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 In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  We humans do not hesitate to speak of the almost superhuman power of unconditional parental love; otherwise how could we explain the profound feelings and actions we take toward our newborns, with their slimy, wrinkled-prune bodies that know little else but to defecate, urinate and wail in ear-piercing shrieks of frantic discomfort? We gaze at them, listen, coo and smell; we hold and rock them; we become hopelessly and ridiculously smitten in love. And this, as any parent knows, is only just the beginning of trial by fire and infinite patience. Evolution has given us the most compelling of all feelings to direct and organize the critical acts of care and nurturance. The Darwinian emotions and behaviors of “love” have evolved, presumably, for the protection and care of the babies in a species bearing one offspring and compressing an eighteen-month gestation (arguably because of its large head) into nine. For these underdeveloped creatures to survive, special, extended, and therefore highly motivated caregiving behaviors were required. Such an enduring task demanded nothing short of love, perhaps the same emotion that drives soldiers in the heat of battle to rescue fallen comrades, pulling them to safety even at the supreme risk to their own lives. And love, in the final analysis, may be our collective antidote—the salvation for a species with such a penchant for senseless killing and carnage. Love is the glue that holds family, tribes, and—perhaps in times of need—even societies together. It is also the potion that binds the human animal to the divine through the highest religious and spiritual feelings of oneness and connection. Was I, at the lake’s edge, witnessing an early precursor to that love supreme in the primitive instinctual programs that so nonchalantly inhibited the adult birds from exhibiting their normal voracious competitive appetites so that their young could fill their bellies first? An Open WindowScience is our new religion and its holy water is disinfectant. —George Bernard Shaw In spite of persistent rejection of our animal nature, there was a vital and rich window of time during the twentieth century when six Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded on the subject of instincts.† Darwin, a century and a half ago, emphasized just how nuanced and intelligent instincts are. In Notebook M (1838) Darwin mused, “The origin of man is now proved. He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” In this regard it was recently demonstrated that a mere one or two percentage points differentiates the human and chimpanzee genomes (with not much more distinguishing humans from other mammals). Indeed chimps can outperform college sophomores in a fairly sophisticated math exercise, and yet psychology, purportedly a natural science, still seems to favor overlooking the reality that we are, in the last analysis, animals.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  WE WENT TO BOLOGNA because it was the cheapest place we could fly: there were tickets for forty euros, a price I could afford. We packed a single carry-on each, anything else would have meant a fee, and rode in a cab to the airport’s old terminal, which the budget airlines used. It was my first time leaving the country. During breaks, when the other American teachers left for places near or far—Istanbul, Tangier, St. Petersburg—I stayed behind; I didn’t want to travel, I said, I wanted to be settled in a single place. I studied Bulgarian, I read, I wandered the streets downtown. But I did want to travel with R., to leave Sofia, where even when his friends were gone there was a pressure of secrecy, where it was too dangerous to hold hands in the streets, to kiss in public, however chastely, where everywhere we had to keep a casual distance; I wanted to be with him in a place where we could be freer with each other, a place in the West. It was my gift to him, a getaway, a bit of romance. We arrived at the airport early enough to be first in line for the unassigned seats, and sat in the front row, where there was extra room for our legs. Even so my knees almost touched those of the single attendant who sat facing us, strapped into her foldout seat. She spoke English with an accent I couldn’t place, not Bulgarian but something Eastern European, and she smiled slightly, kindly I thought, when the plane started down the runway, thrusting us all back, and R. moved his hand to cover mine where it lay on my knee. WE BOOKED THE CHEAPEST HOTEL, too, a chain a good way from the city center, with a bus stop outside for getting to town. We arrived too late for any exploring, we’d have to wait until morning to see the city. It was hard not to feel depressed by our room, which had the corporate airlessness of such places, comfort sterilized of any human touch. It was on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot. It’s not exactly a dream of Italy, I said, meaning it as an apology, but R. laughed, he drew the curtain across the glass and pulled me to the bed. Who cares about the view, he said, the bed is nice, that’s all that matters, you should care about the bed, and then we were both laughing, one on top of the other.