Longing

Passages

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

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• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  From the lip of the bowl, up top, it looked more treacherous and lively than it turned out to be. The cleared overlook at the tip of the trail, Massai Point, is named for a Chiricahua Apache man who stole a horse out from under the droopy mustache of a settler. The startled, righteous white man gathered up some of his buddies and they stood at the point and watched for the Apache to show the top of his head. Rifles poised and scanning, they kept their eyes peeled. From the overlook there are a hundred thousand gaps and crevices between the balanced monoliths and stacked boulders. Breathing into the granite walls, hands flat and calming against the heaving sides of his new horse, he waited them out, watching the sky darken and the moon lift its face. They got tired of waiting and rode back to their settlement, miffed at the giant sheltering landscape, the defiant stone thumbs that hid wild Indians in their shadows. This is daytime. My soap opera is on right now, somewhere. Back in Iowa. My people are roaming back and forth on the television screen, all prepared for any kind of upheaval; there are a lot of chiffon dresses and dyed-to-match shoes. I mention to Eric that my show is on. He turns with a grin and watches me ski down a dissolving patch of trail. Loose rocks roll beneath my feet as I’m carried along. This is elementary physics, ancient Egyptians used it to take house-size rocks here and there, up and down various hills. I skid one foot halfway under an overhanging rock and a curled ribbon of skin peels up my leg. Rattlers hang out under rocks, waiting for a shin to come along. Yee-ikes. I pull my lower leg back out where it belongs and start making an enormous deal out of my injury. Eric sprinkles water on it and yawns. He remembers that we’re an hour off down here, the soap is already over. The air turns tangy and alive, the sun is gone, the sky is black. Glimmers of light bristle forward in the dome above the coyote’s head. He moves out. The night has a seething quality, a crisp silence that hides the tunneling of small, cowering mammals, the slumped somnolence of the wandering cattle, the wide-eyed jitters of the stick-leg deer. The moon, from the bitter cold of outer space, croons to the griddle of the desert. The coyote listens and turns to the west. An image has moved forward in his head: Out of the murk a picture comes to the forefront, melting into view. The thick, spongy edges of lightness, the dark legs and face, the palpable panic of the herd. The sheep are waiting. The moon pushes him forward from behind and snakes slide under bushes until he passes. Out of nowhere a skunk appears, startled, hunkering low with wide mirrored eyes.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  Surely I only imagine now, from this distance, that there was longing in his voice as he spoke, surely I didn’t hear it then, when I turned to him and put my arms around him and buried my face in his chest, as I was still young enough to do, when he wrapped his arms around me in turn, holding me even as I could feel him withdraw into his own reverie or contemplation. But I do hear it, the longing I think he felt as he drifted away from me and from the scene we inhabited together, which must have seemed so different to him, for whom it was the life he had escaped. It was only six months or so before the day when I left my classroom and walked into the September heat that I learned fully both the extent of his longing and the full measure of what he had fled. My sisters had come to visit me in Sofia, my half sisters, the two daughters my father had with his second wife. They were more than a decade younger than I, and I had always felt an overwhelming tenderness for them, which competed with the envy I felt of the love my father showed them so freely. This was especially true of the youngest, G., whom my father loved as he had loved none of the rest of us; he delighted in her swiftness when she was a child, the way she sped about the house, quieting only when he caught her and gathered her in his arms. It was G. who one night told us the stories he had shared with her, stories I couldn’t remember ever having heard, though occasionally some note in what she said struck as if at a distance a familiar tone. We hadn’t seen one another for years, and in that time my father’s second marriage had failed, ending what had always seemed to me my sisters’ good fortune. One of them was just out of college, the other still studying, and I was shocked at the sight of them; they were competent and adult, elegant, with a sophistication I could never dream of having. We were in the main room of my apartment, the common room and kitchen, surrounded by the detritus of a gathering we had had; we sat with half a bottle of wine, two of us at the table and G. alone on the couch. We had let the room go almost dark, only a few candles were still burning, and through the windows the lights of the neighboring blokove were lovely, now that the gray of their concrete had faded into the night. It was my birthday, we had all been drinking, but G. with an abandon I watched with concern.