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 Cleanness (2020)

  From where I stood now I could see the path we had taken, my friend and I, and I remembered too how he had pointed to this beach, telling me that in summer very late at night you could find men here, that there were sheltered places in the rocks where you could go with them. I wondered if I would want that now, if there were men to be had. Shortly after R. had told me he wanted to end things I had gone to the city center, seeking I don’t know what. For almost two years I had been with no one but R., and for the past three months I hadn’t been with anyone at all; I went out in search of feeling, I suppose, or maybe the absence of feeling. I descended the flights of stairs to the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, though for so long I imagined I had left them behind, that I had been lifted out of them, as I was in the habit of putting it to myself, into a new life. I had thought that before, when I sat in that room in Boston with the priest, I had thought in precisely those terms, I am being lifted out of it, not by my own agency but by some intervening force: God, love, edno i sushto, one and the same. But we are never lifted out of such places, I think now, and so I went back to the bathrooms beneath NDK, I had never stopped thinking about them; even as I lay with R., flooded with love, there was a part of me untouched by him, a part that longed to be back here. My hands shook as I undid my belt at the urinals, out of excitement or dread, I felt I could hardly breathe. Almost immediately a man stepped up next to me, nineteen or twenty perhaps, very beautiful, his large cock already hard. Possibly he was a hustler, he was so eager, though he didn’t make any demands as I reached over and took him in my hand, feeling the thick warmth of him as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to discern what I wanted, knowing how easy it would be to take him into the neighboring room with its stalls. I heard him whisper Iskash li, do you want it, and though I did want it I let him go, I hid away my own hardness and fled.

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

  Her father, Daddy as she called him, had been a navy officer and a paper millionaire. They’d lived in a big house with a turret. Just before Daddy lost all his money and all his shanty-Irish relatives’ money and got himself transferred overseas, my mother was one of four girls chosen to ride on the Beverly Hills float in the Tournament of Roses. The float’s theme was “The End of the Rainbow” and it won that year’s prize by acclamation. She met Jackie Coogan. She had her picture taken with Harold Lloyd and Marion Davies, whose movie The Sailor Man was filmed on Daddy’s ship. When Daddy was at sea she and her mother lived a dream life in which, for days at a time, they played the part of sisters. And the cars my mother told me about as we waited for the Rambler to cool—I should have seen the cars! Daddy drove a Franklin touring car. She’d been courted by a boy who had his own Chrysler convertible with a musical horn. And of course there was the Hernandez family, neighbors who’d moved up from Mexico after finding oil under their cactus ranch. The family was large. When they were expected to appear somewhere together they drove singly in a caravan of identical Pierce-Arrows. Something like that was supposed to happen to us. People in Utah were getting up poor in the morning and going to bed rich at night. You didn’t need to be a mining engineer or a mineralogist. All you needed was a Geiger counter. We were on our way to the uranium fields, where my mother would get a job and keep her eyes open. Once she learned the ropes she’d start prospecting for a claim of her own. And when she found it she planned to do some serious compensating: for the years of hard work, first as a soda jerk and then as a novice secretary, that had gotten her no farther than flat broke and sometimes not that far. For the breakup of our family five years earlier. For the misery of her long affair with a violent man. She was going to make up for lost time, and I was going to help her. WE GOT TO Utah the day after the truck went down. We were too late—months too late. Moab and the other mining towns had been overrun. All the motels were full. The locals had rented out their bedrooms and living rooms and garages and were now offering trailer space in their front yards for a hundred dollars a week, which was what my mother could make in a month if she had a job. But there were no jobs, and people were getting ornery. There’d been murders. Prostitutes walked the streets in broad daylight, drunk and bellicose. Geiger counters cost a fortune. Everyone told us to keep going. My mother thought things over.

