Love

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 Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “Mine,” Daddy growls as he licks the blood from my skin. “My boy to fuck. My hole to use. Mine. You are mine to do with as I see fit. You belong to Daddy. This is your place, impaled on my cock. This is who you are. I made you and I get to say who you are, faggot. You will learn to love this, as any good cub would. I will teach you. That’s what Daddies do for their boys. Teach them how to be men. You will be a good man when Daddy’s through with you. For as long as it takes, Daddy will teach you. You will learn.” He resumes ramming into me, brutal and relentless. He thrusts in deep with each word. I spent much of my adult life searching for a Daddy like this. I am so grateful to this man for pushing me like this, for trusting me with his cruelty. “You. Are. My. Boy. My. Hole. To. Use. Made. By. Me. For. My. Pleasure.” He grabs my head and wraps his hand around my mouth and nose as he fucks me. All I can smell is leather. I can’t breathe. Daddy keeps slamming his dick into me, and I start to tremble. No breath. My head is pounding. My dick throbs as I begin to think about it again, getting ready to obey Daddy’s order. And then his cock starts to feel good. I moan against his hand and have less breath. My eyes bulge, and I start to struggle against his hand. I can’t breathe. Oh, god, his dick feels so good. I am screaming in my head. My cock is ready to burst. Then Daddy’s teeth sink into my neck. Searing pain roars through me and I can’t breathe or think, or do anything except take it. Take his dick in my ass. Take his teeth in my neck. Take his cum as it spurts into me. It all explodes inside me, rushing through me and out my cock in intense painful spurts of cum. And then Daddy’s hand leaves my mouth and we breathe together. “That’s my good boy. I am very proud of you,” Daddy murmurs, as he pulls me to him. His arms surround me, hands stroking. I can hear his heartbeat and I let my eyes flutter shut. I am safe in his arms. I breathe in, smelling leather and Daddy and cum. I am home. ABOUT THE AUTHORS GAVIN ATLAS (gavinatlas.com) enjoys writing Daddy stories more than anything, and most of the stories in his collection, The Boy Can’t Help It: Sensual Stories of Young Bottoms, are intergenerational fantasies. He lives in Houston with his boyfriend, John, and he enjoys hearing from readers.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The trees arching above the deserted suburban streets tracked slowly past overhead, their crowns dark against a hazy white night sky, clouds lit up like internal organs dyed for examination, for augury … I spoke quietly, deliberately, to Helen Paper and I snatched glances of her famous smile rising to greet my words. Our attention wasn’t given over to words but to the formal charting of that night street that we were executing. I mean we, or rather our bodies, the animal sense in us, some orienting device—we were discovering each other, and for one moment I felt exultantly worthy of her. For she did have the power to make me seem interesting, at least to myself. I found myself talking faster and with more confidence as we approached the wide, dimly lit porch of her house. Some late roses perfumed the night. A sprinkler someone had left on by mistake played back and forth over the grass. A sudden breeze snatched up the spray and flung it on the walkway ahead, a momentary darkening of the white pavement. Inside, upstairs, a room was just barely lit behind a drawn curtain. Crickets took the night’s pulse. Although I said something right out of dancing school to Helen—“Good night, it’s been great to spend some time with you”—an unexpected understanding had fallen on us. Of course her allure—the sudden rise and fall of her wonderful soft breasts, the dilation of her perfume on the cool night air, the smile of a saint who points, salaciously, toward heaven—this allure had seduced me entirely. I loved her. I didn’t know what to do with her. I suspected another, more normal boy would have known how to tease her, make her laugh, would have treated her more as a friend and less as an idol. Had I been expected to do something I would have fled, but now, tonight, I did love her, as one might love a painting one admired but didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t own. She was completely relaxed when she took my hand and looked in my eyes, as she thanked me and bobbed a curtsy in a little-girl manner other men, I’m sure, liked better than I; sensing my resistance to anything fetching, she doubled back and intensified her gravity. By which I’m not suggesting she was playing a part. In fact, I don’t know what she was doing. Because I loved her she was opaque to me, and her sincerity I doubted not at all until I doubted it completely.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “You’ve taught me about what being a Daddy—something that once repulsed me—means. Tonight showed me how much I can learn from my boy.” I unrolled the condom off his cock and pushed it inside out. “And I need to eat his cum for homework.” I licked precious pearls off the latex. “Now, that’s a real midnight snack.” He laughed. Our clothes were strewn all over the foyer. I pointed to his shirt. “Take that off. I think your Dad’s gonna like what he sees underneath.” His nipples look like perfectly melted Hershey’s kisses. “How about we go upstairs and shower?” “Show me the way, and I’m yours.” He pointed to the stairs. “Professor Papi?” “How do you say son in Spanish?” “Hijo.” I took his hand and beamed. “Let’s go, my hijo.” IT’S MY JOB Xan West It’s my job to stand still and take it for Daddy. I don’t have to like it. I just have to stay standing, relatively still, and take whatever he wants to dish out. That’s what boys do, he says, that’s how you build a boy up. His job is to teach me how to be a man. Just like my