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It was a difference between us, that fewer things put me off, that I could be indifferent to something and still indulge it for my partner’s sake. That was what he did now, I guess, when he let me pull his foot back to me, holding it in both hands as I kissed the sole again, the arch and then the pads at the base of his toes, each of them, and then the toes themselves. What are you doing, he said, and I couldn’t answer, I wasn’t sure what I was doing as I took the other foot in my hands and repeated what I had done with the first. I was moving slowly now, the tone had changed; I didn’t want to make him laugh anymore, I didn’t know what I wanted him to feel. I kissed his ankles next, at three points, moving from the outside in, from right to left on his right leg, from left to right on his left, which would remain my pattern. Skups, R. said, a question in the way he said it, his name for me or our name for each other. But I didn’t answer, I made another band of these kisses, slightly higher than the first, and then another; I would cover him in kisses, that was what I wanted to do, and I would do it even though I could feel R.’s impatience, even as he said again Skupi , and then, don’t be cheesy, which was his warning against too much affection, against my surfeit of feeling. I ignored it, moving up another inch. It would take a long time, I realized; when you imagine something like that you don’t think about how long it will take, how large a body is, how small a pair of lips. But I would do it, I decided, a kind of unhurriedness opened up in me, a weird wide patience I sank into. I strung kisses across him, his calves and knees, his thighs, the flesh firm in the center and giving at the sides. They were places I had never touched him before, some of them, and this gave gravity to the moment, more gravity; I whispered I love you as I kissed him, and then two kisses later I whispered it again, which became a new pattern, to whisper it again and again.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He hadn’t uttered a sound in all that time, the fifteen or twenty minutes it had taken me to make my way up his body, not since the interrogative of my name, the admonition I ignored; there hadn’t been any change in his breath, or none I had noticed, and so I was surprised to see the tears on his face, two lines that fell toward his ears, he hadn’t wiped them away. He didn’t try to hide them when I moved his arm, or tried only by turning his face slightly, as if he didn’t want to meet my gaze (though his eyes were shut, there was no gaze to meet). I paused, wanting to speak, to ask him what they were for, his tears, but I knew what they were for, and so I hung over him a moment before I continued kissing him, the line of his jaw, his chin, his cheek and lips, which didn’t answer mine, which suffered themselves to be kissed, his ears, the tracks of his tears, his eyes. It was a kind of blazon of him, of his body, I love you, I whispered again and again to him. And then, when I had laid the last line across his forehead—a garland, I thought, I had garlanded him—You are the most beautiful, I said to him, you are my beautiful boy, and he reached his arms up and pulled me down on top of him, clutching me. You are, he whispered to me, you are, you are. THEY USED SOME KIND of accelerant, they must have, so that when the three children touched their torches to it (angling their bodies away, keeping the greatest distance between themselves and the fire) the flame leapt up the wood, from the base to the ridiculous crown the whole frog blazed up. And with it there was a huge explosion of sound, air horns and rattlers and little handheld bells children jingled, and above them all human voices, the crowd cheering both the fire and the New Year, which had just struck.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I ignored it, moving up another inch. It would take a long time, I realized; when you imagine something like that you don’t think about how long it will take, how large a body is, how small a pair of lips. But I would do it, I decided, a kind of unhurriedness opened up in me, a weird wide patience I sank into. I strung kisses across him, his calves and knees, his thighs, the flesh firm in the center and giving at the sides. They were places I had never touched him before, some of them, and this gave gravity to the moment, more gravity; I whispered I love you as I kissed him, and then two kisses later I whispered it again, which became a new pattern, to whisper it again and again. His cock was soft when I reached it, as mine was, I hadn’t noticed it until then. I almost passed over it, kissing his upper thigh on the right and then the left, but I didn’t skip it, I kissed it, too, as I had kissed the rest of him, and said again the words that somehow became more real with repetition. Usually words wear out the more you use them, they become featureless, rote, and more than any others this is true of the words I repeated to R.; even in our relationship that was still so new they had lost most of their flavor. I remembered the fear I had felt the first time I spoke them to him, weeks before, when they had had all their force; I had been terrified, really, not so much that they wouldn’t be answered (they weren’t, it would be days before he repeated them) as that they would scare him away, that he would startle like the wild thing I sometimes felt he was. But now we said them often, when we left each other and were reunited (even if it was only a room we left, only minutes we were separated). But repeating the words now didn’t dull them, it called them to attention somehow, to service, it restored them, and they became difficult to say again; I found myself almost unable to speak as I whispered into R.’s silence, kissing the soft flesh of his stomach, the firmer flesh over his ribs, his nipples and the patch of hair at the center of his chest, his collarbone, the taut skin at his windpipe. His arms were still raised but he had folded them at the elbow, crossing his forearms over his face.

