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 On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  At the front steps, I take the keys from my bag and jostle the door open. It’s nearly midnight. The house sends over me a sheet of warmth, mixed with the sweet musk of old clothes. Everything quiet. The living room TV hums on mute, its blue washes over the empty couch, a half-eaten bag of peanuts on the seat. I shut off the TV, walk up the stairs, turn toward the room. The door’s ajar, revealing the glow of a clamshell night-light. I push it open. You’re lying, not on your bed, but on the floor, on a mat made of folded blankets. Your work at the nail salon has left your back so badly strained the bed has gotten too soft to hold your joints in place through a night’s sleep. I crawl next to you on the mat. Rain, collected in my hair, falls and blotches your white sheets. I lie down, facing the bed, my back to your back. You startle awake. “What? What are you doing? My god, you’re wet . . . your clothes, Little Dog . . . what? What’s going on?” You sit up, pull my face to you. “What happened to you?” I shake my head, smile stupidly. You search me for answers, for cuts, feeling my pockets, under my shirt. Slowly, you lie down on your side. The space between us thin and cold as a windowpane. I turn away—even if what I want most is to tell you everything. It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you. There’s a word Trevor once told me about, one he learned from Buford, who served in the navy in Hawaii during the Korean War: kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name. Lying on the mat with you, I cannot help but want us to be our own kipuka, our own aftermath, visible. But I know better. You place a sticky hand on my neck: lavender lotion. Rain drums the gutters along the house. “What is it, Little Dog? You can tell me. Come on, you’re making me scared.” “I hate him, Ma,” I whisper in English, knowing the words seal you off from me. “I hate him. I hate him.” And I start to cry. “Please, I don’t know what you’re saying. What is that?”

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  No doubt the stories that you read made me seem quite unkind, and even unwilling to return to my Beast. Nothing could be further from the truth. I missed him terribly! I wanted more than anything to return to the castle, but my dear mother wept each time I made an attempt to leave. Nearly two months passed in this way, until late one evening I awoke with a start from a dream of the castle and my Beast. In the dream all was dark as I wandered through the halls of the castle in search of my Beast. Upon entering his bedchamber, I found the Beast sleeping peacefully in his bed. As I approached him, it slowly occurred to me that my Beast was not sleeping at all, but dead! It had been my scream that awakened me. Suddenly I remembered the Beast’s warning that he would certainly die if I extended my stay for longer than a month! I immediately jumped from my bed and packed my things. By morning I was ready to leave and, after a sad but firm goodbye, I began my journey home to the castle and my Beast. Oh, how I suffered that day, worrying that I should never see my Beast again! If only I had known how true that would be… When at last I arrived at the castle later that day, I immediately rushed to the Beast’s bedchamber. The Beast was lying on the bed, exactly as he had been in my dream. “No!” I screamed, as I rushed to his side. “Please, Beast, don’t die!” His head moved slightly when he heard my voice. I wept with joy and threw my arms around him. “Thank goodness you’re not dead,” I kept murmuring through my tears. “You came back,” was all he said. “Yes, I’m back…for good!” And I knew I would never leave him again. “Will you marry me, Beauty?” he asked. “Yes, Beast,” I said through my tears. “Yes, yes, yes!” Barely had I uttered those words when, suddenly, there was a great flash of light. In the next instant a strange man sat where the Beast had been lying only a moment before. My Beast had disappeared. I gasped in astonishment and took a step backward. “Oh, Beauty,” exclaimed the stranger. “Finally you have freed me from the curse!” I blinked through my tears as I tried to comprehend the man’s words. He was explaining that he was my Beast, who was really a prince who had been turned into a beast by the spell of an evil witch. Being an especially wicked witch, she had cruelly added the seemingly impossible condition that the prince would be released from the spell only if his true love would agree to marry him while he was still a Beast!

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  But sexual fantasies don’t reflect reality in the same way. The point about sexual fantasy is that it involves pretending. It’s a simulation, a performance—not the real thing, and not necessarily a desire for the real thing. Like dreams and works of art, fantasies are far more than what they appear to be on the surface. They’re complex psychic creations whose symbolic content mustn’t be translated into literal intent. “Think poetry, not prose,” I tell her. From everything Joni had told me about her relationship with Ray, I didn’t think she needed to worry about being a masochist, or even about being passive. The cowboys may be controlling her, but ultimately she is the one controlling the cowboys. She is the author, the producer, the casting agent, the director, and the star of the show. The whole thing is a production staged by her for the purpose of pleasure, not pain. These are worshippers, not sadists. If she were really being forced, she would not be having such a good time. Even though the means is control, her experience is one of care. The convoluted plots are just a safe pathway to pleasure. When I explain to Joni that her fantasy seems to be more about attention and vulnerability than masochism, her relief is palpable. She is a recovering alcoholic, and so the idea that she has dependency issues comes as no surprise to her. She has been denying her need for support her