job is to stand still and take it for Daddy. Tonight he told me to lay out his leather. It’s my job to take care of Daddy’s gear. I know every piece intimately. He’s wearing the chaps I just cleaned yesterday. His large furry belly hangs over them and my cheek aches to rub against it. The buttery leather is comfort to me, as much Daddy as his breath on my skin. The belt he’s wearing was passed from one man in his family to the next, on down to him. It is old and strong, and it has drawn my blood. When I hold it in my hands, it radiates with his strength. He has told me that when I am ready he will pass it to me. The leather jock he wears was a gift from his Daddy. It has taken on his scent. Even after I clean it, it still smells of him, of musk and fur. The gloves he is wearing know my skin well. They are molded to his hands, a gift from his first boy, who made them specifically for him. My body is attuned to them. They graze my cheek and my lips automatically part, already tasting a mix of leather and Daddy so precious I just want to open myself up to worship.

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

  His face went all saggy like he was going to cry and he reached out and hugged me hard. ‘Let me tell you something, Sport. Marriage is like a roller coaster. It has real highs and real lows. The lows have been worse than I thought and the highs have been better than I thought. The big picture is that I love your mother and you kids are the high point of our marriage. The picture right now is your mother and I are in a slump, but we’ll work our way out of it. I know we will because we love you kids so much. Our marriage has been challenging, but it’s been a good ride and I’m hanging on till the end.’” Gary was choking up as he recalled his father’s words and blinking back tears. We smiled at each other. “Your father gave you a great gift. Very few dads talk that way to their young sons.” He nodded silently, unable to speak. Finally, he said, “That was one of the most important conversations of my whole life.” When a Marriage Is Unhappy— What Should a Parent Do? THE CONVERSATION THAT Gary described in such moving detail is one of the most valuable legacies that a father could provide his child. It’s worth examining closely because it was so absolutely right, and there is so much to be learned from this remarkably honest, loving, and obviously unhappy man. The first important principle is for the parent to take the child’s concerns seriously and to acknowledge that his observations are valid. “Yes, we are having trouble and I’m glad that you are bringing it up” is the best response. The temptation is to brush the child’s worries aside, to plead being busy, to postpone, or worst of all to deny that anything is amiss. But all of those would be serious mistakes. They can do the child a great deal of harm. Most children will sooner or later perceive that parent’s behavior as cowardly or dishonest or both. He will learn that he cannot trust the parent to provide a straight answer or to help him. Brushing aside a child’s accurate perception of trouble increases his confusion, misery, and disenchantment with the parent as someone he can turn to when he is distressed. As important, parent and child will have missed an opportunity for a meeting of hearts and minds that may never reoccur. When a child expresses concern or worry about his parents’ marriage, he needs and deserves priority over other concerns of the day.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X V I The Apostle John reassures Dante as to his lost sight, which Beatrice will restore to him as Ananias restored his to Paul; and invites him to discourse meanwhile of Love; and first to tell him what is the supreme object on which his soul’s affection is fixed. Dante, resignedly awaiting Beatrice’s succour, declares that he is still burning in that same flame which she brought into his heart, and that God is the beginning and end of that and of all his other loves. Moved by the Apostle to declare more at large the justification of his love Dante answers that, since good as good must be loved, to know God is of necessity to love him, and goes on to deslares how Aristotle and the Scriptures have made this truth level to his capacity. When questioned as to other reasons for loving God Dante perceives that he is expected to supplement his account of the supreme love of God, as good in himself, by a statement of the accessory gratitude to God as good to us, and enumerates the creation of the world, his own creation, the redemption and the hope of heaven. He adds that all creatures share his love in proportion as they share the good which is supreme in the Creator. A hymn of praise is raised, and Dante’s sight is restored to him; whereon he is bewildered by Beatrice’s greater beauty and then by the presence of a fourth flame, weherin he learns the soul of Adam to abide. Overwhelmed at first, then moved to eagerness that will not brook delay, by finding himself face to face with the human being who has had such unique experience and who holds the answer to questions that have so long tantalized the world, Dante reads the answering affection of the first father in the swaying undulations of the light that clothes him and receives the answer to his unspoken questions, as to chronology, the language of Eden, the length of the period of innocence and the nature of the sin that cost the world so dear. WHILST I WAS in suspense concerning my quenched sight, I was made heedful by a breath that issued from the glowing flame which quenched it, saying: “Until thou hast again the sense of sight thoix hast consumed on me, ’tis well thou compensate it by discourse. Begin then, and declare whereon thy mind is focussed; and assure thee that thy sight within thee is confounded, not destroyed; because the lady who through this divine region doth conduct thee hath in her look the power that was in Ananis’ hand.” 1 I said: “At her good pleasure, soon or late, let succour come to the eyes which were the gates when she did enter with the fire wherewith I ever burn.