• From Story of O (1954)

  O was at a loss what to do. Her lover was there, as close, as tenderly relaxed and surrendered as he was in the bed in that low-ceilinged room to which, almost every night since they had begun living together, he came to sleep with her. It was a big, mahogany, English-style four-poster bed, without the awning, and the posters at the head were taller than those at the foot. He always slept on her left, and whenever he awoke, even were it in the middle of the night, his hands inevitably reached down for her legs. This is why she never wore anything but a nightgown or, if she had on pajamas, never put on the bottoms. He did so now; she took that hand and kissed it, without ever daring to ask him for anything. But he spoke. Holding her by the collar, with two fingers slipped in between the neck and collar, he told her it was his intention that henceforth she should be shared by him and those of his choosing, and by those whom he did not know who were connected to the society of the château, shared as she had been the previous evening. That she was dependent on him, and on him alone, even though she might receive orders from persons other than himself, whether he was present or absent, for as a matter of principle he was participating in whatever might be demanded of or inflicted on her, and that it was he who possessed and enjoyed her through those into whose hands she had been given, by the simple fact that he had given her to them. She must greet them and submit to them with the same respect with which she greeted him, as though they were so many reflections of him. Thus he would possess her as a god possesses his creatures, whom he lays hold of in the guise of a monster or a bird, of an invisible spirit or a state of ecstasy. He did not wish to leave her. The more he surrendered her, the more he would hold her dear. The fact that he gave her was to him a proof, and ought to be one for her as well, that she belonged to him: one can only give what belongs to you. He gave her only to reclaim her immediately, to reclaim her enriched in his eyes, like some common object which had been used for some divine purpose and has thus been consecrated. For a long time he had wanted to prostitute her, and he was delighted to feel that the pleasure he was deriving was even greater than he had hoped, and that it bound him to her all the more, as it bound her to him, all the more so because, through it, she would be more humiliated and ravaged. Since she loved him, she could not help loving whatever derived from him. O listened and trembled with happiness, because he loved her, all acquiescent she trembled. He doubtless guessed it, for he went on:

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

  Knowing Ben’s romantic nature, I’m reluctant to prescribe concrete sexual interventions designed to recharge his libido. Ben is advice-resistant; pragmatic solutions don’t work for him, because his quandary is less something to repair than something to acknowledge. With this in mind, I borrow an exercise from Barry Johnson. I tell Ben, “I want you to breathe in and keep the air in as long as you can.” Fresh oxygen inevitably turns into suffocating carbon dioxide, forcing him to exhale. At first, the release feels wonderful, but a few moments later he craves fresh oxygen again. I explain, “You can’t choose between inhaling and exhaling; you have to do both. It’s the same thing with intimacy and passion.” I explain to Ben that the tension between security and adventure is a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve. It is a puzzle. “Can you hold the awareness of each polarity? You need each at different times, but you can’t have both at the same time. Can you accept that? It’s not an either-or situation, but one where you get the benefits of each and also recognize the limits of each. It’s an ebb and flow.” Love and desire are two rhythmic yet clashing forces that are always in a state of flux and always looking for the balance point. Ben has been going out with Adair for the past eight months—a record for him—and something different is happening. “I think I’m in love with this woman,” he says. “OK, I think I’m in love with every woman, but this one is different. OK, everyone is different, but this one is really different. She grounds me. I can be freaking out about something—you know how I get—and she doesn’t react. Not that she doesn’t care, or doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t get in there and panic right along with me. There’s something quiet about her, and, you know, I’m anything but quiet. I think this could work. I like being with her. And the sex is still pretty good…” “I’m waiting for the but…” I tell him. “But I do feel it changing. I’m getting nervous, restless. I really don’t want to fuck this up. I’m forty-three-years old, for God’s sake. I want to have a kid, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to stick around.”