whole life, even while secretly longing for someone to take care of her. The only thing she’s ever felt safe enough to depend on was alcohol, a consistent and reliable friend. More to the point, alcohol never asked for anything in return. At thirteen Joni applied to boarding school on her own initiative, was accepted, and left home for good. At the time she thought of herself as an ambitious girl. In retrospect, she realizes that this was an attempt to escape the problematic distribution of needs and resources that ruled the family’s emotional economy. Over the years she has developed a network of solid friendships that have nurtured her in many ways. But in the end, neither boarding school, nor her career, nor alcohol, nor even her friends have protected her from the inescapable dependency or from the quagmire of vulnerabilities that intimate love entails. Act II: Enter Ray. In his own words, Ray is a meat-and-potatoes man. He’s the happy product of successful male socialization: independent, self-reliant, and able to handle his own problems. He was not like the guys Joni usually dated—struggling, self-absorbed, emotionally undependable, alcoholic artists who weaseled out of relationships by saying things like, “Let’s not try to define this; can’t we just see where it goes?” and “It’s because I like you that I can’t be with you.” Ray, on the other hand, made it clear that he was interested.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  It is unruly, and it defies our attempts at control. So where does that leave us? We don’t want to throw away the security, because our relationship depends on it. A sense of physical and emotional safety is basic to healthy pleasure and connection. Yet without an element of uncertainty there is no longing, no anticipation, no frisson. The motivational expert Anthony Robbins put it succinctly when he explained that passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate. Having New Eyes How are we to introduce this uncertainty into our intimate relationships? How are we to create this gentle imbalance? In truth, it is already there. Eastern philosophers have long known that impermanence is the only constant. Given the transient nature of life, given its ceaseless flux, there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent, and that security can actually be fixed. As the adage says: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Yet with blind faith we forge ahead. As loyal citizens of the modern world we believe in our own efficacy. We liken the passion of the beginning to adolescent intoxication—both transient and unrealistic. The consolation for giving it up is the security that waits on the other side. Yet when we trade passion for stability, are we not merely swapping one fantasy for another? As Stephen Mitchell points out, the fantasy of permanence may trump the fantasy of passion, but both are products of our imagination. We long for constancy, we may labor for it, but it is never guaranteed. When we love we always risk the possibility of loss—by criticism, rejection, separation, and ultimately death—regardless of how hard we try to defend against it. Introducing uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of certitude. In this shift of perception, we recognize the inherent mystery of our partner. I point out to Adele that if we are to maintain desire with one person over time we must be able to bring a sense of unknown into a familiar space. In the words of Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Adele recalls a moment when she experienced just this kind of perceptual shift. “Let me tell you what happened two weeks ago,” she says. “It is so rare that I even remember the moment. We were at a work function, and Alan was talking with some colleagues, and I looked at him and thought: he’s so attractive. It was almost weird, like an out-of-body experience. And you know what was so attractive?

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There was a deck that looked out over the mountain, and on the first night we sat there late, talking and drinking, laughing in a way I only ever laughed when I was with them. It was a perfect night, he said, with the long weekend still stretching before them, when have I ever been so happy. There came over his face at this an expression of such longing I had to look away. I had been feeling this increasingly as he spoke, this desire to look away, and had resisted it, wanting him to know I was listening, that I was ready to receive whatever he offered; and this was all the more true because he so seldom looked at me, staring instead at the table, at his hands or the empty cup between them. I wanted to be present when he did look, I wanted him to see my attention, which was my way of catching him, I suppose, or that’s what I wanted it to be, I wanted to gather him up. But as he continued to speak I failed even at this, I was unable to keep my eyes on his face. I went to bed before B., he said then, we were sharing a room but he wanted to stay up a bit and I was exhausted. I thought he would wake me up when he came in, that we would talk for a little like we always did, just a few minutes the two of us by ourselves; but I slept through the night and when I woke his side of the bed was untouched. I thought maybe he had fallen asleep out on the deck, but it had gotten cold in the night and there was nobody outside. It was early, foggy and quiet, like it only ever is in the mountains, and I stood for a while at the wooden rail, looking down at the village where everything was still. He waited for them in the main room, doing nothing, he said, just waiting until he heard a noise on the upper floor and then the final member of their group came down. G. called this boy by name and for the first time I had a clear sense of the four of them, all of them students I had seen every day, more or less, with so little idea of what passed between them.