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The gaps they left were filled in with glimpses of dingy undershirt. His jockey shorts had holes in them. Around one leg a broken elastic had popped out of the cotton seam and dangled against his thigh like a gray noodle. Since he wore a single pair of shorts for days on end the front pouch would soon be stained with yellow. He got up too late to shower before school; he’d run a hand through his fine hair but could never tame that high spume of a cowlick that tossed and bobbed above him, absurdly, gallantly. His rattiness wore a jaunty air that redeemed everything. Faded, baggy jeans, Indian moccasins he’d owned so long the soft leather tops had taken on the shape of his toes, sunglasses repaired with Band-Aids, an ancient purple shirt bleached and aged to a dusty plum, a letter jacket with white leather sleeves and on the back white lettering against a dark blue field—these were the accoutrements of a princely pauper, a paupered prince. We walked beside the lake at night, a spring night. As we walked we rolled gently into each other, so that our shoulders touched with every other step. A coolness scudded in off the lake and we kept our hands in our pockets. Now Tom had leaped up onto the narrow top of a retaining wall and was scampering along it in his moccasins. Although heights terrified me I followed him. The ground on both sides fell away as we crossed a canal flowing into the lake, but I put one foot in front of the other and looked not down but at Tom’s back. I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in to preserve me. Soon enough I was beside Tom again and my pulse subsided: that dangerous crossing was a sacrifice I’d made to him. Our shoulders touched. As usual he was talking too loud and in his characteristic way, a sustained tenor uh as he collected his thoughts, then a chuckle and a rapid, throw-away sentence that came almost as an anticlimax. Since Tom was the most popular boy at school, many guys had imitated his halting, then rushing way of talking (as well as his grungy clothes and haphazard grooming). But I never wanted to be Tom. I wanted Tom to be Tom for me. I wanted him to hold his reedy, sinewy, scruffy maleness in trust for us both. We were heading toward a concrete pier wide enough for a truck to run down. At the far end people were fishing for smelt, illegal lanterns drawing silver schools into nets. We ambled out and watched the lights play over that dripping, squirming ore being extracted from the lake’s mines.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  As a case history, “Lolita” will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac—these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita” should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. Widworth, Mass. August 5, 1955 Part One1Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. 2I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  He was about twenty-four when he began to woo Poverty. 11. In the early biographies of Francis (including the Fioretti or popular stories of him) with which every reader of Dante should be familiar, we are told how he fell in love with Poverty; how his father indignantly sought to reclaim him; how he appealed to the Bishop, stripped himself naked before him, giving to his earthly father Pietro Bernadone that which was his, and dedicating himself to his heavenly father, and thus publicly espousing Poverty; how Bernard, the nobleman of Assisi, was converted by overhearing his devotions; how Egidius whose thoughts were already turning from the world flung himself at the feet of Francis and implored him to receive him as a companion; how Sylvester, the priest, tried to cheat him over some stones he had from him with which to repair a church and was overcome by his unworldly generosity; how he rejoiced in all suffering and humiliation; how he loved and rejoiced in all God’s creatures; how two successive Popes sanctioned his Order (1210 (?) and 1223); how he preached to the Soldan in Egypt; and finally, how he received the stigmata or impress of the nails and the lance as a testimony to his oneness of spirit with Christ (b. 1182, d. 1226). 12. Jesus Christ. 13. Lucan tells how Cæsar found the fishennan, Amyclas, lying on a bed of seaweed, undismayed when he roused him to demand his services, and unmoved by the revolutions of the times, secure in his poverty. 14. Nearly all the MSS. read pianse (wept) for salse (rose) and the best modern editions for the most part follow them. Dr. Moore, however (rightly as we think), adheres to the reading we have adopted. It is supported not only by internal evidence, but by some of the old commentators and by the analogy of the ancient prayer for Poverty ascribed to St. Francis, in which are the words “when thy very mother, because the cross was so high ... could not come at thee, Lady Poverty, embraced thee more closely,” etc. 15. The rope girdle worn by the Franciscans. 16. Note the first, second, final. 17. An enigmatical phrase, since it is in heaven that the song of praise is being sung. Cf. Canto xii. 18. Alvernia. 19. “And when he had blessed the brothers he had them take off his tunic, and place him naked on the ground” (Old Biography). 20. St. Thomas now passes to his own founder, Dominic, and rebukes the degenerate Dominicans. Cf. Canto xii, note 20. 21. Another reading of the original is coreggier, which would mean the Dominican (that is, one girt with the leather thong), and would refer either to the speaker (St. Thomas) himself or to any Dominican who might reprove his order in this way.