• From Story of O (1954)

  She rang. Pierre chained her hands above her head, to the chain of the bed. When she was thus bound, her lover kissed her again, standing beside her on the bed. Again he told her that he loved her, then he got down off the bed and nodded for Pierre. He watched her struggle, so fruitlessly; he listened to her moans swell and become cries. When her tears flowed, he sent Pierre away. She still found the strength to tell him again that she loved him. Then he kissed her drenched face, her gasping mouth, undid her bonds, laid her down, and left.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  As they drift peacefully by, I carefully toss out some small pieces of bread. It is curious to observe how the adults stand back, carefully monitoring their chicks while allowing them to peck and feast. Only after they have filled their fluffy bellies do the adults take some morsels for themselves. So it seems they not only ferociously protect their young from outside harm but with patient restraint show an uncharacteristic deference, protecting them from their own gluttony. When they are not parents, these gracious lily-white swans show their true colors as nasty aggressive beasts, jousting with one another for any crumbs thrown their way. In mammalian development the instincts for protection and care were greatly extended and elaborated, flourishing with a wide range of nurturing behaviors. Then, in the evolution of primates and Homo sapiens , care of the young made a monumental jump; this involved paradigm shifts such as diverse altruistic and mutually supportive social behaviors. Then bonding, through direct physical touch and eye contact, promoted focus on one potential mating partner at a time. And that procreative connection between male and female—the one above all others—was cemented by the orgasm’s commanding neurochemical surge. * We find ourselves, consequently, rising to the perennial saga of mustering the courage to love that which time will claim for its own; love, sexuality and loss were now forever and intrinsically entwined, becoming the broad business of the world’s poetry, art, music and prose. We humans do not hesitate to speak of the almost superhuman power of unconditional parental love; otherwise how could we explain the profound feelings and actions we take toward our newborns, with their slimy, wrinkled-prune bodies that know little else but to defecate, urinate and wail in ear-piercing shrieks of frantic discomfort? We gaze at them, listen, coo and smell; we hold and rock them; we become hopelessly and ridiculously smitten in love. And this, as any parent knows, is only just the beginning of trial by fire and infinite patience. Evolution has given us the most compelling of all feelings to direct and organize the critical acts of care and nurturance. The Darwinian emotions and behaviors of “love” have evolved, presumably, for the protection and care of the babies in a species bearing one offspring and compressing an eighteen-month gestation (arguably because of its large head) into nine. For these underdeveloped creatures to survive, special, extended, and therefore highly motivated caregiving behaviors were required. Such an enduring task demanded nothing short of love, perhaps the same emotion that drives soldiers in the heat of battle to rescue fallen comrades, pulling them to safety even at the supreme risk to their own lives.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  And love, in the final analysis, may be our collective antidote—the salvation for a species with such a penchant for senseless killing and carnage. Love is the glue that holds family, tribes, and—perhaps in times of need—even societies together. It is also the potion that binds the human animal to the divine through the highest religious and spiritual feelings of oneness and connection. Was I, at the lake’s edge, witnessing an early precursor to that love supreme in the primitive instinctual programs that so nonchalantly inhibited the adult birds from exhibiting their normal voracious competitive appetites so that their young could fill their bellies first ? An Open Window Science is our new religion and its holy water is disinfectant. —George Bernard Shaw In spite of persistent rejection of our animal nature, there was a vital and rich window of time during the twentieth century when six Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine were awarded on the subject of instincts. † Darwin, a century and a half ago, emphasized just how nuanced and intelligent instincts are. In Notebook M (1838) Darwin mused, “The origin of man is now proved. He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” In this regard it was recently demonstrated that a mere one or two percentage points differentiates the human and chimpanzee genomes (with not much more distinguishing humans from other mammals). Indeed chimps can outperform college sophomores in a fairly sophisticated math exercise, and yet psychology, purportedly a natural science, still seems to favor overlooking the reality that we are, in the last analysis, animals. Even our sense of wonder may be shared by our nearest cousins, the apes. Jane Goodall, a leading primatologist, has suggested the existence of primal spiritual feelings in the chimps she had carefully studied over many years. Here she describes the behaviors of a troupe visiting an especially beautiful place with a waterfall and river: For me, it is a magical place, and a spiritual one. And sometimes, as they approach, the chimpanzees display in slow, rhythmic motion along the river bed. They pick up and throw great rocks and branches. They leap to seize the hanging vines, and swing out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind until it seems the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings. For ten minutes or more they may perform this magnificent “dance.” Why? Is it not possible that the chimpanzees are responding to some feeling like awe? A feeling generated by the mystery of the water; water that seems alive, always rushing past yet never going, always the same yet ever different. Was it perhaps similar feelings of awe that gave rise to the first animistic religions, the worship of elements and the mysteries of nature over which there was no control?