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

  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? For a moment there I forgot that he’s my husband and a real pain in the ass, obnoxious, stubborn, that he annoys me, that he leaves his mess all over the floor. At that moment I saw him as if I didn’t know all that, and I was drawn to him like in the beginning. He’s very smart; he talks well; he has this soothing, sexy way about him. I wasn’t thinking about all our stupid exchanges when we bicker in the morning because I’m running late, or why did you do this, or what’s going on for Christmas, or we have to talk about your mother. I was away from all that inane stuff and those absurd conversations. I just really saw him. That’s how I felt, and I wonder if he ever feels like that about me anymore.” When I ask Adele if she has ever told Alan of that experience, she is quick to let me know that she hasn’t. “No way. He’ll make fun of me.” I suggest that maybe the waning of romance is less about the bounds of familiarity and the weight of reality than it is about fear. Eroticism is risky. People are afraid to allow themselves these moments of idealization and yearning for the person they live with. It introduces a recognition of the other’s sovereignty that can feel destabilizing. When our partner stands alone, with his own will and freedom, the delicateness of our bond is magnified. Adele’s vulnerability is obvious in the way she wonders if Alan ever feels this way about her. The typical defense against this threat is to stay within the realm of the familiar and the affectionate—the trivial bickering, the comfortable sex, the quotidian aspects of life that keep us tethered to reality and bar any chance of transcendence. But when Adele looks at Alan out of the context of their marriage—switching from a zoom lens to a wide-angle—his otherness is accentuated, and that in turn heightens Adele’s attraction to him. She sees him as a man. She has transformed someone familiar into someone still unknown after all these years. Just When You Thought You Knew Her…

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

  * * * CHUCK AND THE others knew a lot of women like Veronica, and girls on their way to being like Veronica. When they found a new one they shared her. They tried to fix me up with some of them, but I always backed out. I didn’t know what these girls expected; I did know I was sure to disappoint them. Their availability unmanned me. And I didn’t want it to be like that, squalid and public, with a stranger. I wanted it to be with the girl I loved. This was not going to happen, because the girl I loved never knew I loved her. I kept my feelings secret because I believed she would find them laughable, even insulting. Her name was Rhea Clark. Rhea moved to Concrete from North Carolina halfway through her junior year, when I was a freshman. She had flaxen hair that hung to her waist, calm brown eyes, golden skin that glowed like a jar of honey. Her mouth was full, almost loose. She wore tight skirts that showed the flex and roll of her hips as she walked, clinging pastel sweaters whose sleeves she pushed up to her elbows, revealing a heartbreaking slice of creamy inner arm. Just after Rhea came to Concrete I asked her to dance with me during a mixer in the gym. She nodded and followed me out onto the floor. It was a slow dance. When I turned to face her she moved into my arms as no other girl had ever done, frankly and fully. She melted against me and stayed against me, pliant to my least motion, her legs against mine, her cheek against mine, her fingers brushing the back of my neck. I understood that she didn’t know who I was, that all of this was a new girl’s mistake. But I felt justified in taking advantage of it. I thought we were meeting rightly, true self to true self, free of the accidents of age. After a while she said, “Y’all don’t know how to party.” Her voice was throaty and deep. 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