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  In this house the parents maintained a silence except for the father’s dreaded little comments, the sugar substitute of his sweetness, and the whole chirping menagerie of the mother’s comical voices. No one hovered over the kids. They came and went as they chose, they stayed home and studied or they went out, they ate dinner in or at the last moment they accepted the hospitality of other tables. But under this superficial ease of manner ran their dread of their father and their fear of offending him in some new way. He was a man far milder, far more (shall I say) ladylike than any other father I’d known, and yet his soft way of curling up on a couch and tucking his silk dressing gown modestly around his thin white shanks terrified everyone, as did his way of looking over the tops of his glasses and mouthing without sound the name of his son: “Tom-my”—the lips compressed on the double m and making a meal out of his swallowed, sorrowing disappointment. He was homely, tall, snowy-haired, hardworking, in bad health. He seemed to me the absolute standard of respectability, and by that standard I failed. My sister had coached me in some sort of charm, but no degree of charm, whether counterfeit or genuine, made an impression on Mr. Wellington. He was charm-proof. He disapproved of me. I was a fraud, a charlatan. His disapproval started with my mother and her “reputation,” whatever that might refer to (her divorce? her dates? the fact she worked?). He didn’t like me and he didn’t want his son to associate with me. When I entered his study I’d stand behind Tom. Only now does it occur to me that Tommy may have liked me precisely because his father didn’t. Was Tom’s friendship with me one more way in which he was unobtrusively but firmly disappointing his father? Once we closed Tom’s bedroom door we were immersed again in the happy shabbiness of our friendship. For he was my friend—my best friend! Until now other boys my age had frightened me. We might grab each other in the leaves and play Squirrel; Ralph might have hypnotized me, but those painful stabs at pleasure had left me shaken and swollen with yearning—I wanted someone to love me. Someone adult. Someone under my power. I had prayed I’d grow up as fast as possible. No longer. For the first time I found it exhilarating to be young and with someone young. I loved him, and the love was all the more powerful because I had to hide it. We slept in twin beds only two feet apart.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  People say young love or love of the moment isn’t real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts. I was aware of the treacherous air vents above us, conducting the sounds we were making upstairs. Maybe my dad was listening. Or maybe, just like Kevin, he was unaware of anything but the pleasure spurting up out of his body and into mine. My father had started his own business fifteen years earlier in order to make money, be his own boss and keep his own hours. These were imperatives, not simple wishes, and whenever they were set aside he suffered, even physically. Money was for him the air superior people needed to breathe; wealth and superiority coincided, though when he said someone was from a “good” family, he meant rich first and only secondarily respectable or virtuous. But his real reason for wanting money, I imagine, was that it was a distinction as absolute as genius and as solitary; any other thing people think is worth getting would have struck him as too arbitrary and congenial. Too sociable. His need for independence was less explicit, more shaded but just as strong. Independence conferred upon him feudal rights of the purse and gavel and allowed him to dictate his fate and ours. The fate he chose for himself was misanthropic and poetic. He slept all day, rose at three at the earliest or five at the latest and by six, when the winter sky was already dark, he was sitting down to a breakfast of a pound of bacon, six scrambled eggs and eight slices of toast freighted with preserves. He took no lunch but at three or four in the morning ate a supper of a plate-size steak, three vegetables, a salad, more bread and a dessert, preferably sugared strawberries over vanilla ice cream. His only drink was spring water delivered to the house in big glass jugs, tinted a faint blue, inverted above an office-style electric water cooler. Before bedtime he had his snack of buttered chocolate grahams. Then he’d brush Old Boy in the basement and take him out for a long dawn walk; he talked to the dog in a man-to-man but deeply solicitous way, somewhat as though the animal were a great man gone senile. His hours gave Dad the cool and silence of the night and took away the populated disorder of the day. He worked all night at his desk, wielding a calculating machine and slide rule and printing page after page of specifications and instructions.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, analyzed, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed—an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller. I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her—after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred—I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever—for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation)—and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again—and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure—all would be shattered.