• From Story of O (1954)

  When René had rung, it was to have the coffer brought in which contained, or one of whose compartments contained, an assortment of small chains and belts, and whose other held a variety of these shafts, ranging from the very thin to the very thick. They all had one feature in common, namely that they flared at the base, to make it impossible for them to slide up inside the body, an accident which might have produced the opposite effect from that desired, that is it might have allowed the ring of flesh to tighten up again, whereas the purpose of the shaft was to distend it. Thus quartered, and quartered each day a little more, for James, who made her kneel down, or rather lie prone, to watch while Jeanne or Monique, or whichever girl happened to be there, fastened the shaft that he had chosen, each day chose a thicker one. At the evening meal, which the girls took together in the same refectory, after their bath, naked and powdered O still wore it, and everyone could see that she was wearing it, because of the little chains and the belt. It was only removed, by the valet, when he came to chain her to the wall for the night if no one had asked for her, or, if someone had, when he locked her hands behind her if he had to take her to the library. Rare were the nights when someone did not appear to make use of this passage thus rapidly rendered as easy as, though still narrower than, the other. After eight days, there was no longer any need for an instrument, and O’s lover told her that he was happy she was now doubly open and that he would make certain she remained so. At the same time, he warned her that he was leaving and that she would not see him during the last seven days she was to spend in the château, before he came back to pick her up and take her back to Paris. “But I love you,” he added, “I do love you. Don’t forget me.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  We met weekly for a few months in an irregular contractual arrangement. “Psychotherapy,” an observer might have said, for I entered her name in my professional appointment book and she sat in the patient’s chair for the ritual fifty minutes. Yet our roles were always blurred. The question of fees, for example, never arose. From the very beginning I knew this was no ordinary professional contract and found myself reluctant to mention money in her presence—it would have been vulgar. And not only money but other such tasteless issues as carnality, marital adjustment, or social relationships. Life, death, spirituality, peace, transcendence: those were the topics we discussed; those were Paula’s only concerns. Mostly we talked about death. Each week four of us, not two, met in my office—Paula and I, her death and my own. She became my courtesan of death: she introduced me to it, taught me how to think about it, even to befriend it. I came to understand that death has had a bad press. Though there is little joy to be found in it, still death is not a monstrous evil that drags us off to some unimaginably terrible place. I learned to demythologize death, to see it for what it is—an event, a part of life, the end of further possibilities. “It’s a neutral event,” Paula said, “which we’ve learned to color with fear.” Every week Paula entered my office, flashed the broad smile I adored, reached into her large straw bag, lifted her journal to her lap, and shared her reflections and dreams of the past week. I listened hard and tried to respond appropriately. Whenever I voiced doubts about whether I was being helpful, she seemed puzzled; then, after a moment’s pause, she smiled as if to reassure me and turned again to her journal. Together we relived her entire encounter with cancer: the initial shock and disbelief, the mutilation of her body, her gradual acceptance, her getting used to saying, “I have cancer.” She described her husband’s loving care and that of close friends. I could easily understand that: it was hard not to love Paula. (Of course I never declared my love until much later, at a time when she was not to believe me.) Then she described the horrible days of her cancer’s recurrence. That phase was her Calvary, she said, and the stations of the cross were the trials experienced by all patients with recurrence: radiotherapy rooms with doomsday metallic eyeballs suspended aloft, impersonal harried technicians, uncomfortable friends, aloof doctors, and, most of all, the deafening hush of secrecy everywhere.

• From Story of O (1954)

  As for her clothes, it was up to her to choose them, or if need be to invent them, so that this semi-undressing to which he had subjected her in the car on their way to Roissy would no longer be necessary: tomorrow she was to go through her closet and sort out her dresses, and to do the same with her underclothing by going through her dresser drawers. She would hand over to him absolutely everything she found in the way of belts and panties; the same for any brassieres like the one whose straps he had had to cut before he could remove it, any full slips which covered her breasts, all the blouses and dresses which did not open up the front, and any skirts too tight to be raised with a single movement. She was to have other brassieres, other blouses, other dresses made. Meanwhile, was she supposed to visit her corset maker with nothing on under her blouse or sweater? Yes, she was to go with nothing on underneath. If someone should notice, she could explain it any way she liked, or not explain it at all, whichever she preferred, but it was her problem, and hers alone. Now, as for the rest of what he still had to teach her, he preferred to wait for a few days and wanted her to be dressed properly before hearing it. She would find all