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

  You’ve replaced sensual love with something else. It’s what the sex therapist Dagmar O’Connor calls comfort love.” Candace nods, “Like a flannel nightgown.” The caring, protective elements that nurture home life can go against the rebellious spirit of carnal love. We often choose a partner who makes us feel cherished; but after the initial romance we find, like Candace, that we can’t sexualize him or her. We long to create closeness in our relationships, to bridge the space between our partner and ourselves, but, ironically, it is this very space between self and other that is the erotic synapse. In order to bring lust home, we need to re-create the distance that we worked so hard to bridge. Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life. In one of our sessions Candace describes how nothing turns her on more than to see Jimmy perform onstage. But when I ask her if she ever goes backstage afterward, she tells me no. “Why don’t you go into the dressing room?” I ask her. “You look at him up there onstage and you’re all excited by him. He’s totally in possession of himself and his talent. But then you wait until he comes home and he instantly becomes deeroticized.” She nods in agreement; he looks disappointed. “Why don’t you divorce him?” I suggest. “Stay with him but divorce him. If you’re not married to him, he won’t look like such a homebody.” “You know what I said to him?” she admits, “I said, ‘If you left me today I would be sexually interested in you.’” Candace recognizes that the feeling of emotional closeness she longs for with Jimmy stands in the way of what excites her sexually. In order to circumvent this pitfall, she needs to create psychological distance. Long before meeting me, Candace had attempted to do just that. She had come up with her own solution to the predicament: Jimmy was to ignore her when he came home, rather than instantly approach her. As she said, “If I feel that you don’t need me at all, you become desirable.” Intuitively, without knowing why she needed this particular plot, she was trying to generate desire. Unfortunately, Jimmy wasn’t up for the game. He saw her need for being at arms-length as a rejection of him. He poignantly articulated his longing when he explained, “I’ve had so much anger. I remember a time when all I had to do was rub my knee up her thigh and she’d get all turned on. But for so long I haven’t truly felt that she wanted me like that. I want her to want me. I want her to be hungry for one thing and one thing only.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Just past the grocery there was a wide trench where they were extending the metro across Mladost, tearing open whole segments of pavement a few hundred meters at a time, and along the length of it was a simple chain fence, draped in green plastic mesh, the metal poles anchored in plastic buckets filled with concrete. It was meant as a deterrent but really it would have been easy to get through, the blocks weren’t heavy, with a little effort you could shift them. Work had been stopped for days, it was too dangerous in the wind, and when we came to the fence we saw that one of the poles had tipped over; the wind had caught the green mesh and now it hung suspended over the drop, held in place by its neighbors, which for the moment were still upright. Jesus, I heard R. say, or thought I heard it, and we kept our distance as we walked to a segment of unbroken ground where we could cross. And then we were on my street and at my building and the door slammed shut behind us. R. started up the stairs, not waiting for the elevator as we usually did; I only lived on the third floor, but we had made a kind of ritual of it, as soon as the doors closed we kissed and groped each other, half silly and half sincere, pulling apart at the last moment before the doors opened again. But today R. took the stairs, and I followed him, letting him climb ahead of me. He hadn’t pressed the switch to set the lights running on their timer and so neither did I, the hallways were dark but there was a dull light from the window at each floor, neon signs and lights from neighboring buildings filtered through the unwashed glass. I could hear noises from the apartments we passed, televisions and voices that mixed with the sound of the wind, and from one there was a quick burst of laughter, a man’s voice, joining in the laughter from the show he was watching. R. reached my floor and waited for me at the end of the hallway, where it was truly dark, there wasn’t any window to let in light from the street. He slid past me when I opened the door and headed to the bedroom while I locked it again. I hung back, resting my hand on the knob as I heard the familiar sounds of him undressing, fabric pulled off, the heavy buckle of his belt striking the floor, and then the mattress sighing with his weight.