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Memory Palace From the street, here is the house. There is a front door, but you never go in the front door. Here is what lines the driveway: all the boys who liked you as a girl. Colin, the dentist’s son, who told you in a soft voice that your dress was beautiful. You looked down to confirm for yourself, and then skipped merrily away. (A diva, even then! Your mother told you this story; you were so young you did not remember it on your own.) Seth, who, in sixth grade, bought you the brand-new Animorphs book—the one where Cassie transmogrifies into a butterfly on the cover—and had his mother drive him to your house so he could give it to you. Adam, your beloved friend who worked at the local movie theater and brought home garbage bags of day-old popcorn so you could watch movies your parents would never let you see: Memento and Dancer in the Dark and Pulp Fiction and Mulholland Drive and Y Tu Mamá También . Adam burned you so many CDs. Some of them were too weird for you. There was one band who just destroyed instruments into microphones, and you rolled your eyes and said, “This is stupid.” But then Adam’s mom took both of you to Philadelphia in January to see a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert. The band started late, and you huddled together in a shared hoodie. The music was byzantine, kaleidoscopic, inexpressibly beautiful. You didn’t know how to even talk about the mix of audio and sound, the way the symphony of it washed over you, vibrated every part of your body. Once, Adam wrote a story about you and later, a song, when you went away to college. You did not know what to do with Adam’s love, the steady and undemanding affection of it. Then, Tracey, who had a twin brother, Timmy. They were Mormon and sweet, and you had a crush on Timmy, but Tracey had a crush on you. You once ordered a free Book of Mormon from the internet and ended up having a two-hour-long conversation with a young guy—he sounded so handsome—who was calling from Salt Lake City to gauge your interest in their religion. You couldn’t say, “I ordered it because I am in love with one half of a set of Mormon twins and the other half has a crush on me.” So instead, you bantered about theology for two hours before you regretfully got off the phone. Anyway, those boys. You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself—not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for? The back patio: college. So many unrequited crushes, and—ultimately—the worst sex. You once drove across four states to sleep with a man in upstate New York in the dead of winter. It was so cold your drugstore-brand astringent face wash froze in its tube. The sex was bad, obviously, but what you remember most clearly is what you wanted from that night. You wanted that drive-across-four-states desire. You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? You were awake all night staring at the streetlight in the parking lot outside his bedroom window. Why did men never own curtains? How do you get someone you want to want you? Why did no one love you? The kitchen: OkCupid, Craigslist. Living in California and trying to date women, but failing because Bay Area lesbians proved to be pretty testy about the whole bisexual thing. So then, a parade of men: sweet men and terrible men and older men. Professionals and students. An astrophysicist, several programmers. One guy with a boat in the Berkeley marina. Then, moving to Iowa and going on a bunch of terrible dates, including with a man you kept seeing later in the waiting room of your therapist’s office. He played piano. A med student, maybe? You can barely remember. The living room, the office, the bathroom: boyfriends, or something approximating them. Casey and Paul and Al. Casey was the worst. Al was the kindest. Paul was knock-you-sideways perfect; he fucked you and fed you and tried to teach you to love California. It was all you ever wanted. He was so pretty. You loved his downy ass, his surprisingly soft scruff, the strength of his hands. You wanted to crawl up inside him and have him crawl up inside you. He made you feel special and sexy and smart. He broke up with you because he didn’t love you, which is a very good reason to break up with somebody, even though at the time you wanted to die. The bedroom: don’t go in there.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Which is what people crave in sex, isn’t it? To be known fully and still loved, still embraced, still accepted. We read that in this city, “nothing impure will ever enter it.”10 Isn’t that what sex is supposed to be for people in its greatest moment? When it is free from power and coercion and manipulation and agendas and fears, when it is simply two people giving all of themselves to each other, holding nothing back? We read in John’s account that there is a tree of life in this city, and that “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”11 The healing of the nations is the dream of the Jewish prophets, the dream of God—for everybody to finally get along. No war, no conflict, no strife. Harmony between all of humanity. Isn’t that the dream of any relationship? Isn’t that why people continue to step into relationships, even when they’ve been hurt time and time again? Because we still find new ways to hope that there, we will finally get along with somebody. All of us connected with each other in one giant global embrace. We read that in this city, “no longer will there be any curse.”12 The curse is a reference to the entrance of death into the human story in the garden of Eden. This curse is everywhere we look. Even the best possible relationships have a certain ache to them because someday, inevitably, one person is going to stand over the casket of the other. It all ends there. For everyone. For many people, sex is brief moments when everything is okay with the world, even if it isn’t. It’s escape from the pain and suffering and brokenness of life. It’s a short time when all is right, even if lots of things around us are falling apart. In Revelation, God announces, “I am making everything new!”13 Isn’t that the longing of every embrace, every act of love, sex itself? To start again, to give yourself away, again, to try again for hope and healing and restoration? We find sex so powerful because it provides people with glimpses into the world we all desperately desire but can’t seem to create on our own. Which raises a few questions. If marriage has a purpose, to bring hope to the world, what happens when the world doesn’t need hope? What happens to marriage when every hope has been fulfilled? If sex is about connection, what happens when everybody is connected with everybody else? If marriage is about the man and the woman filling each other in, complementing each other, bone of bones and flesh of flesh, what happens when the man and woman are complete in and of themselves? What happens when everything we need from each other we have in God? What happens in the presence of God when we are everything we were originally created to be?