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  When I turned around Trevor was smiling up at the ceiling. He saw me, hopped off the ledge, and walked over, the smile fading into something else as he pulled the army helmet over his eyes. The black Adidas logo on his white T-shirt shifted as he approached. I was a freshman that summer, and Trevor was already a junior. Although barely visible in the sun, here in the barn, and coming closer, his thin mustache deepened, a blondish streak dark with sweat. And above that, his eyes: their grey irises smattered with bits of brown and ember so that, looking at them, you could almost see, right behind you, something burning under an overcast sky. It seemed the boy was always looking at a plane wrecking itself midair. That’s what I saw that first day. And although I knew that nothing behind me was on fire, I turned back anyway and saw the coiled summer air, sputtering with heat, rise over the razed fields. — The boy is six and wearing nothing but a pair of white underwear with Supermans patterned everywhere. You know this story. He has just finished crying and is now entering that state where his jaw shudders to calm itself shut. His snot-plastered nose, its salt on his lips, his tongue, he’s at home. His mother, you remember this, has locked him in the basement for wetting his bed again, the four or five Supermans near his crotch now soiled dark. She had dragged him out of bed by the arm, then down the stairs as he screamed, begged, “One more chance, Ma. One more chance.” The kind of basement no one goes down, all around him the dank scent of damp earth, rusted pipes choked with cobwebs, his own piss still wet down his leg, between his toes. He stands with one foot on the other, as if touching less of the basement meant he was less inside it. He closes his eyes. This is my superpower, he thinks: to make a dark even darker than what’s around me. He stops crying. — Summer was almost gone as we sat on the toolshed roof by the field’s edge, but the heat had stayed, and our shirts clung to us like unmolted skins. The tin roof, touched all day by the heat, was still warm through my shorts. The sun, now waning, must still be stronger somewhere west, I thought, like in Ohio, golden yet for some boy I’ll never meet. I thought of that boy, how far from me he was and still American. The wind was cool and thick up the legs of my shorts.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  The remnants of candles stuck up from trays filled with sand in front of the image of the Virgin; a pile of these candles, very long and thin, sat next to a donation box at the door. There’s a feeling such places accrue, a residue of use, and I considered taking one of those candles and saying a prayer of my own, something to do with R. maybe, that he be happy, that we both be happy, together or apart. Now, in the plaza, as N. continued to speak I looked at the priest, who stood quietly, still calm, his hands crossed at the waist, the bottle dangling, his head slightly bowed. He could almost have been praying himself, though he wasn’t praying, he was drunk, or maybe he was praying too, I don’t know. It was a posture—the bowed head, the apparent meekness—I remembered from the man I had gotten to know that year in Boston, the priest in whose office I had sat nearly every week; it was the posture with which he met my zeal or desire for zeal, which seemed to bemuse him, as if he found it both sincere and unreal, which it was. I don’t recognize the person I was then, when I read my journal from that time, or the handful of poems I wrote. I wanted to unmake myself, it seems to me now, I wanted to fit my life into a system that would deform it so entirely it would be unrecognizable. But now N. interrupted his lecture, saying here he was, telling us about the town, it was hard work, and he was a professional, he shouldn’t work for free. I want money, he said, making us laugh, American money, does someone have a quarter, and someone did, it was fished out of a pocket and handed over. George Washington, he cried, a sudden change of tone, I love George Washington, he is my favorite person. We laughed again and he looked up, Why are you laughing, he asked, which made us laugh more. Look, he said, holding up the coin, it says here Liberty, it is the most beautiful thing, most beautiful word, it is for this I love George Washington. He fights for freedom, like us, Bulgarians fight for freedom too. For five hundred years we are slaves to the Turks, but now we are free. It is the most important thing, Liberty. Hear hear! someone said, an American, and we all raised our cups to N., though most of them were empty already.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  In a previous draft of this letter, one I’ve since deleted, I told you how I came to be a writer. How I, the first in our family to go to college, squandered it on a degree in English. How I fled my shitty high school to spend my days in New York lost in library stacks, reading obscure texts by dead people, most of whom never dreamed a face like mine floating over their sentences—and least of all that those sentences would save me. But none of that matters now. What matters is that all of it, even if I didn’t know it then, brought me here, to this page, to tell you everything you’ll never know. What happened was that I was a boy once and bruiseless. I was eight when I stood in the one-bedroom apartment in Hartford staring at Grandma Lan’s sleeping face. Despite being your mother, she is nothing like you; her skin three shades darker, the color of dirt after a rainstorm, spread over a skeletal face whose eyes shone like chipped glass. I can’t say what made me leave the green pile of army men and walk over to where she lay under a blanket on the hardwood, arms folded across her chest. Her eyes moved behind their lids as she slept. Her forehead, lashed deep with lines, marked her fifty-six years. A fly landed on the side of her mouth, then skittered to the edge of her purplish lips. Her left cheek spasmed a few seconds. The skin, pocked with large black pores, rippled in the sunlight. I had never seen so much movement in sleep