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

  He makes a fantastic coq au vin and you know why? Because he wants to please me; he knows I like it. “So I’m trying to figure out what it is that I miss. You know that feeling you have the first year, that fluttery, exciting feeling, the butterflies in your stomach, the physical passion? I don’t even know if I can get that anymore. And when I bring this up to Alan, he gets this face. ‘Oh, you want to talk about Brad and Jen again?’ Even Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston got tired of each other, right? I’ve studied biology; I know how the synapses work, how overuse lessens the reaction; I get that. Excitement wanes, yeah yeah yeah. But even if I can’t have that fluttery butterfly feeling, I want to feel something. “The realistic part of me knows that the excitement in the beginning is because of the insecurity in not quite knowing what he’s feeling. When we were dating and the phone rang the reason it was exciting was that I didn’t know it would be him. Now when he travels I tell him not to call me. I don’t want to be woken up. The more intelligent part of me says, ‘I don’t want insecurity. I’m married. I have a kid. I don’t need to worry every time he leaves town: Does he like me? Does he not like me? Is he going to cheat?’ You know those magazine tests: How to tell if he really loves you. I don’t want to worry about that. I don’t need that with my husband right now. But I’d like to recapture some of that excitement. “By the end of a long day at work, taking care of Emilia and cooking a meal, cleaning up, checking things off my list, sex is the farthest thing from my mind. I don’t even want to talk to anyone. Sometimes Alan watches TV and I go into the bedroom to read and I am very happy. So what is it I’m trying to put into words here? Because I’m not just talking about sex. I want to be appreciated as a woman. Not as a mother, not as a wife, not as a companion. And I want to appreciate him as a man. It could be a gaze, a touch, a word. I want to be looked at without all the baggage. “He says it goes both ways. He’s right. It’s not like I put on my negligee and go hubba hubba. I’m lazy in the ‘make me feel special’ department. When we first met I bought him a briefcase for his birthday—something he saw in a store window and loved—and it had two tickets to Paris inside. This year I gave him a DVD and we celebrated with a couple of friends by eating a meat loaf his mother had made.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I felt entranced by Magnolia—by those wise eyes, that inviting smile, that bounteous lap. And those arms— just like my mother’s arms, with those generous folds of flesh cascading down to obscure her elbows. What would it be like to be held, to be cradled, in those pillowy chocolate arms? I thought of all the pressures in my life—writing, teaching, consulting, patients, wife, four children, financial commitments, investments, and now my mother’s death. I need comfort, I thought. Magnolia-comfort—that’s what I need, some of Magnolia’s big-armed comfort. A refrain from an old Judy Collins song drifted into my mind: “Too many sad times . . . Too many bad times . . . But if somehow . . . you could . . . pack up your sorrows and give them all to me . . . You would lose them . . . I know how to use them . . . Give them all to me.” I hadn’t thought of that song for ever so long. Years before, when I first heard Judy Collins’s dulcet voice sing out, “Pack up your sorrows and give them all to me,” desire stirred deep within me. I wanted to climb right into the radio to find that woman and pour my sorrows into her lap. Rosa jolted me out of my reverie: “Dr. Yalom, you asked earlier why I thought others here were better than me. Well, you can see now what I mean. You see how special Magnolia is. And Martin too. They both care about others. People—my folks, my sisters—used to tell me I was selfish. They were right. I don’t reach out to do anything for anyone. I don’t have anything to offer. All I really want is for people to leave me alone.” Magnolia leaned toward me. “That child is so artful,” she said. “Artful”—a strange word. I waited to see what she meant. “You should see the blanket she’s embroidering for me in occupational therapy. Two roses in the center, and around them she’s stitching teeny violets, mus’ be twenty of ’em, all along the edges. And she did the edges in a delicate red design. Honey,” Magnolia turned to Rosa, “will you bring that blanket into group tomorrow? And the picture you was drawin’ too?” Rosa blushed but nodded assent. Time was passing. I suddenly realized I hadn’t explored what the group could offer Magnolia. I had been too enchanted by the promise of her largesse and the memory of that refrain: “You would lose them . . . I know how to use them.” “You know, Magnolia, you should get something from the group too. You started the meeting by saying that what you want from the group is to be a good listener. But I’m impressed, very impressed, with what a good listener you already are. And a good observer too: look at the details you remember about Rosa’s blanket.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  There were six of us left, we tightened our circle as another Bulgarian writer, the only woman in their cohort, took the bottle and spun it on the cobblestones. But before it could come to a stop a voice called out in Bulgarian and then a waitress from inside stepped in between us, wagging her finger and snatching the bottle up from the ground. Chakaite, one of the Bulgarians said, hold on, we’re almost finished, but the waitress said Ne, ne mozhe, it’s not permitted, we were being too loud, people lived above the restaurant, and the bottle, what if it broke, what a mess, and then she turned and walked back inside, the bottle cradled against her chest. We looked at one another, embarrassed, and then the Bulgarian woman shrugged and turned back to the table. Most of the others joined her, one or two went inside the restaurant, where the writers who taught the workshops were sitting, one Bulgarian and one American, we had had our first sessions earlier that day. I stepped away again, not wanting to join them, I pulled my phone out but put it back in my pocket unchecked. I can’t, R. had said, wiping his face, I don’t think I can, I don’t know what I feel, I have to figure out my life. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his computer open in front of him, he kept leaning toward the screen and back. But Skups, I said, using my name for him, our name for each other, that’s what we’ve been doing, we’re figuring out our lives, you are my life, I didn’t say, but I thought it, for two years he had been my life. Every couple of months I flew to Lisbon to spend a long weekend with him, a week, whenever I had a break I stayed in his tiny student’s room, we slept together in the narrow bed he was sitting on now. I’m trying, I said to him, I’m applying for jobs, but there were no jobs, or none I could get, it was too expensive to hire Americans, they said, especially with the crisis, if I had an EU passport it would be different. It’s impossible, R. said, you know it’s impossible, we have to accept it, I have to live my life. I had to live my life too, and I wanted a different life, not a life without R. but a life in a new place, I couldn’t keep living the same day again and again, the hours of teaching, I wanted a new life too.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  But Skups, I said, using my name for him, our name for each other, that’s what we’ve been doing, we’re figuring out our lives, you are my life, I didn’t say, but I thought it, for two years he had been my life. Every couple of months I flew to Lisbon to spend a long weekend with him, a week, whenever I had a break I stayed in his tiny student’s room, we slept together in the narrow bed he was sitting on now. I’m trying, I said to him, I’m applying for jobs, but there were no jobs, or none I could get, it was too expensive to hire Americans, they said, especially with the crisis, if I had an EU passport it would be different. It’s impossible, R. said, you know it’s impossible, we have to accept it, I have to live my life. I had to live my life too, and I wanted a different life, not a life without R. but a life in a new place, I couldn’t keep living the same day again and again, the hours of teaching, I wanted a new life too. On the patio a plan was forming to leave the restaurant and explore the town. It was a warm night, early June, still a week or two before the shops would open for the summer tourists, with signs in Russian hung out over cheap souvenirs; we would have the streets to ourselves. N. made a quick trip inside the restaurant, to the long table where food had been laid out, and returned with a bottle of wine, which he held low and tight against his body, hiding it from the waitress. Rations, he said, very important. The restaurant was near the hotel, at the tip of the little peninsula that formed the southern side of the harbor, and the street we walked along was like all the others in the old town, cobbled and lined on both sides with unpainted wooden houses in the National Revival style, two- or three-story buildings, oddly off-kilter and asymmetrical, with elaborate wooden beams buttressing upper floors jutting out over the foundations. They were in varying stages of upkeep, some renovated, others barely shacks, even here along the most desirable streets near the shore, where buildings jostled for a glimpse of the sea. Most of them were empty, shuttered hotels and vacation homes, but occasionally the sound of a television reached us from inside, or light spilled through the slats of the wooden shutters, a few people lived here all year long.