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  Love is risky. If she decides to love him, she runs the huge risk that she might have her heart broken. And this risk does not end with marriage, with going through the wall and leaving home. Later in the Song of Songs, it appears that this couple is married. He comes to her at night. “Open to me . . . my darling . . . my head is drenched with dew, my hair with the dampness of the night . . .”2 Now there is all sorts of commentary by scholars on what is going on here, but the general belief is that he’s been gone—farming, fighting, traveling—doing something that has brought him back in the middle of the night. Normally he would stay somewhere else rather than wake her up. But he returns to their bedroom and knocks. She responds, “I have taken off my robe—must I put it on again? I have washed my feet—must I soil them again?” What’s interesting about her words is that they translate from the Hebrew language, “I have a headache.”3 This is the awkward, real-life stuff that happens every day in relationships. She’s tired, and getting out of bed right now seems like such a hassle. It’s been a long day, she’s exhausted. Her reaction is, “Anytime but now.” But then she catches herself. Like we all do. Do you ever have those moments when you hear yourself talking, almost from outside of your body, and the second you finish, you’re already starting the next sentence, which is, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. Please forget I said that. What I meant was . . .”? She says, “My heart began to pound for him. I arose to open for my beloved . . . but my beloved had left; he was gone.” And then she adds, “My heart sank at his departure.” She’s too slow, and he’s gone. He extended himself, he risked, he called to her from the other side of the door, and he got a no. Who doesn’t know this feeling? She discovers that he’s split, and she says, “I looked for him but did not find him.” Now she’s the one risking, searching, trying to find him. And coming up empty. The heart has tremendous capacity to love, and to ache. And this ache is universal. Universal Sisterhood You can put women from all over the world with nothing in common in a room together and they may not have a thing to talk about until one of them says, “And then he cheated on me,” and instantly you have universal sisterhood. Think of the poems, songs, plays, movies, novels across the ages that have dealt with this pain. Everybody understands it.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I turn on my side on the hard picnic table and look at Eric. He is awake, watching me. He knows the desert is making me sad, that I have these moments; he smiles and moves up close. I can feel the sky on my face, the warm flannel of the desert floor below. I can feel the face of the man beside me. In the silence of the monument he begins whispering the names of the constellations while I listen: Cygnus the Swan, Pegasus the Horse, Canis Major the Great Dog, Cassiopeia, Arcturus. I am on planet Earth. They are near. He pulls in the scent with loud snorts, running from bush to rock to bush again. This is a clearing, a high naked spot. On the distant rise, just ahead, waiting, they are still invisible, but the scent rises in the air around him, palpable as mist. He opens his mouth wide and stands frozen, ears back, eyes pressed shut. The dirt beneath his pads is hard and dry, devoid, the moon is gone. As the mist rises around him, the sound comes forth, pulled from tendon and muscle. It pushes itself through his lungs and into the night, a long trembling wail, dying slowly, drifting finally, without his help, dissipating. Still frozen, he listens for a moment to the roaring silence, waiting, and slowly the sound moves back toward him, fainter, broken into parts like music. Many voices. They are ahead of him, in the high clearing where the deer sometimes sleep, pausing to listen, ready to bring him in with the radar of their voices. He begins running again and gravity relinquishes its hold. The terrain becomes buoyant and he soars low over the ground, like a night bird, a skipped stone. The tent is completely dark. I am floating on the ocean in a canoe, each dip of the oar pours out a panful of light, beneath the surface small silver minnows hover like aircraft. My big collie roams along the shore, following the boat, whining low in her throat, stamping her white paws against the sand. I row toward the beach, casting light behind me, and she begins to bark. I am awake suddenly in the darkness. Outside the tent is the padding of feet, around and around, a swift turning, a pause. There is something in our campsite, trying to get our food. Eric startles and wakes, I touch his hair, breathe into his ear. The paws turn again, there is loud panting, the low whine, and then a series of barks and yelps, a prolonged terrible howl. It is deafening and wild, I can feel him out there, conjuring hysteria out of the dark. A long, plaintive keening, and suddenly it ends, drifting off, carried away from us. We are breathing low and shallow, resting on our elbows. When the reply comes he joins in, barking first and then crying, pitched high then low, the howl of loneliness and communion.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Small quail run across the path, back and forth, stopping and starting, murmuring and pecking. In the distance one cactus stands apart, reaching at least two feet taller than any of the others, a surly foreman, the dad of the landscape. I want to go see it, see how tall it is compared to me. Eric has a forked stick that he’s using for a divining rod. “It’ll come in handy for snakes,” he tells me, “and show us where there’s water.” The stick suddenly lifts in the air and starts shaking, he manages to hold on and push it back down. “I accidentally pointed it towards the bathrooms,” he says. The camper people are out with their little dog. The guy has a garden hose that he’s spraying the path with because he doesn’t want dust from cars to get on his Astroturf rug. I feel like talking to him but he just nods without smiling and we have to keep walking. He points the hose politely in another direction until we’re past, and the poodle barks and barks. I tell Eric I wish I had a little dog like that one. “Of course you do,” he answers, “that’s the one thing you’re short on.” Three dogs mingle and mill somewhere in the vast universe, in Iowa, wondering why we’re not there petting them. I muse on this for a while. A big dog, a medium-size dog, and a charming lapdog with a mean streak. “They don’t even know we’re gone,” I tell Eric, “they think we went in the other room and just haven’t come back yet.” The minds of dogs interest me, the way they never bother to anticipate problems. By the time we get to the tall cactus the light has softened to a benign burn, a warm pat on the head. We both look great all of a sudden, stained brown with pink auras. Eric sets down his stick and moves back to get the whole cactus in the frame, with me standing at the base for comparison. At the very top of the saguaro a crista has formed over some kind of damage. The scar blooms out, hard and dark green, like the tiny head on a giant. I step over the debris at the base and arrange myself with arms out, bent at the elbow. The cactus is very old and very tall; up close it is hard and weathered and looks important; a cactus emeritus. I stand in the soft, end-of-day shadow and have my picture taken. It feels like being on Mars here, the light is strange, these green men stand all over the terrain. Ninety-three million miles due west, the sun continues to shoot off its bottle rockets. The desert has edged away now, out of range. At the foot of the saguaro, a snake, without moving anything but the thread of tongue, gently touches shoe leather, considers it, and decides no.