the money she needed in the little drawer of her desk. When he had finished speaking, she murmured “I love you” without the slightest gesture. It was he who added some wood to the fire, lighted the bedside lamp, which was of pink opaline. Then he told O to get into bed and wait for him, that he would sleep with her. When he came back, O reached over to turn out the lamp: it was her left hand, and the last thing she saw before the room was plunged into darkness was the somber glitter of her iron ring. She was lying half on her side: her lover called her softly by name and, simultaneously, seizing her with his whole hand, covered the nether part of her belly and drew her to him. The next day, O, in her dressing gown, had just finished lunch alone in the green dining room—René had left early in the morning and was not due home until evening, to take her out to dinner—when the phone rang. The phone was in the bedroom, beneath the lamp at the head of the bed. O sat down on the floor to answer it. It was René who wanted to know whether the cleaning woman had left. Yes, she had just left, after having served lunch, and would not be back till the following morning. “Have you started to sort out your clothes yet?” René said.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Whitehorn genuinely wanted to be taught. He was a collector and had in this manner accumulated an astounding treasure trove of factual curios over the years. “You and your patients both win,” he would say, “if you let them teach you enough about their lives and interests. Learn about their lives; you will not only be edified but you will ultimately learn all you need to know about their illness.” Fifteen years later, in the early 1970s, Dr. Whitehorn was dead, I had become a professor of psychiatry, and a woman named Paula with advanced breast cancer entered my life to continue my education. Though I didn’t know it at the time, and though she never acknowledged it, I believe that from the very beginning she assigned herself the task of mentoring me. Paula had called for an appointment after having heard from a social worker in the oncological clinic that I was interested in forming a therapy group of patients with terminal disease. When she first entered my office, I was instantaneously captivated by her appearance: by the dignity in her bearing; by her radiant smile, which gathered me in; by her shock of short, exuberantly boyish, glowing white hair; and by something I can only call luminosity that seemed to emanate from her wise and intensely blue eyes. She caught my attention with her first words: “My name is Paula West,” she said. “I have terminal cancer. But I am not a cancer patient.” And indeed, in my travels with her through many years, I never regarded her as a patient. She went on to describe in clipped, precise fashion her medical history: cancer of the breast diagnosed five years earlier; surgical removal of that breast; then cancer of the other breast, that breast also removed. Then came chemotherapy with its familiar awful entourage: nausea, vomiting, total loss of hair. And then radiation therapy, the maximum permitted. But nothing would slow the spread of her cancer—to skull, spine, and the orbits of her eyes. Paula’s cancer demanded to be fed, and though the surgeons tossed it sacrificial offerings—her breasts, lymph nodes, ovaries, adrenal glands—it remained voracious. When I imagined Paula’s nude body, I saw a chest crisscrossed with scars, without breasts, flesh, or muscle, like the rib planks of some shipwrecked galleon, and below her chest a surgically scarred abdomen, all supported by thick, ungainly, steroid-thickened hips. In short, a fifty-five-year-old woman sans breasts, adrenals, ovaries, uterus, and, I’m sure, libido. I have always relished women with firm, graceful bodies, full breasts, and a readily apparent sensuality. Yet a curious thing happened to me the first time I met Paula: I found her beautiful and fell in love with her.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  His cock was soft when I reached it, as mine was, I hadn’t noticed it until then. I almost passed over it, kissing his upper thigh on the right and then the left, but I didn’t skip it, I kissed it, too, as I had kissed the rest of him, and said again the words that somehow became more real with repetition. Usually words wear out the more you use them, they become featureless, rote, and more than any others this is true of the words I repeated to R.; even in our relationship that was still so new they had lost most of their flavor. I remembered the fear I had felt the first time I spoke them to him, weeks before, when they had had all their force; I had been terrified, really, not so much that they wouldn’t be answered (they weren’t, it would be days before he repeated them) as that they would scare him away, that he would startle like the wild thing I sometimes felt he was. But now we said them often, when we left each other and were reunited (even if it was only a room we left, only minutes we were separated). But repeating the words now didn’t dull them, it called them to attention somehow, to service, it restored them, and they became difficult to say again; I found myself almost unable to speak as I whispered into R.’s silence, kissing the soft flesh of his stomach, the firmer flesh over his ribs, his nipples and the patch of hair at the center of his chest, his collarbone, the taut skin at his windpipe. His arms were still raised but he had folded them at the elbow, crossing his forearms over his face. I kissed his armpits again, the exposed undersides of his arms, and then (I was kneeling now, my knees on either side of him) I took his arms in my hands and moved them away from his face.