• 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 This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  over again. The fact was, she had no money and no place to go. Alone, she might have bolted anyway. With me to take care of she thought she couldn’t. When I told her I’d spoken to Geoffrey, her eyes filled with tears. This was unusual for her. We were sitting at the kitchen table, where we liked to talk when we were alone in the house. Geoffrey had recently been sending my mother letters, too, but they hadn’t spoken since we left Utah. She wanted to know what he sounded like, how he was, and all manner of things I had not thought to ask him. My mother grew somber, as she often did when we talked about Geoffrey. She was afraid she’d done the wrong thing in letting him go with my father, afraid he held it against her, that and the divorce, and taking up with Roy. I mentioned Geoffrey’s idea about Choate, about the possibility of my getting a scholarship there or maybe at some other school. I was afraid of her reaction. I thought she would be hurt by my wish to go, but she liked the idea. “He actually thinks you have a chance?” she said. “He said they’ll be eating out of my hand, quote un-quote.” “I don’t know why he thinks that.” “My grades are good,” I said. “That’s true. Your grades are good. What other schools did he mention?” “St. Paul’s.” “He’s got big plans for you.” “Deerfield.” She laughed. “They’ll recognize your name, anyway. I think your father was the only boy they ever expelled.” Then she said, “Don’t get your hopes too high.” “Geoffrey said he’d talk to Dad about it. He said maybe Dad would have some ideas.” “I’m sure he will,” she said. GEOFFREY SENT THE names and addresses of the schools he had first mentioned, and also three others—Hill, Andover, and Exeter. I went to the library at school and looked them up in Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers. This book explained