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  And there I’d be, while they snored up one side and down the other in the room across the hall. I’d tiptoe all over the bedroom, gazing for a while out the window, watching the sky turn black, the stars come out. I’d quietly open all the drawers of all the dressers in the room, take out things, examine them, put them back. I didn’t dare jump on the bed, although sometimes I said “Chicka-chicka China” to myself out of boredom. I tried counting sheep like on the cartoons, but I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t for the life of me imagine what sheep looked like. I knew but I didn’t know, just as I couldn’t conjure up the faces of my long-lost parents and siblings. I was wide-awake, staring out at the vast Milky Way while the grown-ups snored on and on and the moon rose and sank. The strange thing was, I always asked to go there. I don’t remember them ever inviting me, or my parents suggesting it. It was me. From far away the idea of their house was magical to me, all those nooks, all those crannies, all those things to play with — the button jars, the lowboy with a little drawer full of marbles, the flower arrangements, the rotating fan. So, every July I got dropped off on a Sunday and picked up the following Sunday. By Tuesday I’d be counting the hours, sitting on the backyard glider, staring at the black lawn jockey and the flagstone path that took you to the garden, the broken bird bath with a pool of rusty, skanky water in it. Their yard had as much stuff in it as their house did, only the yard stuff was filthy, full of dirt and rainwater. The last time I went there my parents drove off on a Sunday afternoon as I stood on the gravel sidewalk and waved, already regretting my visit. My grandma fed us, dinner was the usual ordeal of gravy rivulets and tainted food, and then they turned Bonanza on. I lay on the living room floor, in the cleared-out space in the center; on either end of the couch were Grandma and Ralph. She was knitting an afghan and he was sharpening a stack of scissors. We were watching my favorite show. The dad, Ben, had a buckskin, Hoss had a black horse, and Little Joe had a pinto pony. They had Hop Sing for a servant, in place of a mom. Back home my little brother would be humming to himself through the whole show, “Umbuddy-umbuddy-umbuddy-ummm Bonanza,” and everyone would be telling him to shut up. My mom would be smoking her cigarettes and drinking beer out of a bottle, my dad would have his socks off and be stretching his bare toes, drinking his beer out of a glass. My sister would be trying to do homework at the dining room table.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Flannery looked forward to every visit and felt pangs of emptiness when he left. In May of 1954, on one of his visits he told her he was taking a six-month leave from his job to return to Denmark, and he suggested they take a good-bye car ride through the county, their favorite activity. It was dusk, and in the middle of nowhere he parked the car on the side of the road and leaned over to kiss her, which she gladly accepted. It was short, but for her quite memorable. She wrote to him regularly and, clearly missing him, kept discreetly referencing their car rides and how much they meant to her. In January 1955, she began a story that seemingly poured out of her in a few days. (Normally she was a careful writer who put stories through several drafts.) She called it “Good Country People.” One of the characters is a cynical young woman with a wooden leg. She is romanced by a traveling salesman of Bibles. She suddenly lets down her guard and allows him to seduce her, playing her own game with him. As they are about to make love in a hayloft, he begs her to remove her wooden leg, as a sign of her trust. This seems far too intimate and a violation of all her defenses, but she relents. He then runs away with the leg, never to return. In the back of her mind she was aware that Erik was somehow extending his stay in Europe. The story was her way of coping with this, caricaturing the two of them as the salesman and the cynical crippled daughter who had let down her guard. Erik had taken her wooden leg. By April she felt his absence rather keenly and wrote to him, “I feel like if you were here we could talk about a million things without stopping.” But the day after she mailed this she received a letter from him announcing his engagement to a Danish woman, and he told her of their plans to return to the States, where he would take up his old job. She had intuited such an event would happen, but the news was a shock nonetheless. She replied with utmost politeness, congratulating him, and they wrote to each other for several more years, but she could not get over this loss so easily. She had tried to protect herself from any deep feelings of parting and separation because they were too unbearable for her. They were like small reminders of the death that would take her away at any moment, while others would go on living and loving. And now those very feelings of separation came pouring in. Now she knew what it was like to experience unrequited love, but for her it was different—she knew that this was the last such chance for her and that her life was to be led essentially alone, and it made it all doubly poignant.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  The abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence, but as a generally understood concept it—and she—did not exist until about fifty years ago. The conversation about domestic abuse within queer communities is even newer, and even more shadowed. As we consider the forms intimate violence takes today, each new concept—the male victim, the female perpetrator, queer abusers, and the queer abused—reveals itself as another ghost that has always been here, haunting the ruler’s house. Modern academics, writers, and thinkers have new tools to delve back into the archives in the same way that historians and scholars have made their understanding of contemporary queer sexuality reverberate through the past. Consider: What is the topography of these holes? Where do the lacunae live? How do we move toward wholeness? How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record keeping toward justice? The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context. I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound. [image file=image_rsrc2K0.jpg] 1. Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickock, November 17, 1933.IEros limbslackener shakes me again— that sweet, bitter, impossible creature. —Sappho, as translated by Jim Powell Dream House as Not a MetaphorI daresay you have heard of the Dream House? It is, as you know, a real place. It stands upright. It is next to a forest and at the rim of a sward. It has a foundation, though rumors of the dead buried within it are, almost certainly, a fiction. There used to be a swing dangling from a tree branch but now it’s just a rope, with a single knot swaying in the wind. You may have heard stories about the landlord, but I assure you they are untrue. After all, the landlord is not a man but an entire university. A tiny city of landlords! Can you imagine? Most of your assumptions are correct: it has floors and walls and windows and a roof. If you are assuming there are two bedrooms, you are both right and wrong. Who is to say that there are only two bedrooms? Every room can be a bedroom: you only need a bed, or not even that. You only need to sleep there. The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Such kinship is not a biological fact. But it is an anthropological one. In other— Aristotelian—words, we would all be, as it were, “by nature” inherently social creatures. And therefore all of us have a certain social group to which we understand ourselves properly to belong. In the case of Paul, this “people” were the Ioudaioi. And they, in turn, were, for Paul, his “kinfolk” (a word that derives, in fact, from the ancient Greek term— genos—that Paul usual y used to describe them). Thus, when Paul describes himself as among those who were physei Ioudaioi, or as someone who was Hebraios ex Hebraiôn, he is speaking—not biological y, but anthropological y—in the key of ancestry. And that is why—even if he had wanted to do so—it would have made no sense for him or for anyone else to imagine that he could somehow cease to be Ioudaios, given that his parents and grandparents were all Israelites, of the tribe of Benjamin, and the like. With regard to Paul’s own “Jewish” identity, I think that it is this simple. Paul was Ioudaios because this was one of the names used by his “people” to describe themselves. The same people were not, however, what we now might call an “ethnic” group but, rather, the much more limited set of Paul’s “kinfolk,” those with whom Paul knew, as it were, in his own flesh, as his own flesh, a sense of “mutual being.” The sense of belonging to such a social group—those who were physei Ioudaios— was profound, to be sure. In fact, it is the kind of feeling that appears to be basic to all human life and therefore would be as ordinary a sentiment as it could be. For this 35 Even though none of this has ever described very well—no matter how much power it may have possessed at a given time and place—the always much more heterogeneous configuration of human life “on the ground,” including the category’s own designated sphere of influence. Not even the social life of one human family is adequately or concretely described when understood to be only an instance in miniature of a given “ethnicity.” What the term does describe more or less accurately, at least as far as it goes, is the ideological and bureaucratic mechanisms of modern political power whereby the concept of the “nation-state” corresponding to a specific “people” would be endowed with some identifiable substance, to wit, color as race, sound as speech, taste as food, mass as land, etc. 56 56 Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles reason, to underscore Paul’s “Jewish” identity is, in one sense, merely to restate the obvious fact that, yes, of course, Paul, too, was a human being, which means that he, too, claimed a specified set of ancestors. And he never stopped claiming to be their descendant as long as he continued to display the earthly flesh that their most recent avatars, to wit, Paul’s parents, had produced once upon a time.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I keep taking short, recreational hits from my inhaler as I talk her through it. Faint voices distinguish themselves inside the phone hiss, the content is blurred but emotion comes through. The voices rise and fall. “Who are those people?” she asks once, cheerfully. The crisis has passed. Fall of our eighth-grade year, her sister-in-law has come to stay with them for a while. She’s from Thailand, her name is Jinn, and she has a flat, beautiful face and black hair that reaches to her waist in long oily ropes. She is nine months pregnant and perpetually drowsy, alternating her time between sleeping on the living room couch, watching television, and cooking outlandish food that no one else will touch. She eats sitting at the kitchen table with her eyes closed, wielding chopsticks expertly and humming a song called “Kowloon Hong Kong” that she plays over and over on the hi-fi. The woman on the record jacket looks like Jinn, with a large paper flower behind one ear and black hair wound up and held in place with pointy sticks. Her voice is high and lilting, and basically off-key. We know all the words, even though they aren’t in our language. I’m not sure what Jinn is doing here, I’ve never asked. Elizabeth’s stepbrother is in the service, and stares out at everyone from a lacy metal frame on top of the television. He’s round-faced and wears a white hat and a navy blue coat with ribbons on the lapel. His cheeks are pink and airbrushed and the whites of his eyes have been enhanced. If the baby turns out to be a boy it will be named Hugh, after him; if it’s a girl it will be named Angelique, after a character on Dark Shadows , which we all watch religiously each afternoon at three. It comes on right before The Addams Family , a show that Jinn dismisses with a grunt and a wave of the hand before turning over on the couch and returning to an unconscious state. She speaks English just fine, but it hardly ever occurs to us to talk to her. We treat her like one of the cats, minus the torture. We ignore her unless she can do us a favor. Sunday afternoon, family cookout at Blackhawk State Park, Elizabeth and I spend our time looking for boys and trying to act like we’re not with her parents. Jinn sits at the picnic table reading a magazine from Thailand full of hieroglyphics and cigarette advertisements. Elizabeth’s stepfather turns pieces of chicken on the grill. He has a friendly disposition, warm brown eyes, and a slight limp left over from a stroke. Elizabeth’s mother is a little less personable, as are all our friends’ mothers. Everyone I know has a mother who operates on the fringes of what’s appropriate. Elizabeth’s mother, Doris, was especially excitable, and relied on us to calm her down. “Shut up, Mother,” Elizabeth would tell her.