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  That with us it is love—real, true honest-to-god love.” She doesn’t see the similarity when Michael gives her a silver necklace for an eighteenth birthday present. He’s had the round pendant engraved with both of their names and the word “forever.” “In my whole life nothing will ever mean more to me,” Katherine says with tears in her eyes. By the time she’s sporting Michael’s gift around town, Katherine is no longer a virgin. One afternoon, Michael surprises her with the key to his sister’s empty apartment in nearby Springfield, New Jersey. Katherine says she isn’t sure she wants to go and Michael assures her they don’t have to “do anything”; they can “just talk.” Katherine knows better but it’s all part of the dance—Michael is giving her plausible deniability. By the rules of the day, no matter what happens next, Katherine’s moral position is upheld by the pretense that it wasn’t her idea. The first time Katherine sees the apartment, she and Michael follow the same old script: just talking leads to just kissing, which ends in them satisfying each other with their hands. But the next day, something has changed. Katherine feels ready. They’re at the apartment again, and Katherine says that “when we were naked, in each other’s arms, I wanted to do everything—I wanted to feel him inside of me.” She’s conscientious of course; she asks Michael if they can move from his sister’s bed to the floor, because she’s worried about stains. She also insists that he wear a condom, even though she’s just finished her period. “I’m thinking about getting pregnant,” Katherine tells Michael when he assures her that he doesn’t have a sexually transmitted disease. “Every woman had a different cycle.” That night, they have intercourse twice. Both times, Michael comes immediately. Katherine is disappointed, but she doesn’t let it show. On her way home from the apartment, she’s buzzing with her new reality—she’s no longer a virgin. “Still, I can’t help feeling let down,” she muses, because it wasn’t so pleasurable for her. “Everybody makes such a big thing out of actually doing it. But Michael is probably right—this takes practice.” And practice is exactly what Katherine resolves to do. This is where Blume steers Forever off the preexisting road map, where the novel goes from merely explicit and bold to something revolutionary. Chapter Eleven Pleasure “Can we do it again?” Around the same time that Forever was published in the fall of 1975, the New York Times printed a brief op-ed called “Recreational—and Procreational—Sex.” The writer was Dr. John Money, a New Zealand–born sexologist (that’s right, sexologist ) who founded the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. In his essay, Money argued that a “new ethic” was required for sex, in response to a massive paradigm shift surrounding intercourse and its purposes. “Our old ethic is, like Venice, sinking imperceptibly into the sea,” he wrote colorfully.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  But I’m hoping, in time, I’ll earn it.” “Stop calling me that,” she said to Dr. O. He looked hurt. “What would you like me to call you?” “Miri.” “Okay,” Dr. O said. “From now on it’s Miri.” —RUSTY CAME to her room and knocked on the door before she opened it. “I wish it could have been different,” she said. “I know people are saying I stole him away from Corinne but I didn’t. You have to believe that, honey. Please.” “Did you fall in love in an instant, like a flash of lightning?” “I wouldn’t describe it that way. I was volunteering with the Red Cross. I’d bring him coffee and Danish at the morgue,” Rusty said, “sometimes late at night. He needed to talk, to unwind. It was gruesome work, identifying burned and broken bodies.” “I don’t want to hear about that.” “Okay.” “And I don’t want to hear about the other stuff, either.” “I understand. But you should know that when Natalie got sick we decided to end it before it had even begun.” “So then, what…you changed your minds?” “Staying apart didn’t work out.” Miri could have laughed but she didn’t. Rusty tried to give her a hug. Miri stood stiffly at first, then relented. She knew she had the power to refuse but she was losing her will. “It’s going to be a great adventure,” Rusty whispered. Miri never thought about her mother being adventurous. If she was so adventurous how come she never went anywhere or did anything except get up and go to work every day, five days a week, and on weekends clean the house and do the laundry? When Miri put that to her, Rusty said, “Because I took my responsibilities seriously. I still do.” “Would you marry him if he were staying in Elizabeth? Would that be enough of an adventure for you?” “I love him, Miri. Our lives together will be all the adventure I need. I’d stand by his side no matter what.” That was a powerful message for Miri. She loved Mason. But she wasn’t standing by his side no matter what. And neither would Rusty, she bet, if the no-matter-what was Polina, or someone like Polina. If the no-matter-what was a pack of lies. “Would you have gone without me?” Miri asked. That was really all she wanted to know. “I could never leave you, Miri. How could you doubt my love?” Even if she could doubt it, why would she? Why make life harder than it had to be? She was so tired from all of it. Too tired to fight it anymore. Too tired to run every time someone she loved disappointed her. So, that was that. She was going. Mason wasn’t. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00043.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00043.jpg] JUNE WEDDINGJUNE 22 — Miss Leah Rose Cohen, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Seymour Cohen, of Cleveland, Ohio, and Mr. Henry Joel Ammerman, son of Mrs.