before—except in dogs who run in dreams none of us will ever know. But it was stillness, I realize now, that I sought, not of her body, which kept ticking as she slept, but of her mind. Only in this twitching quiet did her brain, wild and explosive during waking hours, cool itself into something like calm. I’m watching a stranger, I thought, one whose lips creased into an expression of contentment alien to the Lan I knew awake, the one whose sentences rambled and rattled out of her, her schizophrenia only worse now since the war. But wildness is how I had always known her. Ever since I could remember, she flickered before me, dipping in and out of sense. Which was why, studying her now, tranquil in the afternoon light, was like looking back in time. The eye opened. Glazed by a milky film of sleep, it widened to hold my image. I stood against myself, pinned by the shaft of light through the window. Then the second eye opened, this one slightly pink but clearer. “You hungry, Little Dog?” she asked, her face expressionless, as if still asleep. I nodded. “What should we eat in a time like this?” She gestured around the room. A rhetorical question, I decided, and bit my lip.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  He falls back in the seat, lets his head roll to one side, and eases out a come-on grin. He starts to fumble the buckle over his Levi’s. “Come on, Trev. You’re blazed. Let’s not, okay?” “I used to hate it when you call me Trev.” He drops his hands, they lie in his lap like unearthed roots. “You think I’m fucked up?” “No,” I mumble, turning away. I press my forehead against the window, where my reflection hovers above the parking lot, the rain falling through it. “I think you’re just you.” I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner’s neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period? “Hello,” he says, without turning his head. We had decided, shortly after we met, because our friends were already dying from overdoses, to never tell each other goodbye or good night. “Hello, Trevor,” I say into the back of my wrist, keeping it in. The engine jolts, stutters up, behind me the woman coughs. I’m back inside the bus again, staring at the blue mesh seat in front of me. — I get off on Main St. and immediately head toward Trevor’s house. I move as if I’m late to myself, as if I’m catching up. But Trevor is no longer a destination. Realizing, too late, that it’s useless to show up unannounced at a dead boy’s house to be greeted only by his grief-fucked father, I keep walking. I reach the corner of Harris and Magnolia, where I turn, out of habit or possession, into the park, cross the three baseball fields, the earth rising up musty and fresh beneath my boots. Rain in my hair, down my face, shirt collar. I hurry toward the street on the other side of the park, follow it down to the cul-de-sac, where the house sits, so grey the rain almost claims it, rubbing its edges into weather.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He told me about his day then, which was less regimented than mine, the day of a student. He was in Sofia as part of a program that shuttled college students around the EU, an attempt to stitch up the union though in R.’s case it hadn’t worked; he hated Bulgaria, he said, almost as much as he hated his own country. He had come with M., a friend from his university in Lisbon. He had thought it would be good to know someone here but it wasn’t good, he felt watched, forced to compromise and deceive, stuck with the self he would have liked to leave behind; that was really what he hated, I thought, not the country he lived in but the life he had made there. He was studying physical therapy, though he had wanted to major in languages, he told me the first time we met, when we talked for hours in a café before he came home with me. His parents insisted that he study something practical, a trade, but nothing’s practical now, he had said, laughing bitterly, there aren’t any jobs for anybody in Portugal, I should have studied what I wanted. He had a talent for languages; his English was almost perfect, natural and easy, and when he learned I was a teacher, he said with something like pride that he had always done well in his literature classes in high school, which were the only classes he enjoyed. When we got to my apartment that first time, before we moved into the bedroom, while we were still taking pleasure in delay, he recited a poem to me in his own language, a few lines of Pessoa he said everyone learned in school. It could have been anything, I didn’t understand a word of it, but it charmed me and allowed me to reach for him, to pull him close and press my mouth to his.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We arranged to rent a house together for the fall trip, he said, close enough to the others to join the parties at night but far enough away to have the days to ourselves. We were in the mountains, in a little village that’s empty most of the year, there was nothing else for kilometers around. We brought everything with us, alcohol, music, even little lights to hang up in one of the houses so we could dance. There was a deck that looked out over the mountain, and on the first night we sat there late, talking and drinking, laughing in a way I only ever laughed when I was with them. It was a perfect night, he said, with the long weekend still stretching before them, when have I ever been so happy. There came over his face at this an expression of such longing I had to look away. I had been feeling this increasingly as he spoke, this desire to look away, and had resisted it, wanting him to know I was listening, that I was ready to receive whatever he offered; and this was all the more true because he so seldom looked at me, staring instead at the table, at his hands or the empty cup between them. I wanted to be present when he did look, I wanted him to see my attention, which was my way of catching him, I suppose, or that’s what I wanted it to be, I wanted to gather him up. But as he continued to speak I failed even at this, I was unable to keep my eyes on his face.