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)

  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.”

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

  I know how bad it can be out there. So what is it I want? “I look at my friend Marc, who’s getting divorced from his third wife because, he says, ‘She doesn’t inspire me.’ So I ask Alan, ‘Do I inspire you?’ and you know what he says? ‘You inspire me to cook chicken every Sunday.’ 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.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I was walking with another American, a graduate student in a program he hated in the South. He was younger than I was, and fit; in the mornings he ran along the sea, on the path that led to the new town, where the shops were open, he said, it was a real city, not just a museum. He was friendly and I tried to match his friendliness, it was why I was here, I told myself, to meet people, to make friends. But I didn’t trust myself, I was too eager, I caught myself looking at him, at almost every man I passed, with a kind of hunger R. had shielded me from, I mean the thought of R. It might be possible, I thought about the other writer, he looked at me sometimes in a way that made me think maybe I could have him, or he could have me, we could have a little romance, though that wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me, I wanted to go back to what R. had lifted me out of. It was a childish feeling, maybe, I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me. We were trailing behind the others, we could hear them ahead of us in the dark, their occasional bursts of laughter. We were walking up Apolonia, the main thoroughfare, though it wasn’t until we reached the center of town that there were any real signs of life, some open shops, a restaurant, a man at a table outside, hunched over a slice of pizza. We caught up with the others in front of a convenience store, and waited until N. and the priest emerged with new bottles of wine and a stack of plastic cups. N. handed these out as the priest busied himself with one of the bottles, cutting the foil at the neck with a pocketknife attached to his keys, working at it slowly, with the deliberateness of drunkenness. He had arrived after the rest of us, driving in from Veliko Turnovo. We had all been curious to meet him, but there was nothing especially priestly about the man who appeared dressed all in black, not in a cassock but in jeans and a T-shirt he wore tucked in, tight on his thin frame.