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  George came over afterward and as Judy likes to put it in interviews, he never left. In her 2004 introduction to her adult novel Smart Women , Blume writes of getting to know George: “Falling in love at forty (or any age) is s’wonderful , just like the song says. But this time around you bring all that baggage with you, not to mention your kids, who might not think it’s as romantic as you do.” Smart Women , first published in 1983, covers exactly this territory. Margo is a divorced mother of two teenagers, raising them as a single mom in Boulder, Colorado. Over the past few years, her children, Michelle and Stuart, have transformed from her sweet little buddies into rough, prickly strangers, banging around the house. After spending the summer in New York with their conservative father, Stuart comes back west as Dad’s preppy clone with a tidy haircut, piles of Polo shirts, and a newfound passion for tennis. Meanwhile Michelle is consistently hard on Margo. “She did not understand how or why Michelle had turned into this impossible creature,” Margo says early on in the novel. “Margo would never voluntarily live with such an angry, critical person. Never. But when it was your own child you had no choice.” In the introduction, Blume explains that because some details from her personal life overlapped with Margo’s, everyone assumed Smart Women was about her and her family. Even Randy, she says, “believes that Michelle is based on her (when she was that age) and maybe she’s right.” Judy goes on to say that “all the characters in the book (okay, except for some parts of Michelle) are fictional,” admitting that Michelle is closest to her heart. “Michelle is my favorite character in the book… I love her for giving her mother a hard time because she cares about her and can’t bear to see the family painfully disrupted again.” The novel is told from four different perspectives: Margo’s, Michelle’s, Margo’s friend B.B.’s, and that of B.B.’s twelve-year-old daughter Sara. B.B. (whose real name is Francine) is also a divorced forty-year-old who is newish to Boulder. She and Margo meet at work and hit it off. But their burgeoning friendship gets complicated when B.B.’s ex-husband, Andrew, sublets the house next door to Margo’s for three months. One balmy August night, he calls over the fence and invites himself over for a drink and a hot tub. The flirtation revs up. Andrew, a journalist, is rakish and charming. He earnestly tells Margo that she “look[s] like the girl on the Sun-Maid raisin box.” For their first official date, Margo calls him and tells him she’s leaving for Apocalypse Now in a few minutes, and would he like to join her? He would. He brings two boxes of raisins to the theater and they eat them before holding hands. When Margo nods off because she doesn’t like the movie, she snuggles up to Andrew’s shoulder.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X God as self-existent contemplating himself as manifested, in that love which in either aspect he breathes forth, made all objects of intelligence or sense with that order which speaks of him to all beholders. Let the reader, then, look upon the equinoctial point, which so clearly displays that art of God which he himself ever contemplates, in love. Let him reflect how the influences of the sun and planets—the seasons and other alternations—would be effective over a smaller part of the earth if the inclination of the ecliptic were less, and would be too violent in their contrasts if it were greater. If the reader will not give himself time to work out these and other such bints, weary listlessness instead of enjoyment will be the fruit of his study, for the author cannot pause to elaborate them for him. The sun is in the spring equinoctial point and Dante is with him. Standing out against the sun by their very brightness are spirits rejoicng in the vision of the relation of the Father to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Beatrice calls on Dante to thank the sun of the angels; and he thereon so concentrates his thought on God as to forget Beatrice; in pleasure whereat she smiles so beauteously as to shatter the undivided unity of his mind; which thus broken up distributes itself amongst the wondrous objects that claim it. Twelve spirits surround Dante and Beatrice, as with a crown, and thrice circle them, uttering music that may not be conceived on earth; then pause, while one of them, Thomas Aquinas, declares that since the divine grace has kindled in Dante such true love as must ever increase itself by the mere act of loving, and has revealed to him that heavenly bliss to which he who has once known it must ever return, it follows that every blessed soul must freely love to do him pleasure; whereon he tells him who are the other flames; whereon the wheel of lights again begins to revolve with ineffable music. GAZING upon his Son with the Love which the one and the other eternally breathes forth, the primal and ineffable Worth, 1 made whatsoever circleth through mind or space with so great order that whoso looketh on it may not be without some taste of him. Then, reader, raise with me thy sight to the exalted wheels, directed to that part where the one movement smiteth on the other; 2 and amorously there begin to gaze upon that Master’s art, who within himself so loveth it, that never doth he part his eye from it.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  We sat around for hours in our underpants and talked about Sartre and tennis and Sally and all the other kids at school and love and God and the afterlife and infinity. Tom’s mother never came to his door, as mine would have, to order us to sleep. The big dark house creaked around us as we lay on our separate beds in zany positions and talked and talked our way into the inner recesses of the night, those dim lands so tender to the couple. And we talked of friendship, of our friendship, of how it was as intense as love, better than love, a kind of love. I told Tom my father had said friendships don’t last, they wear out and must be replaced every decade as we grow older—but I reported this heresy (which I’d invented; my poor father had no friends to discard) only so that Tom and I might denounce it and pledge to each other our eternal fidelity. “Jesus,” Tom said, “those guys are so damn cynical! Jeez …” He was lying on his stomach staring into the pillow; his voice was muffled. Now he propped himself up on one elbow. His forehead was red where he’d been leaning on it. His face was loose from sleepiness. His smile, too, was loose, rubbery, his gaze