the hint of parody. I thought I'd give him a minute or two and then firmly throw him out, with a quick cheek-kiss at the top of the stairs. Then I'd go into the bedroom and in some way break down. Already I felt an agony of regret rising inside me. "I'm afraid it's gentlemen's again," he said, groping for the floor with his drink and surging out of the chair. I showed him where and he went in and slammed the door as if I might want to help. I came back into the room so as not to torture myself with hearing. When he reappeared he had the stricken jokey look of someone battling with tension or the unsaid. He didn't meet my eye. I thought of the unfinished confessions of earlier, and how I didn't want to know more. He threw off the cap with a breathy laugh, wandered to where I was standing and put his arms round me in a loose hug. "Bye, my dear," I said. It was a lovely gesture, but I almost wished he hadn't. My head in the crook of his arm, his head on my shoulder, face hidden from me. I raised a hand and ran it lightly, sorrowfully over his suede back. He seemed to want to draw it out, there was a charge of emotion I hadn't allowed for. I felt him press himself against me, nuzzle his chin more snugly at my collar in a final clinch, let out a mumbled sigh. I supposed he must know everything, it was his clumsy way of saying sorry, a rugger-faggoty brush-off from which I would have to break free any second. I felt his lips pressing, lifting, pressing on my neck. I tried to say "Luc", it was just a swallow, a bubble. There was a shriek of laughter through the wall, a spasm of gabbling, the knock of some dropped object shaking the floor. "What was that?" whispered Luc, chuckling, not nervous, standing back, but still holding me, putting both arms more comfortably round my neck, as I stood there, clutching him feebly, with little terrified sighs. He leant his forehead against mine, he was open-mouthed, too close to see. Slowly I shifted, power ran back into my arms—it was as if something had come into the room or something had gone out. We started to kiss. Luc was asleep.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well, it's, of course, all to do with love." "Mmm." "And as we all know by now, the course of true love never did run straight." "Exactly." "You're much older than me, maybe you can tell me what to do," he said. I studied my thumbs responsibly, wounded, honoured, and when I looked up he was smiling, not quite at me but over my shoulder. "Hi," he said. There was a quick bloom of scented body-lotion, a hand squeezing the back of my neck. Matt was back. He ducked vaguely for a kiss and his gelled hair was cold on my cheek. "Hi," he said quietly, nodding slyly at Luc. "I didn't know I'd see you two in here." "Well, here we are," I said, with a self-satisfaction that made Matt smile. "As it happens, we were just having a terrifically private talk." "Oh, it's not important—" said Luc, who was gazing happily at Matt as if he were his special hero. And he did look glamorous, in his crook's suit and cashmere overcoat, and with his sapphire stud. "No problem. I'll see you soon," he said, moving on down the bar, patting Luc on the shoulder as he went, as though he were a promising pupil of his, not mine. I followed him with my eyes and he turned smiling and made a fisting gesture—I shook my head slightly to say it was not alas like that. He started talking to one of the leather-men. As far as I could see he had something for him in his pocket. "I think that guy Matt must be gay," said Luc. "You're absolutely right," I sighed, as though reluctantly admitting to some long-held secret. And I sensed further questions coming, the boy must be a bit drunk, but still he held back at the edge of this new terrain. I felt that for once I had aroused his curiosity: he was about to be interested in me and my friends. I glanced sideways across low tables where men were gossiping, some with their arms round each other, or snogging in the shadows. How was Luc with all this? A qualm of propriety came and went. They must be sick with envy seeing me with him, my face lit up by his aureole of young heat. "Let's get back to solving your problems," I said, so pleased to be invited in that I ignored how those problems might tangle with my own. I saw the pain alter his face, saw him weigh the difficulty of telling against the relief of it. He gazed at me abstractedly. Was I his buddy or his moral tutor? "I think maybe you won't know what I'm talking about," he said. "You're a very sensible, correct-minded kind of person. I think you are always in control of your own feelings, and maybe you don't have all so strong feelings about other people."