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

  We stopped at the top of one of the hills, exhausted. Moonlight appraised the orchard to our right. The apples glowed dimly on their branches, dropping here and there in quick thuds, their sweet fermented stink in our lungs. Deep in the oaks across the road, invisible tree frogs let out their rasped calls. We let our bikes drop and sat on a wooden fence along the road. Trevor lit a cigarette, drew from it, eyes closed, then passed the ruby bead toward my fingers. I sucked but coughed, my spit thick from the ride. The smoke warmed my lungs and my eyes settled on a cluster of mansions in the small valley before us. “They say Ray Allen lives up here,” Trevor said. “The basketball player, right?” “He played for UConn—dude probably has two cribs up here.” “Maybe he lives in that one,” I said, pointing the cigarette to the only darkened house at the edge of the valley. The house was almost invisible but for the white trim around its edges, like the skeleton of a prehistoric creature. Maybe Ray Allen is away, I thought, playing in the NBA and too busy to live in it. I passed the cigarette back. “If Ray Allen was my dad,” he said, his gaze still fixed on the bone house, “that’d be my house and you could always come and crash there.” “You already have a dad.” He flicked the roach on the road and looked away. It fell and broke into an orange gash on the pavement, then sputtered out. “Forget that guy, little man,” Trevor looked at me, soft, “he’s not worth it.” “Worth what?” “Getting pissed over, dude. Ah—score!” He took out a mini Snickers from his coat pocket. “Must’ve been here since last Halloween.” “Who said I was?” “He just got his things, you know?” He pointed the Snickers to his head. “The drink gets to him.” “Yeah. I guess.” The tree frogs seemed further away, smaller. Some kind of quiet sharpened between us. “Hey, don’t do the fuckin’ silent thing, man. It’s a fag move. I mean—” A frustrated sigh escaped him. He bit into the Snickers. “Want half?” By way of reply I opened my mouth. He placed the thumb-sized morsel on my tongue, wiped his lips with his wrist, and looked away. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, chewing. He was about to say something else, his teeth grey pills in the moonlight, then got up and stumbled toward his bike. I picked up my own, the steel already wet with dew, and that’s when I saw it. Actually, Trevor saw it first, letting out an almost imperceptible gasp. I turned around and we both just stood there leaning against our bikes.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  1005 00:49:34,905 --> 00:49:38,308 [Narrator] The Forbes exposé is soon forgotten. 1006 00:49:38,408 --> 00:49:41,111 And Keith Raniere rides high once again, 1007 00:49:41,211 --> 00:49:43,146 all thanks to the continued benevolence 1008 00:49:43,246 --> 00:49:45,415 of the Bronfman sisters. 1009 00:49:46,750 --> 00:49:51,188 But soon Raniere will face a bigger scandal closer to home-- 1010 00:49:51,288 --> 00:49:54,024 a revolt from his own female members. 1011 00:49:56,960 --> 00:50:00,564 [Narrator] For nine years, NXIVM member and Keith Raniere lover 1012 00:50:00,664 --> 00:50:02,833 Barbara Bouchey has looked the other way 1013 00:50:02,933 --> 00:50:06,636 when it came to her leader's numerous paramours. 1014 00:50:06,737 --> 00:50:09,706 But in 2009, she reaches her breaking point 1015 00:50:09,806 --> 00:50:11,975 for a different reason. 1016 00:50:12,075 --> 00:50:14,244 Barbara is financially ruined by Keith. 1017 00:50:14,344 --> 00:50:16,146 [Narrator] Raniere has drained his lover's account 1018 00:50:16,246 --> 00:50:21,151 of roughly $1.6 million, trading stock in his name. 1019 00:50:21,251 --> 00:50:23,020 I don't know that she'll ever financially recover, 1020 00:50:23,120 --> 00:50:26,089 at least not to where she was beforehand. 1021 00:50:27,324 --> 00:50:29,860 [Narrator] That April, Bouchey and eight other women 1022 00:50:29,960 --> 00:50:35,098 in Raniere's inner circle decide to leave the group for good. 1023 00:50:35,198 --> 00:50:37,367 [Paige] They were like, he's lying to all of us, 1024 00:50:37,467 --> 00:50:39,036 and we're gonna make him pay. 1025 00:50:39,136 --> 00:50:41,738 They then kind of make it their mission to tell people about 1026 00:50:41,838 --> 00:50:43,140 what's going on, 1027 00:50:43,240 --> 00:50:45,609 to try and reveal what's happening. 1028 00:50:45,709 --> 00:50:48,211 [Narrator] The NXIVM Nine, as they're called, 1029 00:50:48,311 --> 00:50:53,083 claim the organization is psychologically abusive. 1030 00:50:53,183 --> 00:50:55,919 Despite the sensational nature of the claims, 1031 00:50:56,019 --> 00:50:58,388 few take notice. 1032 00:50:58,488 --> 00:51:03,193 There were reports in the Times Union for years about NXIVM. 1033 00:51:03,293 --> 00:51:04,795 Nothing was done. 1034 00:51:04,895 --> 00:51:08,365 Nobody seemed to want to go after this huge group, 1035 00:51:08,465 --> 00:51:11,201 which is now widely viewed as a cult. 1036 00:51:11,301 --> 00:51:15,272 And many attorneys in the capital region were 1037 00:51:15,372 --> 00:51:17,074 either afraid to go after them 1038 00:51:17,174 --> 00:51:19,876 or were actually representing them. 1039 00:51:21,645 --> 00:51:25,348 The NXIVM Nine were powerful people in our organization. 1040 00:51:25,449 --> 00:51:28,518 So when they left, they created this sort of exodus. 1041 00:51:28,618 --> 00:51:31,088 A lot of people left at that point. 1042 00:51:31,188 --> 00:51:33,390 I didn't leave, because... 1043 00:51:33,490 --> 00:51:36,326 I believed Keith's story. 1044 00:51:37,227 --> 00:51:39,062 [Narrator] Despite the string of defections, 1045 00:51:39,162 --> 00:51:40,931 Raniere is still riding high, 1046 00:51:41,031 --> 00:51:43,800 thanks in large part to a devoted group of followers 1047 00:51:43,900 --> 00:51:46,837 such as Smallville actress Allison Mack. 1048 00:51:48,672 --> 00:51:51,341 [Paige] Allison Mack is someone who has been successful.

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

  As we went into the first curve I felt Pearl’s fingers sinking into my forearm. “Please, Dwight,” I said. “Please, Dwight ,” he said. And then he took us through the turns above the river, tires wailing, headlights swinging between cliff and space, and the more we begged him the faster he went, only slowing down for a breath after the really close calls, and then laughing to show he wasn’t afraid. When I was alone in the house I went through everyone’s private things. One day I found in my mother’s bureau a letter from her brother Stephen, who lived in Paris. It was filled with descriptions of the city and the pleasures to be had there. I read it a couple of times, then copied the address from the flimsy blue envelope and put it back in the drawer. That night I wrote my uncle a long letter in which I created a nightmare picture of our life in Chinook. It seemed true enough as I wrote it, but I got carried away. At the end of the letter I pleaded with my uncle to bring my mother and me to Paris. If he would just help us get started, I said, we’d be on our feet in no time. We would find jobs and pay him back whatever we owed. I said I didn’t know how much longer we could hold out—everything depended on him. I plastered an envelope with stamps and mailed it off. I waited a few days for his answer, then forgot about it. MY MOTHER CAUGHT me on the steps one afternoon as I was coming in from my paper route. She said she wanted me to take a walk with her. Not far from the house there was a footbridge over the river, and when we got there she stopped and asked me what in the world I had written to her brother. I said I didn’t remember, exactly. “It must’ve been pretty bad,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How did you get his address?” I told her I’d found the letter on top of her bureau. She shook her head and looked out over the water. “I was just trying to help,” I said. “Read this,” she said, and handed me a blue envelope. Inside was another letter from Uncle Stephen. He expressed his shock and sympathy at the wretchedness of our condition, but explained that he wasn’t able to launch a rescue operation on the scale of the one I had proposed. They didn’t have room for both of us, and as far as finding jobs was concerned we had no prospects at all. We didn’t speak French, and even if we did we would never be able to get working papers. I belonged in school, anyway. The whole idea was ridiculous. Still, he and his wife wanted to do what they could.