genial, bleary. “I mean, God! How can they go on if they think that way?” He laughed a laugh on a high brass note, a toot of amazement at the sheer gall of grown-up cynicism. “Maybe,” I said suavely, “because we’re not religious, we’ve made friendship into our religion.” I loved ringing these changes on our theme, which was ourselves, our love; to keep the subject going I could relate it to our atheism, which we’d just discovered, or to dozens of other favorite themes. “Yeah,” Tom said. He seemed intrigued by this possibility. “Hold on. Don’t forget where we were.” He hurried into the adjoining bathroom. As I listened through the open door to the jet of water falling into the toilet I imagined standing beside him, our streams of urine crossing, dribbling dry, then our hands continuing to shake a final glistening drop of something stickier than water from this new disturbance, this desire our lifting, meeting eyes had to confess. No sooner would such a temptation present itself than I would smother it. The effect was of snuffing out a candle, two candles, a row of twenty, until the lens pulled back to reveal an entire votive stand exhaling a hundred thin lines of smoke as a terraced offering before the shrine. In this religion hidden lights had been declared superior to those that glared.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Pasiphae, but with an ass. In the end she promised a great reward to my keeper for the custody of me one night, who cared for naught but for gain of a little money, and accorded to her desire. When therefore I had supped in a parlour with my master, we departed away and went into our chamber, where we found the fair matron, who had tarried a great space for our coming. Good God, how nobly all things there were prepared! there were four eunuchs that laid a bed of billowing down on the ground with bolsters accordingly for us to lie on ; the coverlet was of cloth of gold and Tyrian dye, and the pillows small, but ‘soft and tender, as whereon delicate matrons accustom to lay their heads. Then the eunuchs, not minding to delay any longer the 'pleasure of their mistress, closed the doors of the chamber and departed away ; and within the chamber were wax candles that made light the darkness of the night all the place over. Then she put off all her garments to her naked skin, yea even the veil of her bosom, and standing next the lamp began to anoint all her body with balm, and mine likewise, but especially my nose ; which done, she kissed me, not as they accustom to do at the stews or in brothel-houses, or in the courtesan schools for gain of money, but purely, sincerely, and with great affection, casting out these and like loving words: ** Thou art he whom 1I love,” * Thou art he whom I only desire," “Without thee I cannot live," and other like ‘preamble of talk, as women can use "well enough when they mind to shew or declare their burning ‘passions and great affection-of love. Then she took me by the ‘halter and cast me upon the bed, which was nothing strange unto me, considering that she was so ‘beautiful a matron, and I so well blown out with wine, and 509 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Picaresque Before I met the woman from the Dream House, I lived in a tiny two-bedroom in Iowa City. The house was a mess: owned by a slumlord, slowly falling apart, full of eclectic, nightmarish details. There was a room in the basement—my roommates and I called it the murder room—with blood-red floors, walls, and ceiling, further improved by a secret hatch and a nonfunctional landline phone. Elsewhere in the basement, a Lovecraftian heating system reached long tentacles up into the rest of the house. When it was humid, the front door swelled in its frame and refused to open, like a punched eye. The yard was huge and pocked with a fire pit and edged with poison ivy, trees, a rotting fence. I lived with John and Laura and their cat, Tokyo. They were a couple; long-legged and pale, erstwhile Floridians who’d gone to hippie college together and had come to Iowa for their respective graduate degrees. The living embodiment of Florida camp and eccentricity, and, ultimately, the only thing that, post–Dream House, would keep the state in my good graces. Laura looked like an old-fashioned movie star: wide-eyed and ethereal. She was dry and disdainful and wickedly funny; she wrote poetry and was pursuing a degree in library science. She felt like a librarian, like the wise conduit for public knowledge, as if she could lead you anywhere you needed to be. John, on the other hand, looked like a grunge rocker-cum-offbeat-professor who’d discovered God. He made kimchi and sauerkraut in huge mason jars he monitored on the kitchen counter like a mad botanist; he once spent an hour describing the plot of Against Nature to me in exquisite detail, including his favorite scene, in which the eccentric and vile antihero encrusts a tortoise’s shell with exotic jewels and the poor creature, “unable to support the dazzling luxury imposed on it,” dies from the weight. When I first met John, he said to me, “I got a tattoo, do you want to see?” And I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Okay, it’s gonna look like I’m showing you my junk but I’m not, I swear,” and when he lifted the leg of his shorts high on his thigh there was a stick-and-poke tattoo of an upside-down church. “Is that an upside-down church?” I asked, and he smiled and wiggled his eyebrows—not lasciviously, but with genuine mischief—and said, “Upside down according to who ?” Once, when Laura came out of their bedroom in cutoffs and a bikini top, John looked at her with real, uncomplicated love and said, “Girl, I want to dig you a watering hole.” Like a picara, I have spent my adulthood bopping from city to city, acquiring kindred spirits at every stop; a group of guardians who have taken good care of me (a tender of guardians, a dearheart of guardians). My friend