• From Story of O (1954)

  When Pierre returned, he was carrying the same blindfold with which he had blindfolded her the first evening. He also had a long chain, which made a clanking noise, a chain similar to the one fastened to the wall. O had the impression that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to put the blindfold or the chain on her first. She was gazing out at the rain, not caring what they wanted from her, thinking only that René had said he would come back, that there were still five days and five nights to go, and that she had no idea where he was or whether he was alone and, if he was not alone, who he was with. But he would come back. Pierre had laid the chain on the bed and, without interrupting O’s daydream, had covered her eyes with the blindfold of black velvet. It was slightly rounded below the sockets of the eyes, and fitted the cheekbones perfectly, making it impossible to get the slightest peek or even to raise the eyelids. Blessèd darkness like unto her own night, never had O greeted it with such joy, blessèd chains that bore her away from herself.

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

  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.”

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

  Anticipation implies that we are looking forward to something. It is an important ingredient of desire, and planning for sex helps to generate it. When Dominick prepares his osso buco, he can almost taste it in advance. He imagines Raoul’s surprise and pleasure. He hopes it will make his boyfriend feel special, and he envisions Raoul’s gratitude. Fantasy is the mortar of anticipation. It’s a way of imagining what something is going to be like. It’s a kind of foreplay that takes place outside the couple’s direct interaction. Anticipation is part of building a plot; that is why romance novels and soap operas are filled with it. I believe that longing, waiting, and yearning are fundamental elements of desire that can be generated with forethought, even in long-term relationships. When Nile and Sarah go out on Saturday, they often have a few things planned. Dinner, music, and—later—sex. In the past, an entire evening’s worth of wooing was undone the instant Sarah had to pay the babysitter. “All of a sudden, I’d be the mother again, and all that tension we worked to build up would just vanish. Now, Nile deals with the babysitter and I go straight to the bedroom. It’s an arrangement that lets me keep up the momentum.” Sarah and Nile have three kids who keep her running all day, every day. She has made it very clear to Nile that it takes a lot to get her out of that role, and very little for her to slip back in. “I used to think that it was a matter of being in the mood, but I was disabused of that idea a long time ago. Waiting for the mood is like waiting for the Second Coming. I like the planning. It gives me something to look forward to when I’m playing with Barbies and checking homework.” What Sarah looks forward to is more than the sex; it’s the ritual. Spending ample time together, woman to man, they temporarily slip out of the chains of reality. Their foreplay lasts hours. They’ve been at this for twelve years, and like a mastered discipline, they miss it when they skip it. They know that great sex generally demands more than fifteen minutes right after the eleven o’clock news. Cultivating Play When couples complain that their sex life is listless, I know it isn’t mere frequency they’re after. They may want more, but they certainly want better. For this reason, I prefer to talk about their erotic life rather than about their sex life. The physical act of sex is too narrow a subject, which easily degenerates into a conversation about numbers. Human nature abhors a vacuum of intensity. People long for radiance. They want to feel alive. If given half a chance, loving partners can fill the intensity void with transcendence.