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  You could just tell him, I said, cutting into R.’s monologue, and though I had said versions of this before he looked up at me blankly. About us, I mean, you could tell him about us, and then you wouldn’t have to lie. He made an exasperated sound at this, a dismissive sound that made me angry, or not angry, quite, but annoyed. Listen, I said, wouldn’t it be better, isn’t it what you want? I knew I should probably stop but I went on, I want you to be happy, I said, really happy, and you can’t be happy when you have to lie so much. I fell silent then, as did everyone else in the restaurant, an instant of shock at a gust of wind that smacked angrily at the building, an even stronger gust than the others. It was like being besieged, I thought, as conversations picked up and the room filled again with noise, a little tentative now, as if we were all embarrassed at having been frightened. R. began to speak but I had more I wanted to say, I spoke over him, Wait, I said, let me just, and then I paused again, at a loss. You’re happy when you’re with me, right, I said, and he made his noise of exasperation again, a glottal exhalation. You know I am, he said, and it was true, it was something we had already begun to say to each other, that we made each other happy. This was true for me from the very first evening, after I had drawn him to me and kissed him and we fell into bed together, when I looked up at him in the dark and saw his smile. Sex had never been joyful for me before, or almost never, it had always been fraught with shame and anxiety and fear, all of which vanished at the sight of his smile, simply vanished, it poured a kind of cleanness over everything we did. He had given me so much, I thought, for all that he couldn’t give, and I was ashamed of the tone I had taken. I do know, I said, speaking more gently now, and you know I’m happy too, and maybe the best thing this could do, I meant our friendship, relationship, I didn’t know what word to use, is show you what it would be like if you were open, if you let yourself live in a fuller way. I could see that my speech wasn’t having the effect I wanted, that R.’s mood was turning darker; he wasn’t looking at me anymore but at the window, at his reflection or the world beyond it. I should have stopped talking but I couldn’t stop, I want you to be able to live, I said, really live, I don’t want you to just wait for things to happen to you, I want you to be happy. And what are you afraid of, I asked, do you really think your friends won’t accept you, your parents? His family wasn’t religious, I knew, he was from a small place but not a particularly conservative one. I think you should trust them more, I said, I think you should trust that they love you.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I don’t know, G. said, answering his own question, I wanted it to end, I guess, I didn’t want to go back to being so miserable; or maybe it was something else, maybe I did have some hope, not that he would feel what I felt but that he would let me give it to him somehow, that he would receive it. If I could just kiss him, he said, his voice stripped now and small, if I could kiss him just once, that would be enough, I wouldn’t want anything more. I looked at him then, wondering if he meant what he said, if he was really so new to desire that he could believe it. I don’t think so, I said, speaking for the first time since he had started his story, my voice raw, I don’t think that’s how it works; it was a ridiculous thing to say, I knew it even as I spoke. Whatever, G. said, still not looking up, it doesn’t matter, he didn’t give me a chance. I told him that I loved him but he didn’t understand me, or he pretended not to understand, I had to explain it, and once I started speaking I couldn’t stop, after being silent for so long I spoke too much. But it didn’t matter what I said, I only made things worse by talking. He didn’t welcome it at all, and he hadn’t had any idea; I guess I thought he had known it somehow, that he was all I thought about, the only thing, the only thing I cared about. But he was surprised, really surprised, and he didn’t welcome it, he turned away when I kept talking. He wasn’t cruel to me, he was gentle, he was even kind, but he didn’t pretend we could go on as we had. We would stop being friends, he said, he said he was sorry; he didn’t want me to suffer, and it was the quickest way to end suffering, and anyway he couldn’t be comfortable with me now. I was crying then, G. said, I don’t think he had ever seen me cry before, I couldn’t stop. Why did you tell me, he said, I’ve lost something too, you’ve taken something from me too. And I had, I realized, I had ruined so much, for him and for me. I was wrong to tell him, G. said, I shouldn’t have said anything, along with everything else now I’m so sorry for what I said. But there’s nothing I can do, I have to live with it, like I have to live with everything else I feel. He paused, and then, But what if I can’t bear it, he said, looking up at me, finally catching my eye, and though at first I thought the question was rhetorical I realized it was genuine, I needed to have something to say. I remembered the confidence I had had, hours before, in my own competence, the pleasure I had taken in the solace I could give, and I wished I could have some of it back, that it would ease the sense I had now of helplessness and loss, though loss of what I wasn’t precisely sure, an idea of myself, I suppose, which shouldn’t have been so precious to me but was.