Amanda from college, my roommate and housemate until I was twenty-two, whose sharp and logical mind, flat affect, and dry sense of humor witnessed my evolution from messy teenager to messy semiadult. Anne—a rugby player with dyed-pink hair, the first vegetarian and lesbian I ever met—who’d overseen my coming-out like a benevolent gay goddess. Leslie, who coached me through my first bad breakup with brie and two-dollar bottles of wine and time with her animals, including a stocky brown pit bull named Molly who would lick my face until I dissolved into hysterics. Everyone who ever read and commented on my LiveJournal, which I dutifully kept from ages fifteen to twenty-five, spilling my guts to a motley crew of poets, queer weirdos, programmers, RPG buffs, and fanfic writers. John and Laura were like that. They were always there, intimate with each other in one way and intimate with me in another, as if I were a beloved sibling. They weren’t watching over me, exactly; they were the protagonists of their own stories. But this story? This one’s mine.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “See, I can make it tighter,” and indeed he could. His eagerness to please me reminded me that I needn’t have worried, that in his own eyes he was just a kid and I a high school guy who’d done it with girls and one older lady and everything. Most of the time I had dreamed of an English lord who’d kidnap me and take me away forever; someone who’d save me and whom I’d rule. But now it seemed that Kevin and I didn’t need anyone older, we could run away together, I would be our protector. We were already sleeping in a field under a sheet of breezes and taking turns feeding on each other’s bodies, wet from the dew. “I’m getting close,” I said. “Want me to pull out?” “Go ahead,” he said. “Fill ’er up.” “Okay. Here goes. Oh, God. Jesus!” I couldn’t help kissing his cheek. “Your beard hurts,” he said. “You shave every day?” “Every other. You?” “Not yet. But the fuzz is gettin’ dark. Some guy told me the sooner you start shavin’, the faster it comes in. Do you agree?” “I think so. Well,” I said, “I’m pullin’ out. Your turn.” I turned my back to Kevin and I could hear him spitting on his hand. I didn’t particularly like getting cornholed, but I was peaceful and happy because we loved each other. People say young love or love of the moment isn’t real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts. I was aware of the treacherous air vents above us, conducting the sounds we were making upstairs. Maybe my dad was listening. Or maybe, just like Kevin, he was unaware of anything but the pleasure spurting up out of his body and into mine. My father had started his own business fifteen years earlier in order to make money, be his own boss and keep his own hours. These were imperatives, not simple wishes, and whenever they were set aside he suffered, even physically. Money was for him the air superior people needed to breathe; wealth and superiority coincided, though when he said someone was from a “good” family, he meant rich first and only secondarily respectable or virtuous. But his real reason for wanting money, I imagine, was that it was a distinction as absolute as genius and as solitary; any other thing people think is worth getting would have struck him as too arbitrary and congenial. Too sociable.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “We—e—ell!” she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis of wonder and welcome. “Husband at home?” I croaked, fist in pocket. I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. “Come in,” she said with a vehement cheerful note. Against the splintery deadwood of the door, Dolly Schiller flattened herself as best she could (even rising on tiptoe a little) to let me pass, and was crucified for a moment, looking down, smiling down at the threshold, hollow-cheeked with round pommettes, her watered-milk-white arms outspread on the wood. I passed without touching her bulging babe. Dolly-smell, with a faint fried addition. My teeth chattered like an idiot’s. “No, you stay out” (to the dog). She closed the door and followed me and her belly into the dollhouse parlor. “Dick’s down there,” she said pointing with an invisible tennis racket, inviting my gaze to travel from the drab parlor-bedroom where we stood, right across the kitchen, and through the backdoorway where, in a rather primitive vista, a dark-haired young stranger in overalls, instantaneously reprieved, was perched with his back to me on a ladder fixing something near or upon the shack of his neighbor, a plumper fellow with only one arm, who stood looking up. This pattern she explained from afar, apologetically (“Men will be men”); should she call him in? No. Standing in the middle of the slanting room and emitting questioning “hm’s,” she made familiar Javanese gestures with her wrists and hands, offering me, in a brief display of humorous courtesy, to choose between a rocker and the divan (their bed after ten P.M.). I say “familiar” because one day she had welcomed me with the same wrist dance to her party in Beardsley. We both sat down on the divan. Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked—had always looked—like Botticelli’s russet Venus—the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty. In my pocket my fingers gently let go and repacked a little at the tip, within the handkerchief it was nested in, my unused weapon. “That’s not the fellow I want,” I said. The diffuse look of welcome left her eyes. Her forehead puckered as in the old bitter days: “Not who?” “Where is he? Quick!” “Look,” she said, inclining her head to one side and shaking it in that position. “Look, you are not going to bring that up.” “I certainly am,” I said, and for a moment—strangely enough the only merciful, endurable one in the whole interview—we were bristling at each other as if she were still mine. A wise girl, she controlled herself.