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

  It’s not by co-opting aggression but rather by owning it that sexual tension can freely romp—and can itself bring safety. Everyone Needs a Secret Garden In her landmark book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes, “Eroticism is a movement toward the Other, this is its essential character.” Yet in our efforts to establish intimacy we often seek to eliminate otherness, thereby precluding the space necessary for desire to flourish. We seek intimacy to protect ourselves from feeling alone; and yet creating the distance essential to eroticism means stepping back from the comfort of our partner and feeling more alone. I suggest that our ability to tolerate our separateness—and the fundamental insecurity it engenders—is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire in a relationship. Instead of always striving for closeness, I argue that couples may be better off cultivating their separate selves. If cultivating separateness sounds harsh, let’s think of it instead as nurturing a sense of selfhood. The French psychologist Jacques Salomé talks about the need to develop a personal intimacy with one’s own self as a counterbalance to the couple. There is beauty in an image that highlights a connection to oneself, rather than a distance from one’s partner. In our mutual intimacy we make love, we have children, and we share physical space and interests. Indeed, we blend the essential parts of our lives. But “essential” does not mean “all.” Personal intimacy demarcates a private zone, one that requires tolerance and respect. It is a space—physical, emotional, and intellectual—that belongs only to me. Not everything needs to be revealed. Everyone should cultivate a secret garden. Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Love is about having; desire is about wanting. An expression of longing, desire requires ongoing elusiveness. It is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air. 3 The Pitfalls of Modern Intimacy Talk Is Not the Only Avenue to Closeness We have no secrets, we tell each other everything. —Carly Simon, “We Have No Secrets” WHEN MY MOTHER TALKED ABOUT relationships, she didn’t have much to say about intimacy. “You need two things in a marriage,” she told me. “You need the will to make it work and you need to be able to make compromises. It’s not hard to be right, but then you are right and alone.” My father, who was always less pragmatic than my mother, more than filled the quota for expressiveness and demonstrativeness.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  When you play the tape of this session I’d like you to listen carefully to what I just said to you. . . . I think it’s the most important thing I’ve ever said to you.” Switching cassettes, Myrna listened to the countertransference dictation again. Certain phrases struck home: “She will not relate to me, and she will not acknowledge that she doesn’t—and insists it’s not relevant anyway. . . . How many goddamn times do I have to explain why it’s important to look at our relationship? . . . Does everything possible to eliminate any shred of closeness between us. Nothing I do is good enough for her. . . . No tenderness . . . too self-focused . . . ungiving.” Perhaps Dr. Lash is right, she thought. I really never have thought about him, his life, his experience. But I can change that. Today. Right now as I drive home. But she couldn’t stay focused for more than a minute or two. To still her mind, she turned to a useful mind-quieting technique she had learned a few years before at a Big Sur meditation weekend (which in most other ways had been a rip-off). Keeping one part of her mind on the highway, with the rest she imagined a broom sweeping out every stray thought that popped in. That done, she concentrated only on her breathing, on the inhalation of cool air and on the exhalation of the air slightly heated in the nest of her lungs. Good. Her mind quieter now, she allowed Dr. Lash’s face to appear, first smiling and attentive, then frowning and turning away. Over the past several weeks, ever since she had overheard his dictation, her feelings toward him had gyrated wildly. One thing I’ve got to say for him, she thought; he’s persistent. I’ve had the poor guy on the ropes for weeks now. Making him sweat. Belting him again and again with his own words. Yet he’s taking his licks. Hanging in there. Doesn’t throw in the towel. And no weasel in him: no slinking, no crooked twists and turns, no trying to lie his way out as I’d have done. Oh, maybe a little fibbing, like denying he said “whining.” But maybe he was just trying to spare me pain. Myrna came out of her reverie just in time to take the Highway 380 turnoff and then effortlessly slipped back into fantasy. Wonder what Dr. Lash’s doing now? Dictating? Making notes of our session? Storing them in one of the desk compartments? Or maybe he’s just sitting at his desk thinking of me this very minute. That desk. Daddy’s desk. Is Daddy thinking of me now? Maybe he’s still somewhere, maybe watching me now. No, Daddy is dust. Bare shiny skull. Heap of dust. And all his thoughts about me—dust too. And his memories, his loves, his hates, his discouragement—all dust.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It’s crazy outside, he said as he sat down, gesturing to the window beside us, it’s totally crazy, I’ve never seen anything like it, have you—but he went on before I could answer. He was sorry he was late, he said, he was supposed to go to a party but had bowed out at the last minute, and then it had been hard to persuade his roommate to go on without him. I thought I wouldn’t be able to come, R. said, and I made a noncommittal sound, feeling my annoyance return. Oh, he said, are you mad, and he wore an expression of such openness and willingness to be in the wrong that it was impossible to stay angry. I told him it was all right, that he shouldn’t worry, it was nothing. No, he said, it isn’t nothing, I hate that I can’t see you when I want to, and he made a small gesture with his hand, extending it slightly toward mine. We couldn’t touch, of course, it would be imprudent, but he flexed his fingers in a way that I knew meant desire, that though he was touching the polished wood it was me he wanted to touch. This was clear in his expression, too, when I looked at his face and he said very softly, almost mouthing it, Skupi, one of the few words of Bulgarian he had learned. It means dear or of great price, which was what I had thought on our second or third meeting as he lay naked beside me and I ran my hand along his side. I had said the word almost without intending to, Skupi, and he asked me what it meant and then drew me to him and whispered it like an affirmation in my ear. It had become our private name for each other, and I think it was then, when we first uttered the word, that I realized I was caught by him, that however things turned out they would have consequence, and I was both frightened by this and gave myself over to it, I decided I would let whatever might happen between us happen.