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  The way it arches like a well-strung bow brings back the fantasies I used to have of sucking cock when I was still too young to have really tried. I thought I’d find another boy who’d somehow be staying in a house nearby when we were on vacation at the lake in Michigan. I’d see him on the beach one day, and even though we wouldn’t say a word I’d know that he’d seen me as well. Dusk would fall, and then full night. My family would go to sleep and I’d go out for a moonlight walk. The air would still be warm from the day, and the lake would be so flat the moon and her entire history would lie across its missing ripples like silver two-dimensional apples. There would still be frogs and crickets in those days, fireflies would glitter like tiny spotlights caught on distant tinsel tas sels, the grass above the sand would be wet with early dew. I would have no way to know that he was there and still I’d walk along the grass and underneath a tree right into his arms and we would kiss until we fell down from the weight of memory, knowing already how our lives would fit. Somehow our clothes just disappeared, and I made him cry out with de sire as I milked him with my mouth but took myself away be fore he came and made him stop, and made him count from ten to one aloud and slowly before I swallowed his balls and let them try to slip from between my thinly parted lips, ran my tongue like a swift snake down his root to where it disap peared inside his body, and licked him where the hot lake had not dried yet. I tongue his Rimbaldian fawn-brown pucker and come back in a swallow to this graceful instrument that looks now like a stretching cat caught in a moment it cannot relieve.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  views: a native of East Los Angeles, he was the only American boxer to win a gold medal at the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. Born in 1973, he lost his mother to breast cancer when he was eighteen. His father was a professional boxer in Mexico who pushed his young son to fight as early as five years old. But a tenderness emerged that sounded all too familiar. When he first tried boxing, one of the profiles shared, he would cry and run home to hide in his room because he didn’t want to fight. “A handsome young man with no steady girl friend who is focusing all his energy on his boxing.” His recipe for “Golden Blintzes” appeared in a Tito Puente celebrity cookbook. He rebuilt a run-down boxing gym in his old neighborhood, giving inner-city boys a chance at self-esteem and a career like his. And again, “A bachelor who dates often but has no steady girlfriend.” Cooks, does volunteer work, no steady girlfriend: sounds like the stories I told my family when I was in the closet. That night I joined Team de la Hoya, his fan club. Four weeks later, for $39.95,1 received a black baseball cap, a poster of Oscar dressed out in an electric-blue sweatsuit, a license plate frame (too bad I don’t drive a low-rider), and a steamy, autographed portrait of him in black and white, wearing a black satin robe, his hands gloved and held up, the hollow of his chest a dark thicket of hair. This lasted me for a while. Soon every Latino boy I passed on the street was a stand-in for Oscar, and I’d sniff as they passed to catch a whiff of cologne. My head would turn at every salsa tune drifting from a passing car. Riding the sub way, I’d stiffen at the sight of a gold chain on a brown neck next to me, and I began to wish I were a crucifix to nestle in the black, wiry bramble of a Mexican boy’s chest. But it wasn’t enough. I’d become a boxing junkie and a Latinhawk. When the Blue Velvet Boxing Club opened a few blocks from my apartment, I knew what I had to do. I spent a couple of days walking by the plain wood storefront, trying to glimpse the shadowy figures within. I wanted to know what it felt like to box, to enter a ring with a man who wanted to hurt me. What would that do to my body? Besides, Oscar had inspired me. He’d given me an idea for a novel, an Anglo-Latino homo thang, like a gay West Side Story. Oscar and Charles. Boxer and editor. I wanted our lips locked in Latin rhythms, our tongues to tango across our borders. How could I write a convincing boxing novel, I rationalized, with out training at a boxing gym?