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

  It was Hartford. It was a cluster of light that pulsed with a force I never realized it possessed. Maybe it was because his breaths were so clear to me then, how I imagined the oxygen in his throat, his lungs, the bronchi and blood vessels expanding, how it moved through all the places I’ll never see, that I keep returning to this most basic measurement of life, even long after he’s gone. But for now, the city brims before us with a strange, rare brilliance—as if it was not a city at all, but the sparks made by some god sharpening his weapons above us. “Fuck,” Trevor whispered. He put his hands in his pockets and spat on the ground. “Fuck.” The city throbbed, shimmered. Then, trying to snap himself out of it, he said, “Fuck Coca-Cola.” “Yeah, Sprite for life, fuckers,” I added, not knowing then what I know now: that Coca-Cola and Sprite were made by the same damn company. That no matter who you are or what you love or where you stand, it was always Coca-Cola in the end. Trevor rusted pickup and no license. Trevor sixteen; blue jeans streaked with deer blood. Trevor too fast and not enough. Trevor waving his John Deere cap from the driveway as you ride by on your squeaky Schwinn. Trevor who fingered a freshman girl then tossed her underwear in the lake for fun. For summer. For your hands were wet and Trevor’s a name like an engine starting up in the night. Who snuck out to meet a boy like you. Yellow and barely there. Trevor going fifty through his daddy’s wheat field. Who jams all his fries into a Whopper and chews with both feet on the gas. Your eyes closed, riding shotgun, the wheat a yellow confetti. Three freckles on his nose. Three periods to a boy-sentence. Trevor Burger King over McDonald’s ’cause the smell of smoke on the beef makes it real. Trevor bucktooth clicking on his inhaler as he sucked, eyes shut. Trevor I like sunflowers best. They go so high. Trevor with the scar like a comma on his neck, syntax of what next what next what next. Imagine going so high and still opening that big. Trevor loading the shotgun two red shells at a time. It’s kind of like being brave, I think. Like you got this big ole head full of seeds and no arms to defend yourself. His hard lean arms aimed in the rain. He touches the trigger’s black tongue and you swear you taste his finger in your mouth as it pulls. Trevor pointing at the one-winged sparrow thrashing in black dirt and takes it for something new. Something smoldering like a word. Like a Trevor

• From The History of World Literature (2007)

  157 Joyce’s Dubliners Lecture 37 We’re going to try in this lecture to see … how [Joyce’s Dubliners] is related to [the work] of … writers that we’ve looked at in this course … look at two of the stories themselves … and … see how in those two stories … we can see the seeds of later James Joyce works. B eginning with Proust in our last lecture, the arts launched into a period of radical experimentation, partly prompted by the massive dislocations of the 20 th century and partly by the ongoing quest of artists to ¿ nd new ways to capture human experience and its signi ¿ cance in art. One of these great experimenters was James Joyce. Joyce’s most accessible experimental work is Ulysses (1922), to which an entire course offered by The Teaching Company is dedicated. His most strikingly innovative work is Finnegans Wake (1939), which has kept critics and readers busy for the better part of a century. Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), connects back to other writers and points ahead to his later accomplishments. He was one of the writers who re-created the short story as we discussed in Lecture 34, moving its action and focus from external to internal events. Joyce called his own version of this internal focus an epiphany. The word comes from the time in the Christian church year commemorating the visit of the Wise Men—January 6. Joyce used the term to indicate a sudden revelation or discovery, usually unexpected, that allows the protagonist or reader to see something in a new way. Dubliners contains 15 stories, all set in Dublin, written mostly after Joyce had left Ireland for good in 1903. Although he set everything he wrote in Dublin, Joyce was always critical of its narrowness, hypocrisy, and subservience to the Catholic Joyce helped to shift the idea of the modern short story from a heavily plotted one to a story in which … all … major events are internal, mental, rather than external.