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  corresponding. Flannery never judged any of them, feeling herself to be rather odd and outside the mainstream. To this growing cast of characters and misfits she offered advice and compassion, always entreating them to devote their energies to something outside themselves. The letters were the perfect medium for Flannery, for it allowed her to keep some physical distance from people; she feared too much intimacy, as it would mean getting attached to those she would soon have to say good-bye to. In this way she slowly built the perfect social world for her purposes. One spring day in 1953, she received a visit from a tall, handsome twenty-six-year-old man from Denmark named Erik Langkjaier. He was a traveling textbook salesman for a major publisher, his territory including most of the South. He had met a professor at a local college who had offered to introduce him to the great literary figure of Georgia, Flannery O’Connor. From the moment he entered her house, Flannery felt they had some kind of mystical connection. She found Erik very funny and well read. It was indeed rare to meet someone so worldly in this part of Georgia. His life as an itinerant salesman fascinated her; she found it humorous that he carried with him a “Bible,” what those in the business called the loose-leaf binder of promotional materials. Something about his rootless life struck a chord with her. Like Flannery, Erik’s father had died when he was young. She opened up to him about her own father and the lupus she had inherited. She found Erik attractive and was suddenly self-conscious about her appearance, constantly making jokes about herself. She gave him a copy of Wise Blood , inscribing it, “For Erik, who has wise blood too.” He began to arrange his travels so that he could pass often through Milledgeville and continue their lively discussions. Flannery looked forward to every visit and felt pangs of emptiness when he left. In May of 1954, on one of his visits he told her he was taking a six-month leave from his job to return to Denmark, and he suggested they take a good-bye car ride through the county, their favorite activity. It was dusk, and in the middle of nowhere he parked the car on the side of the road and leaned over to kiss her, which she gladly accepted. It was short, but for her quite memorable. She wrote to him regularly and, clearly missing him, kept discreetly referencing their car rides and how much they meant to her. In January 1955, she began a story that seemingly poured out of her in a few days. (Normally she was a careful writer who put stories through several drafts.) She called it “Good Country People.” One of the characters is a cynical young woman with a wooden leg. She is romanced by a traveling salesman of Bibles. She suddenly lets down her guard and allows him to seduce her, playing her own game with

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  the cage (1984) I’m twenty-four when I start at Pine Street, full of nonspecific, scattershot longing. “Dissatisfied” is an emotion. When my shift gets off at eleven I go out with my co-workers and drink to the eventual collapse of the capitalist system, to the hollowness of the go-go eighties. Working with the homeless we can hear the buildings crumble. Yet each night we close Foley’s and step out, faintly disappointed, into the still-standing city. As a newcomer I often work the Cage, where the bed tickets are given out, and the valuables, if any, are stored. Controlled, in terms of contact with the guests—four hours a night, one-on-one, easy. It is also the busiest time in the shelter, when the lobbies are at their most chaotic, the building just reopened after being shut all day. Three hundred to six hundred men will swell through the doors in the next few hours. This is when dinner is served, when the clinic is open, when the men are shepherded upstairs and into beds, those who managed to score a bed. Slowly I am getting to know them by name, trying to be responsible, to count their money out where they can see my hands. 4011. Yes sir, sleep will feel fine tonight. And your name…? What’s the name beside the number? That’s my name. Ah yes, the ever-satisfied Jamal Dexter. Smokes dope in the park all day, they say, sells loose joints to the youngbloods. Followed in line by the nearly unintelligible Randy Phillips, who cannot utter his own name, who cannot look me in the eye, who unfolds yesterday’s bed ticket and slides it through the slot, both hands on it, precious. Carlos, a co-worker, shows me the ropes. Make sure they sign for everything, make sure the number on the envelope matches their bed number, call a counselor if something isn’t right. During a lull one night he tells the story of how he shot a guy under the tracks of the old Dudley Station, how he’d been looking for this guy to avenge a wrong done to his little brother, how the guy pulled a gun when Carlos found him, shot once but Carlos knew to turn sideways, take the bullet in his biceps. He even turns sideways as he tells the story, Like this, flex, your arm can take it, better than making your whole body a target . After he took the bullet he knocked the gun from the guy’s hand, leveled him with a punch, picked up the gun and unloaded the rest into the guy’s head. In telling the story he holds two fingers like a gun to show how he kept pulling the trigger, click click, click click , long after the gun was empty. He went into hiding for a year, disappeared upstate, came back, began working the shelter. Inside the shelter the tension is inescapable—the walls exude cigarette smoke and anxiety.