• From Story of O (1954)

  Even before Sir Stephen could make a sign to her, O had obediently lifted her skirts as she sat down on the iron chair, and it had taken her bare thighs a long time to warm the cold iron. They heard the water slapping against the boats tied up to the wooden jetty at the end of the terrace. Sir Stephen was seated across from her, and O was speaking slowly, determined not to say anything that was not true. What Sir Stephen wanted to know was why she liked Jacqueline. Oh! that was easy: it was because she was too beautiful for O, like the full-sized dolls given to the poor children for Christmas, which they’re afraid to touch. And yet she knew that if she had not spoken to her, and had not accosted her, it was because she really didn’t want to. As she said this she raised her eyes, which had been lowered, fixed on the bed of peonies, and she realized that Sir Stephen was staring at her lips. Was he listening to what she was saying, or was he merely listening to the sound of her voice or watching the movement of her lips? Suddenly she stopped speaking, and Sir Stephen’s gaze rose and intercepted her own. What she read in it was so clear this time, and it was so obvious to him that she had seen it, that now it was his turn to blanch. If indeed he did love her, would he ever forgive her for having noticed it? She could neither avert her gaze nor smile, nor speak. Had her life depended on it, she would have been incapable of making a gesture, incapable of fleeing, her legs would never have carried her. He would probably never want anything from her save her submission to his desire, as long as he continued to desire her. But was desire sufficient to explain the fact that, from the day René had handed her over to him, he asked for her and kept her more and more frequently, sometimes merely to have her with him, without asking anything from her? There he sat across from her, silent and motionless. Some businessmen, at a neighboring table, were talking as they drank a coffee so black and aromatic that the aroma was wafted all the way to their own table. Two well-groomed, contemptuous Americans lighted cigarettes halfway through their meal; the gravel crunched beneath the waiters’ feet—one of them came over to refill Sir Stephen’s glass, which was three-quarters empty, but what was the point of wasting good wine on a statue, a sleepwalker? The waiter did not belabor the point.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  That’s holy enough for me.” “Irv, I know you well. Mark my words—the day will come when you realize how religious you really are. But it’s unfair trying to convert you while you’re hungry. I’ll get lunch.” “Wait one moment, Paula. A few minutes ago, when you said your brother was one who would never have passed you by, was that statement meant for me?” “Once,” said Paula, looking at me with her luminous eyes, “at a time when I needed you badly, you did desert me. But that was then. It’s gone. You’ve come back now.” I was certain I knew the then she meant—the time when Dr. Lee had tossed that chalk into the air. How much time had the flight of that chalk taken? One second? Two? But those brief moments were frozen in her memory. I’d need an ice pick to hack them out. I was not so foolish as to try. Instead, I returned to her brother. “Your saying that your brother was like a rock makes me think of another rock, the anger rock you once placed on the table between us. Do you know that you never, until this day, mentioned your brother to me? But his death helps me understand some things about the two of us. Maybe we’ve always been a threesome—you, me, and your brother? I wonder if his death is the reason you’ve chosen to be your own rock—the reason you would never let me be your rock? Perhaps his death convinced you that other men would prove frail and unreliable?” I stopped and waited. How would she respond? In all the years I had known Paula, this was the first time I had offered her an interpretation about herself. But she said nothing. I continued, “I think I’m right, and I think it’s good that you went on this retreat, good that you tried to say good-bye to him. Maybe things can be different between you and me now.” More silence. Then, with an enigmatic smile, she stood up, saying, “Now it’s time to feed you,” and walked into the kitchen. Was that statement—“Now it’s time to feed you”—an acknowledgment that I had just fed her? Damn, it was hard to give her anything! A moment later, when we sat down to eat, she looked directly at me and said, “Irv, I’m in trouble. Will you be my rock now?” “Of course,” I said, glad to recognize her plea as the answer to my question. “Lean on me. What kind of trouble?” But my pleasure in being allowed at last to help turned quickly to dismay as she began to explain her trouble. “I’ve been so outspoken about the doctors that I think I’ve been medically blacklisted.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Though I didn’t know it at the time, and though she never acknowledged it, I believe that from the very beginning she assigned herself the task of mentoring me. Paula had called for an appointment after having heard from a social worker in the oncological clinic that I was interested in forming a therapy group of patients with terminal disease. When she first entered my office, I was instantaneously captivated by her appearance: by the dignity in her bearing; by her radiant smile, which gathered me in; by her shock of short, exuberantly boyish, glowing white hair; and by something I can only call luminosity that seemed to emanate from her wise and intensely blue eyes. She caught my attention with her first words: “My name is Paula West,” she said. “I have terminal cancer. But I am not a cancer patient .” And indeed, in my travels with her through many years, I never regarded her as a patient. She went on to describe in clipped, precise fashion her medical history: cancer of the breast diagnosed five years earlier; surgical removal of that breast; then cancer of the other breast, that breast also removed. Then came chemotherapy with its familiar awful entourage: nausea, vomiting, total loss of hair. And then radiation therapy, the maximum permitted. But nothing would slow the spread of her cancer—to skull, spine, and the orbits of her eyes. Paula’s cancer demanded to be fed, and though the surgeons tossed