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We were talking, as we did those days after work when we were too exhausted to head home just yet. We talked about his guns, of school, how he might drop out, how the Colt factory in Windsor might be hiring again now that the latest shooting spree was three months done and already old news, we talked of the next game out on Xbox, his old man, his old man’s drinking, we talked of sunflowers, how goofy they looked, like cartoons, Trevor said, but real. We talked about you, about your nightmares, your loosening mind, his face troubled as he listened, which made his pout more defined. A long silence. Then Trevor took out his cell phone, snapped a picture at the colors at the sky’s end, then put it back in his pocket without reviewing what he took. Our eyes met. He flashed an embarrassed smile, then looked away and started picking at a pimple on his chin. “Cleopatra,” he said after a while. “What?” “Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain’t that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.” He gestured to indicate the whole town, even though we were the only people there far as the eye could see. “No wonder people used to think it was god himself.” “Said who?” “People.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “Sometimes I wanna just go that way forever.” He pointed his chin beyond the sycamores. “Like just psssh.” I studied his arm propped behind him, the thin, flowing muscles, field-toned and burger-fed, shifting as he talked. I flung the last rind from the grapefruit I was peeling off the roof. What about our skeletons, I wanted to ask, how do we get away from them—but thought better of it. “It must suck to be the sun, though,” I said, handing him a pink half. He put the whole half in his mouth. “Hob bob?” “Finish chewing you animal.” He rolled back his eyes and bobbled his head playfully, as if possessed, the clear juice dripping down his chin, his neck, the indent under his Adam’s apple, no larger than a thumbprint, glistening. He swallowed, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. “How come?” he repeated, serious. “’Cause you never see yourself if you’re the sun. You don’t even know where you are in the sky.” I placed a wedge on my tongue, letting the acid sting the place where I’d bit the inside of my cheek all week for no reason. He looked at me thoughtfully, turned the idea in his head, his lips wet with juice. “Like you don’t even know if you’re round or square or even if you’re ugly or not,” I continued. I wanted it to sound important, urgent—but had no idea if I believed it. “Like you can only see what you do to the earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are.” I glanced at him.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I could feel it in my chest. “Them old boys back in Norville could flat party,” she said, “and that’s no lie.” I couldn’t speak. I just held her and moved her and breathed in her hair. I had her for three minutes and then I lost her forever. Older boys, boys I didn’t have the courage to cut in on, danced with her the rest of the night. A week or so later she took up with Lloyd Sly, a basketball player with a hot car. When we passed in the hall she didn’t even recognize me. I wrote her long, grandiloquent letters which I then destroyed. I thought of the different ways that fate might put her in my power, so I could show her who I really was and make her love me. Most of these possibilities involved death or severe maiming for Lloyd Sly. And when, as sometimes happened, a girl my own age showed some interest in me, I treated her swinishly. I walked her home from a dance or a game, made out with her on her front steps, then cut her dead the next day. I only ever wanted what I couldn’t have. CHUCK AND THE others had better luck getting me drunk. Though liquor disagreed with me they were patient, and willing to experiment, and time was on their side. They finally broke through during a basketball game, the last game of the season. It had rained earlier and the air was steamy. The windows of the school were open, and from our gully outside we could hear the cheerleaders warming up the people in the stands while the players did their lay-up drills. Who’s the team they hate to meet? Con-crete! Con-crete! Who’s the team they just can’t beat? Con-crete! Con-crete! Huff was passing around a can of Hawaiian Punch cut with vodka. Gorilla blood, he called it. I thought it would probably make me sick but I took a swig anyway. It stayed down. In fact I liked it, it tasted exactly like Hawaiian Punch. I took another swig. I WAS UP on the school roof with Chuck. He was looking at me and nodding meditatively. “Wolff,” he said. “Jack Wolff.” “Yo.” “Wolff, your teeth are too big.” “I know they are. I know they are.” “Wolf-man.” “Yo, Chuckles.” He held up his hands. They were bleeding. “Don’t hit trees, Jack. Okay?” I said I wouldn’t. “Don’t hit trees.” I WAS LYING on my back with Huff kneeling on me, slapping my cheeks. He said, “Speak to me, dicklick,” and I said, “Hi, Huff.” Everybody laughed. Huff’s pompadour had come unstuck and was hanging in long strands over his face. I smiled and said, “Hi, Huff.” I WAS WALKING along a branch. I was way out on it, over the far lip of the gully where the cement bank began. They were all looking up at me and yelling. They were fools, my balance was perfect.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  You asked me what it’s like to be a writer and I’m giving you a mess, I know. But it’s a mess, Ma—I’m not making this up. I made it down. That’s what writing is, after all the nonsense, getting down so low the world offers a merciful new angle, a larger vision made of small things, the lint suddenly a huge sheet of fog exactly the size of your eyeball. And you look through it and see the thick steam in the all-night bathhouse in Flushing, where someone reached out to me once, traced the trapped flute of my collarbone. I never saw that man’s face, only the gold-rimmed glasses floating in the fog. And then the feeling, the velvet heat of it, everywhere inside me. Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us? When Houdini failed to free himself from his handcuffs at the London Hippodrome, his wife, Bess, gave him a long, deep kiss. In doing so, she passed him the key that would save him. If there’s a heaven I think it looks like this. For no reason, I Googled Trevor’s name the other day. The White Pages say he’s still alive, that he’s thirty years old and lives only 3.6 miles from me. The truth is memory has not forgotten us. A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved. — While cleaning my closet one afternoon I found a Jolly Rancher in the pocket of an old Carhartt jacket. It was from Trevor’s truck. He always kept them in his cup holder. I unwrapped it, held it between my fingers. The memory of our voices is inside it. “Tell me what you know,” I whispered. It caught the light from the window like an ancient jewel. I went inside the closet, closed the door, sat down in the tight dark, and placed the candy, smooth and cool, in my mouth. Green Apple. I’m not with you because I’m at war with everything but you. A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future. We’re almost there. I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible. Head around the bend, past the second stop sign with “H8” spray-painted in white on the bottom. Walk toward the white house, the one with its left side charcoal-grey with exhaust blown from the scrapyard across the highway.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  But when I upped the ante in my letters to her, they stopped sending me anything at all. The Disney Studio must have had a kind of secret service that monitored Mousketeer Mail for inappropriate sentiments and declarations. When my name went off the mailing list, it probably went onto some other list. But Alice had taught me about coyness. I kept writing Annette and began to imagine a terrible accident in front of her house that would almost but not quite kill me, leaving me dependent on her care and sympathy, which in time would turn to admiration, love . . . As soon as she appeared on the show—Hi, I’m Annette!—Taylor would start moaning and Silver would lick the screen with his tongue. “Come here, baby,” he’d say, “I’ve got six inches of piping hot flesh just for you.” We all said things like that—It was a formality—then we shut up and watched the show. Our absorption was complete. We softened. We surrendered. We joined the club. Taylor forgot himself and sucked his thumb, and Silver and I let him get away with it. We watched the Mousketeers get all excited about wholesome projects and have wimpy adventures and talk about their feelings, and we didn’t laugh at them. We didn’t laugh at them when they said nice things about their parents, or when they were polite to each other, or when they said, “Hey, gang . . .” We watched every minute of it, our eyes glistening in the blue light, and we went on staring at the television after they had sung the anthem and faded away into commercials for toothpaste and candy. Then, blinking and awkward, we would rouse ourselves and talk dirty about Annette. Sometimes, when The Mickey Mouse Club was over, we went up to the roof. Silver’s apartment building overlooked California Avenue. Though the street was busy we chose our targets carefully. Most days we didn’t throw anything at all. But now and then someone would appear who had no chance of getting past us, like the man in the Thunderbird. Thunderbirds had been out for only a year now, since ‘55, and because they were new and there weren’t that many of them they were considered somewhat cooler than Corvettes. It was early evening. The Thunderbird was idling before a red light at the intersection, and from our perch behind the parapet we could hear the song on the radio—“Over the Mountains and across the Seas”—and hear too, just below the music, the full-throated purr of the engine. The black body glistened like obsidian. Blue smoke chugged from the twin exhausts. The top was rolled back. We could see the red leather upholstery and the blond man in the dinner jacket sitting in the driver’s seat. He was young and handsome and fresh. You could almost smell the Listerine on his breath, the Mennen on his cheeks. We were looking right down at him.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  In the mansion on the property, the furniture was gathered to the center of the room and draped in sheets. I saw a painting of the dead children, dressed in black. I thought I heard my name in a half whisper, but when I turned around there was no one. “Sound moves weirdly in here,” one of the residents explained. The rooms were, in turn, monastic, bombastic. I nursed a crush on a playwright and a nonfiction writer both, rolled my eyes at a sculptor, felt great fondness for badass visual artists who were breaking into the fine arts boys’ club before I was born. I talked about supplements with a painter and comforted a composer. Donald Trump was elected president. People cried at the dinner table. Toward the end, I told the story about the Dream House, the funny version: the version where the irony of my relationship with Val and the universality of shitty exes are at the forefront. I kept my eyes open: for deer, for ghosts. Dream House as Prisoner’s DilemmaMany years later, you stick a memory card into your SLR and find dozens of naked photos of the woman in the Dream House. You jerk involuntarily when the first image comes onto the preview screen. You remember the afternoon so clearly: how the soft, indirect natural light filtered into the room; how she was naked and pale and lounging, and how her cunt was flushed maroon with blood. (It was either just before fucking or just afterward.) You got down between her knees and took dozens of photos, loving the ombre of her, from white to pink to purple. The memory is not sexual; it is distant and removed, as if you are watching a movie about someone else. You sit there for a while, thinking about the photos. You could keep them, but there is no reason to, good or bad. You have no desire for blackmail or the kind of revenge they could make possible; you do not find them erotic anymore. (How quickly your desire curdled when you saw her for what she was, like the scene in The Shining when Jack Nicholson pulls away from a sexy woman to find a decomposing creature in her place.) They are simply a memory, and as you overwrite the data card, erasing them forever, you feel an irrational twinge of loss.