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

  some sharpness. “Right,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” He walked back down the aisle. I began to follow him but she said, “He’ll be right back, Thomas. Just wait here.” She put my purchases in a bag and we stood without speaking for a time. “I don’t usually keep that much cash on hand,” she finally said. I looked toward the rear of the store. I couldn’t see the man. “So how long have you been living here, Thomas?” “About six months,” I said. “And how do you like it so far?” “Okay. I mean I really like it.” “Good. I do too, it’s a nice place to live. People here are nice.” Then I saw that she was trembling, close to tears, and I knew she had betrayed me. I glanced toward the empty prescription desk again and said, “You know, I’ve got some other things to do, I’ll just come back later.” I started down the aisle. She said, “Wait, Thomas.” When I reached the door I looked around and saw that she had come from behind the counter and was following me. “Wait,” she said, holding me with her eyes as I stood there, and I saw in her eyes what I had heard in her voice earlier: sorrow. I pulled the door open and stepped outside and began walking fast down the street. I passed a few shops and then I heard her voice behind me again— “Thomas!” I quickened my pace. She kept following and calling out to me. I looked over my shoulder. She was running, slowly and clumsily, but running. I squeezed the overnight bag against my side with my elbow and broke into a run myself. The two of us ran down the street, twenty, twenty-five feet apart. I was holding back, just loping along. “Thomas!” she said, “Thomas, wait!” and every time she spoke I felt a tug from this voice so full of care. I felt she knew all of me, all my foolishness and trouble, and wanted only to take hold of me and set me right. The sidewalk was crowded. If the men and women we ran through had thought there was any reason to stop me, they would have. If she had yelled “Thief!” just once, I would have been mobbed on the spot. Everyone must have thought it was a family affair. They must have heard what I heard, the voice of a mother trying to reach her child. I turned the corner at the end of the block, and this somehow broke her hold on me. All the speed I’d been saving seemed to come to me at once. I tore down

• From Story of O (1954)

  Had she good reason to be so upset, and to be so annoyed at Natalie who, elated at the prospect of seeing O opened by someone other than Sir Stephen, was doing a kind of wild Indian dance around her and shouting: “Do you think he’ll go into your mouth too, O? You should have seen the way he was looking at your mouth! Oh, how lucky you are to be desired like that! I’m sure that he’ll whip you: he came back three times to those marks where you can see you’ve been whipped. At least you won’t be thinking about Jacqueline then!” “I’m not always thinking about Jacqueline, you silly fool,” O replied. “No! I’m not silly and I’m not a fool. I know very well you miss her,” the child said. It was true, but not completely. What O missed was not, properly speaking, Jacqueline, but the use of a girl’s body, with no restrictions attached. If Natalie had not been declared off-limits to her, she would have taken Natalie, and the only reason she had not violated the restriction was her certainty that Natalie would be given to her at Roissy in a few weeks’ time, and that, some time previously, Natalie would be handed over in her presence, by her, and thanks to her. She was burning to demolish the wall of air, of space, of—to use the only correct term—void between Natalie and her, and yet at the same time she was enjoying the wait imposed upon her. She said so to Natalie, who only shook her head and refused to believe her. “If Jacqueline were here, and were willing,” she said, “you’d caress her.” “Of course I would,” O said with a laugh. “There, you see,” the child broke in.