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Sometime during the early evening he produces three pills, one for each of us. “What are these?” I ask him. He looks at one of the pills closely, turning it over in his hand. “’Lilly,’” he reads. “They’re lilies, that’s what. Red ones.” Down the hatch. Within an hour I’m singing a medley of Beatles tunes to anyone who will listen. My legs are not working correctly. “Hey, Jude,” I say to the guy sitting next to me. His name is Tom. “Did you have any of those red lilies?” He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Elizabeth is nowhere in sight but I can see Wally off in the distance, slapping his leg and laughing silently and hysterically. He squints over in my direction and motions me to come hither. I point to my legs and shake my head. We give each other the peace sign. There’s a fire going, and some people are roasting things over it. I hear my name being called. “Liz is looking for you,” Tom tells me. He stands, stretches, and heads for the beer. She comes tripping up, still in her swimming suit, with a man’s workshirt over it. “Let’s take a walk,” she says. She’s listing slightly to the right, but other than that, doing okay. “I can’t stand up,” I tell her. I indicate the grass next to me. “You sit down.” We watch the other campers for a while, roasting their things, drinking their stuff, laughing and punching each other. “I can’t stay here if you’re going to sing,” Elizabeth tells me. I stop singing. Off in the distance the lizardy sound of Mick Jagger starts up, more cars arrive, people shout for no reason. The red lily has made me feel both weightless and heavy at the same time. The night air is cool against my sunburned arms. I can’t remember what I did with my shoes. The only thing that would make me happier at this moment is if I could sing Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer, but Liz won’t let me. I try humming it softly but she starts to stand up so I have to cut it out. I wonder where Waldo is. Renee and her boyfriend Pete emerge out of the darkness. She has my T-shirt and shoes. Even though my arms are balloon strings, I manage to get the shirt on and slip my swimming suit top off; the shoes I cannot even begin to contend with. Pete is short and very cool, with bedroom eyes, dark curly hair, and an uncivilized manner. Renee is working on taming him. He likes it that I took my swimming suit top off even though he didn’t get a glimpse of anything. “Nice tits,” he says generously. We send him to get beers but right before he leaves he bestows a big, fat birthday kiss on me. I dry my face on my T-shirt.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  seamstress. The school was in a small town, and as she explored it she quickly discovered a new passion to pursue, the theater. She loved everything about it—the costumes, the sets, the performers in makeup. It was a world of transformation, where somebody could become anybody. Now all she wanted was to be an actress and make her name in the theater. She took the stage name Coco and she tried everything—acting, singing, and dancing. She had a lot of energy and charisma, but she realized quickly enough that she lacked the talent for the kind of success she desired. Coming to terms with this, she soon hit upon a new dream. Many of the actresses who could not make a living from their work had become courtesans who were supported by wealthy lovers. Such women had enormous wardrobes, could go where they pleased, and, although they were shunned by good society, they were not shackled with some despotic husband. As luck would have it, one of the young men who enjoyed her on the stage, Etienne Balsan, invited her to stay in his nearby château. He had inherited a family fortune and lived a life of total leisure. Gabrielle, now known as Coco to one and all, accepted the offer. The château was filled with courtesans who floated in and out from all over Europe. Some of them were famous. They were all beautiful and worldly. It was a relatively simple life that centered on riding horses in the country, then lavish parties in the evening. The class differences were noticeable. Whenever aristocrats or important people came to the château, women like Coco were to eat with the servants and make themselves scarce. With nothing to do and feeling restless yet again, she began to analyze herself and the future ahead of her. Her ambitions were great, but she was always searching for something beyond her grasp, continually dreaming about a future that was just not possible. At first it was the palaces in the romance novels, then it was a grand life on the stage, becoming another Sarah Bernhardt. Now her latest dream was just as absurd. The great courtesans were all voluptuous, beautiful women. Coco looked more like a boy. She had no curves and was not a classic beauty. It was more her presence and energy that charmed men, but that would not last. She always wanted what other people had, imagining it contained some hidden treasure. Even when it came to other women and their boyfriends or husbands, her greatest desire was to steal the man away, which she had done on several occasions. But whenever she got what she wanted, including the boyfriend or the life in a château, she inevitably felt disappointed by the reality. It was a mystery what in the end could satisfy her. Then one day, without thinking of what exactly she was up to, she wandered into Balsan’s bedroom and pilfered some of his clothes.

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

  She shrugs. “Not really. I keep thinking that it will come back, but I can’t say I miss it.” While Stephanie’s desire has remained stagnant, Warren’s frustration has risen. “I’ve tried everything,” he tells me. “She asks for help; I give her help. I do the dishes; I let her sleep late on the weekends; I take the kids out so she can have some time to herself. But, you know, I work, too. I’m meeting deadlines all day long. It’s not like I’m having a picnic. She thinks all I want is to get laid, but that’s not it. I want to come home and be with my wife sometimes. But all I get is a woman who’s become all mother. It’s all about the kids. What we need to plan, what we need to do, what we need to buy. Can’t we just give it a rest once in a while?” “Have you seen the movie Before Sunset?” I ask him. “At one point the main character, Jesse, says that he feels as though he’s running a day care center with someone he used to date.” “Exactly!” Warren snaps. “Do you ever have fun?” I ask. “Oh, we have a good time. We do a lot together as a family, and I love that. We went apple picking last weekend. We ride our bikes, go to the park, that kind of thing. The kids are fantastic; we laugh a lot. Stephanie is a terrific mom. She’s always looking for something new to do together.” “Together à deux, or together with all of you?” “Together with all of us,” he grumbles. Eros Redirected Stephanie bursts with creativity: art projects, nature walks, trips to museums and fire stations, puppet shows, cookie cutting, cookie baking, cookie parties. Hardly a day goes by when she’s not thinking about something fun and new to do with the kids. Parental love throbs with vitality. Seeing Stephanie interact with her family, it is apparent that her playful energy did not disappear when she became a mother. Her life is filled with novelty and adventure, but it all takes place in relation to her kids, leaving Warren longing. The children are the adventure now. If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well. But her eroticism no longer revolves around her husband. Instead, it’s been channeled to her children. There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks.