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  We had a late lunch at a restaurant near the hotel. It was almost empty, there were only a few solitary men nursing beers, though the air was still heavy with smoke from the afternoon rush. The large windows along the back wall offered the same view as our room, and R. and I sat at a table next to one of them, looking out at the hills and their crowded houses. These had been grand once, I thought, they rose three or sometimes four stories high; the grandest were built at the very edge of the rock, their walls flush with the cliff. Most of the façades were white, and they gleamed where the sun struck them, their windows shuttered against the heat, but there were other colors too, the bright yellows and blues and reds of the National Revival. I’d be scared to live here, R. said, it looks like the houses could just slide down the hill. I hummed a reply and he laughed. You love it, don’t you, he said, you always love sad places. Then he lifted himself up in his seat to look down the slope of our own hill, toward the banks of the river. Look, he said, and pointed to a series of shacks, what seemed almost like temporary shelters among the trees that filled the valley, with cinder block walls and roofs of corrugated metal. Do you think somebody lives there, he asked, and I said I did, I could see a garden and a tiny yard barely large enough for the mule it enclosed. Why would they need a horse, R. said, and then answered his own question, maybe that’s where the gypsies live. He settled back into his seat, losing interest, but I kept looking at that little house shadowed by trees and in earshot of the river, where it must be cool, I thought, even on the hottest days. When I looked back at him R. was watching me, folding the edge of his napkin up and then pressing it back down. Are you sad, he said, and I shrugged, not sure if I was. I looked back to the window, not at the houses now but at the forested hills beyond Tsarevets, which looked almost pristine, except for one crest where large billboard letters spelled out TECHNOPOLIS, a chain of electronics stores. It’s the only thing we can do, right, R. said, it’s the only thing that makes sense. It was a conversation we had had many times in the past weeks, and since he knew what I thought I didn’t respond. The waiter came then, anyway, bringing the pizza we had ordered. Don’t you think so, R. continued once he had gone, and I hesitated before answering, looking down at the slice of pizza I had taken but not lifting it from the plate. I don’t know, I said finally, I don’t know if it’s the right thing. And then, after a pause, But it’s not the only thing, I said, you know that, you know you could stay, maybe we’re giving up too fast. I would have said more but R. cut me off, he made the annoyed sound I expected, clucking his tongue. But we tried, he said, and I can’t live here. I’d just sit all day by myself, waiting for you to come home, playing computer games, that’s not a life, he said, we couldn’t be happy like that. I started to say that he would make friends, that he could keep looking for a job; there were call centers where they needed European languages, with Portuguese and good English he could find something at one of them. Or he could take classes, I said, he could study again at the school in Studentski grad where he had spent a semester. You could stay, I said, you could make a life here, you wouldn’t have to just sit at home. But I couldn’t put much energy into what I said; he had made a decision, what was the point of talking. I love you, I said, we love each other, it should be enough, though even as I said this I knew it was unfair.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  At thirteen Joni applied to boarding school on her own initiative, was accepted, and left home for good. At the time she thought of herself as an ambitious girl. In retrospect, she realizes that this was an attempt to escape the problematic distribution of needs and resources that ruled the family’s emotional economy. Over the years she has developed a network of solid friendships that have nurtured her in many ways. But in the end, neither boarding school, nor her career, nor alcohol, nor even her friends have protected her from the inescapable dependency or from the quagmire of vulnerabilities that intimate love entails. Act II: Enter Ray. In his own words, Ray is a meat-and-potatoes man. He’s the happy product of successful male socialization: independent, self-reliant, and able to handle his own problems. He was not like the guys Joni usually dated—struggling, self-absorbed, emotionally undependable, alcoholic artists who weaseled out of relationships by saying things like, “Let’s not try to define this; can’t we just see where it goes?” and “It’s because I like you that I can’t be with you.” Ray, on the other hand, made it clear that he was interested. He called when he said he would, was never late, and put a lot of thought into planning their dates. “He actually paid attention to what I said. He asked me questions about myself and remembered the answers. I was used to a scene where you can have sex with someone for six months and never even broach the subject of what that might mean or where it might be going. Ray didn’t play that game. He liked me and wasn’t afraid to say so.” Ray’s openness, his consistency, and his emotional generosity brought Joni a sense of peace and security she had never known in a romantic relationship. She found his ability to intuit her needs positively enchanting, and the fact that he seemed to have so few needs of his own was also a plus. “What an irresistible lure, having a man who can anticipate your needs,” I said. “Tell me, how long did it last?” “Not long enough. I feel like I’m constantly having to ask Ray for everything these days; sometimes I have to ask him twice. I can’t stand it,” she answers. “Ah, cowboys to the rescue. You don’t even have to ask them once.”