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Now that I am home again I may write a few pages, merely to attest to what happened—and perhaps to feel my way towards recovery, to patch up my for ever damaged understanding with the world. One thing I notice already is that since leaving prison I have had long and logical dreams of being back in it, just as when I was in it I dreamt insistently and raptly of happy days long before and also of a day—now, as it might be—when I had been released, and various longed-for things would happen, or promise to happen. Dreams had a powerful and sapping hold on me there. I am the sort of sleeper who has always dreamt richly, so perhaps I should have been prepared for the futile mornings, sewing mail-bags, filling infinite time with that cruel simulacrum of work, but whelmed under in the world of last night’s voyagings, their mood of ripeness and reciprocation. These—and other waking wishes—had such supremacy over the prison’s abstract, cretinous routines that to tell the story of those months with any truthfulness would be to talk of dreams. When, after evening Association—at some infantile early hour—we were sent to our cells, I gained a kind of confidence from the certainty that another world was waiting, a certainty, if you like, of uncertainty, the only part of my life whose goings-on were subject to nobody’s control. The prisoner dreams of freedom: to dream is to be free. Perhaps the strangest dream I had was one which recalled the evening of my arrest. The frequency with which it recurred could of course be explained by the frequency with which I anyway dwelt on those few crucial minutes. What puzzled me was the variations on the actual events. Always the sequence began with my leaving a group of friends and walking off briskly and excitedly, as I had done, towards the cottage. Which cottage it was, however, altered from night to night, much as it did, of course, in my actual routine. Sometimes I would make for the merry little Yorkshire Stingo, sometimes for the more dangerous shadowy dankness of Hill Place. Sometimes I would find myself going out to Hammersmith, intent on one of those picaresque ‘Lyric’ evenings; and this involved a cab, or bus or train, inevitably subject to diversions, wilful misunderstandings by the driver, or bodies on the line. Even if I was only walking a few hundred yards to a spot in Soho or that ever-fruitful market-barrow, the Down Street Station Gents, I was liable to lose my way or to be caught up in other business, other people’s demands, which only served to increase the frustrated urgency of my quest. Often I would arrive at the correct location to find that the cottage had disappeared, or been closed down and turned into a highly respectable shop.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  But I gave it up." "I can't bear it when people give up instruments," I muttered, mortified that he had never told me. "I mean what's the fucking point of learning them, it's all such a waste." Poor Luc was quite abashed at this and mumbled sorry: since he wasn't at school any more . . . Gerard seemed to sense some advantage and pressed on with an account of the Happy Entry of Philip the Good in 1440. I had a nightmarish feeling that he was going to deliver the whole lecture on ceremonial antiphons that I had had a couple of months before. But Luc broke in childishly with "Does it make a lot of noise?" "As a matter of fact", said Gerard, "it's the loudest instrument there has ever been. It used to be used for raising alarms." He gave his hooting laugh, took out two of the sections and looked mischievously around the bar. "I absolutely forbid you to play that thing in here," I said. And fortunately the juke-box was activated at that moment, the Beach Boys came spinning through, and Gerard having got his drink and said how Luc was welcome to try his bombard some time, moved off. I thought I'd rather hurt him with my brusqueness. I heaved a big sigh and Luc started working on his backlog ofdrinks. "So," I said, resuming a conversation that he seemed quite prepared to let drop, "do you still want to leave the country?" It was mad of me to persist, I was grasping for evidence that could only upset me, but to be in his confidence was itself like love and I was thirsty for more. "Well, of course, I still do want to go to Dorset. But not maybe so far as LA! It would be nice not to be always in this town, where I have lived all my life and where my family have lived since the thirteenth century—but—" There was bragging in his complaint, and I felt the crisis was probably over. "You know how it is, sometimes, things get worse and worse, and then you attain a point when you think, I just want to get out of here and start all over again from scratch bottom." I laughed and puzzled him for a second. "I do know what you mean. Maybe that's why I'm here and not in England." He raised his eyebrows and leant forward as if this was especially astonishing, but in fact he was indicating someone hovering behind me, as the hand of another farcical interruption landed firmly on my shoulder. "So we meet again." The wrong-note matiness of Ronald Strong—it grated on Luc as well, I was glad to see. I turned and smiled at him for five seconds, then said quietly, "Piss off." He pushed against me, grinning.