it sacrificial offerings—her breasts, lymph nodes, ovaries, adrenal glands—it remained voracious. When I imagined Paula’s nude body, I saw a chest crisscrossed with scars, without breasts, flesh, or muscle, like the rib planks of some shipwrecked galleon, and below her chest a surgically scarred abdomen, all supported by thick, ungainly, steroid-thickened hips. In short, a fifty-five-year-old woman sans breasts, adrenals, ovaries, uterus, and, I’m sure, libido. I have always relished women with firm, graceful bodies, full breasts, and a readily apparent sensuality. Yet a curious thing happened to me the first time I met Paula: I found her beautiful and fell in love with her. We met weekly for a few months in an irregular contractual arrangement. “Psychotherapy,” an observer might have said, for I entered her name in my professional appointment book and she sat in the patient’s chair for the ritual fifty minutes. Yet our roles were always blurred. The question of fees, for example, never arose. From the very beginning I knew this was no ordinary professional contract and found myself reluctant to mention money in her presence—it would have been vulgar. And not only money but other such tasteless issues as carnality, marital adjustment, or social relationships.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I loved my Aunt Hannah, my father’s sister: her sweetness, her unceasing warmth, her grilled hot dogs wrapped in crisp bologna slices, her incomparable strudel (its recipe forever lost to me, as her son will not send it to me—but that’s another story). Most of all I loved Hannah on Sundays. On that day her delicatessen near the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard was closed, and she put free games on the pinball machine and let me play for hours. She never objected to my putting small wads of paper under the front legs of the machine to slow the pinballs’ descent so I could run up higher scores. My adoration of Hannah sent my momma into a frenzy of spiteful attacks on her sister-in-law. Momma had her Hannah litany: Hannah’s poverty, her aversion to working in the store, her poor business sense, her cloddish husband, her lack of pride and ready acceptance of all hand-me-downs. Momma’s speech was abominable, her English heavily accented and larded with Yiddish terms. She never came to my school for parents’ day or for PTA meetings. Thank God! I cringed at the thought of introducing my friends to her. I fought with Momma, defied her, screamed at her, avoided her, and, finally, in my midadolescence, stopped speaking to her altogether. The great puzzle of my childhood was, How does Daddy put up with her? I remember wonderful moments on Sunday mornings when he and I played chess and he gaily sang along with records of Russian or Jewish music, his head swaying in time to the melody. Sooner or later the morning air was shattered by Momma’s voice screeching from upstairs, “Gevalt, Gevalt, enough! Vay iz mir, enough music, enough noise!” Without a word my father would rise, turn off the phonograph, and resume our chess game in silence. How many times I prayed, Please, Dad, please, just this once, punch her out! So why wave? And why ask, at the very end of my life, “How’d I do, Momma?” Can it be—and the possibility staggers me—that I have been conducting my entire life with this lamentable woman as my primary audience? All my life I have sought to escape, to climb away from my past—the shtetl, the steerage, the ghetto, the tallis, the chanting, the black gabardine, the grocery store. All my life I have stretched for liberation and growth. Can it be that I have escaped neither my past nor my mother? Those friends who have had lovely, gracious, supportive mothers—how I envy them. And how odd that they are not bound to their mothers, neither phoning, visiting, dreaming, nor even thinking about them frequently. Whereas I have to purge my mother from my mind many times a day and even now, ten years after her death, often reflexively reach for a phone to call her.

• From Story of O (1954)

  What a wonderful piece of news! At last man has discovered what he has been searching for so doggedly through the ages, in medicine, ethics, philosophy, and religion: the means to avoid pain—or at least to transcend it, to understand it (were it only by seeing therein the effect of our stupidity or mistakes). What is more, man might easily have made this discovery in ages past, for in truth masochists are not a recent invention. And so I am amazed that this discovery was not greeted by a great fanfare and bestowal of signal honors; that no attempt was made to steal the secret. And I’m also surprised that these masochists were not rounded up and herded into the laboratories and museums, in cages, the better to be observed and studied. Perhaps men never pose themselves any questions which have not already been answered. Perhaps it would be enough to get them together to wrest them from their solitude (as though it were not some purely visionary, human desire). Well, here at least is the cage, and here is this young woman in the cage. All we have to do now is listen to her. III.—Strange love letterShe says: “You shouldn’t be surprised. Take a closer look at your love. It would be terrified if it realized for one moment that I’m a woman, and alive. And it is not by ignoring the fiery wellsprings of the blood that you will dry them up. “Your jealousy does not deceive you. It is true that you make me healthy and happy and a thousand times more alive. Yet there is nothing I can do to prevent this happiness from turning against you. The stone also sings more loudly when the blood flows free and the body is at rest. Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god, and we all know that they are not as tender as all that. You have already seen me cry. Now you must learn to relish my tears. And my neck: is it not charming when, filled with a moan I am striving to stifle, it grows tense and contorted in spite of my attempts to control it? It is all too true that when you come to call on us, you should bring a whip along. And, for more than one among us, a cat-o’-nine-tails.” She hastens to add: “That joke is in such poor taste! But the fact is you’ve missed the whole point. And if I were not so madly in love with you, do you think I would dare to speak to you in this way? and betray my peers?”