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

  Things get tricky when you consider that one of our greatest needs, developmentally speaking, is autonomy. From the moment we can crawl, we navigate the treacherous paths of separation in an attempt to balance our fundamental urge for connection with the urge to experience our own agency. We need our parents to take care of us, but we also need them to give us enough space to establish our freedom. We want them to hold us and we want them to let us go. Throughout our lives we grapple with this interplay between dependence and independence. How artfully we reconcile these needs as adults depends greatly on how our parents reacted to the stubborn duality in our little selves. It’s important to point out that our parents’ behavior, what they actually do, is only one part of the situation. Another part is our interpretation of their actions. Each child brings an individual resilience to the lottery of life. What might feel good to one will feel overwhelming to another. Some of us may wish our parents had been more involved, while others may cringe at memories of their parents’ scrutiny and intrusion. Every family has its preferred responses to expressions of dependency and autonomy—when they are rewarded and when they are thwarted. In the give-and-take with our parents we determine how much freedom we can safely experience, and how much our connections will require the subjugation of our needs. In the end we fashion a system of beliefs, fears, and expectations—some conscious, many unconscious—about how relationships work. We wrap these up in a tidy package and hand it to our beloved. It is a fair trade. Not coincidentally, this entire emotional history plays itself out in the physicality of sex. The body is the purest, most primal tool we have for communicating. As Roland Barthes wrote, “What language conceals is said through my body. My body is a stubborn child; my language is a very civilized adult.” The body is our mother tongue—our mediator with the world long before we speak our first words. From the moment we come into being, love flows from adult to child sensuously—and I dare say erotically as well. Bodily sensations dominate our first awareness of our environment and our earliest interactions with our caregivers. The body is a memory bank for the sensual pleasures of the skin. How often do I hear men and women in my office implore each other, “Can you just hold me?” The soothing powers of a hug hold at forty no less than at five. The body is also a storage facility for the distress and the frustration we have endured, and the pain we have suffered. Cleverly, our bodies remember what our minds may have chosen to forget, both light and dark. Perhaps this is why our deepest fears and most persistent longings emerge in intimate sex: the immensity of our neediness, the fear of desertion, the terror of being engulfed, the yearning for omnipotence.

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

  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. And that thing is me.”

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  It feels crowded inside my bell jar; condensation forms and I begin weeping. He watches calmly, one foot on the bumper of a car. At some point he reaches out, lightly touches my face. I take to wearing a Walkman and earphones everywhere I go, piping music directly into my head. The phone booth is the only place it doesn’t work. “I can only talk for a minute,” I tell her. My days are numbered here; I feel a longing for my empty living room, for the grizzled face of Sheba the dog. The blue enamel breakfast table, the rug with a picture of New Zealand on it, the bird’s nest we found outside the country place years ago, made from hair shed by my old dead heroic-hearted collie. I’m tired of being here. I miss my stuff. “I’m sick of my stuff ,” she says. “I want all new everything.” I want I want I want. I want to go home. “What’s going on?” she asks. After a short pause a lightbulb goes on over her head. “Uh-oh,” she says. Yeah. “Heck,” she says cheerfully. “That’s good . Is he nice?” I don’t think I know what nice means these days. “Well, he hasn’t pulled a gun on me,” I tell her. She sighs. I’ve spent my whole life in this phone booth. I want my circus footstool, my pink coffee table, my Albert Payson Terhune books. I want my Bruce Springsteen records. The Walkman lies dormant in my lap. I push the On button and the tiny voice of Van Morrison emanates from the earphones. “The thing is,” I tell her, “he already has a brown-eyed girl. Back home.” Thank God. “Oh.” She’s thinking this over. “Hmmmm.” A pall settles over the conversation. I stare at my reflection, distorted in the chrome of the telephone. “This is still my youth,” I finally tell her. “Uh, whatever you say.” She sounds skeptical. I peer closer at the chrome mirror. My vertical wrinkle is still visible and it’s afternoon. It’s usually faded back into my face by mid-morning. Also, I might be getting jowls. “I’m looking at my vertical wrinkle in the telephone,” I say. “Isn’t it supposed to be gone by now?” she asks. “It’s one o’clock.” “I hate to break it to you, but it’s two o’clock here,” I inform her. “I need oil-of-old-ladies.” I can’t even bring myself to mention the jowls, for which there’s no cure anyway. All the women in my family begin to look like bulldogs right around the age of thirty-eight; it’s a legacy. The Artful Dodger has taken a turn for the worse. “He’s religious,” Elizabeth says. “And not only that, but he thinks I’m going to church with him this Sunday.” Oh boy. To my way of thinking, the problem isn’t necessarily that he’s religious; it’s more that he doesn’t have anything to counter it with, like a drinking problem or weird sexual tastes.