Nostalgia

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 Middlesex (2002)

  Michigan. Mr. da Silva had spent a summer in Greece six years before. He was still keyed up about it. When he described visiting the Mani, his voice became even mellower than usual, and his eyes glistened. Un- 321 able to find a hotel one night, he had slept on the ground, awaking the next morning to find himself beneath an olive tree. Mr. da Silva had never forgotten that tree. They had had a meaningful exchange, the two of them. Olive trees are intimate creatures, eloquent in their twistedness. It's easy to understand why the ancients believed human spirits could be trapped inside them. Mr. da Silva had felt this, wak- ing up in his sleeping bag. I was curious about Greece myself, of course. I was eager to visit. Mr. da Silva encouraged me in feeling Greek. "Miss Stephanides," he called on me one day. "Since you hail from Homer's own land, would you be so kind as to read aloud?" He cleared his throat. "Page eighty-nine." That semester, our less academically inclined sisters were reading The Light in the Forest. But in the greenhouse we were making our way through The Iliad. It was a paperback prose translation, abridged, set loose from its numbers, robbed of the music of the an- cient Greek but— as far as I was concerned— still a terrific read. God, I loved that book! From the pouting of Achilles in his tent (which re- minded me of the President's refusal to hand over the tapes) to Hec- tor's being dragged around the city by his feet (which made me cry), I was riveted. Forget Love Story. Harvard couldn't match Troy as a set- ting, and in Segal's whole novel only one person died. (Maybe this was another sign of the hormones manifesting themselves silentiy in- side me. For while my classmates found The Iliad too bloody for their taste, an endless catalogue of men butchering one another after formally introducing themselves, I thrilled to the stabbings and be- headings, the gouging out of eyes, the juicy eviscerations.) I opened my paperback and lowered my head. My hair fell for- ward, cutting off everything— Maxine, Mr. da Silva, the greenhouse's geraniums— except the book. From behind the velvet curtain, my lounge singer's voice began to purr. "Aphrodite put off her famous belt, in which all the charms of love are woven, potency, desire^ lovely whispers, and the force of seduction, which takes away fore- sight and judgment even from the most reasonable people." It was one o'clock. An after-lunch lethargy lay over the room. Outside, rain threatened. There was a knock at the door. "Excuse me, Callie. Could you stop for a moment, please?" Mr. da Silva turned toward the door. "Come in." 322

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  They threw down their crutches. Praise God. They didn’t walk, they ran. Hallelujah . The deaf heard. Glory be to God. And the dumb spoke with the tongues of angels. Amen.I had not seen Randall or his father for more than twenty years. It had been longer since I had stepped inside a tent. During the intervening years I had indulged in the posthippie haze of the seventies well into the mideighties before finally graduating from college. Like the woman at the well, I had married and divorced more than one man and lived with several who were not my husband. I had written reams of advertising copy, attended my daughter’s graduation from college and graduate school, and married a poet who was also a successful entrepreneur. Somewhere along the line, I had become a semirespectable, doubt-ridden Episcopalian with Buddhist tendencies.My sister’s message on the answering machine brought it all back: blond pine shavings covering the dirt floor of the tent, feathered and piled one upon the other, each singular as a snowflake. My brother and I bedding down with the Terrell kids on that field of sawdust, wrapped in a nest of quilts while the adults paced the tent, praying into the early hours long after the crowd melted away and the last amen was uttered. The warmth of the cannon-shaped kerosene heater roaring beside us on teeth-chattering cold nights, its red tip glowing in the darkness like the all-seeing eye of God.That November evening as my husband and I stood, mouths agape, in the white-tiled kitchen of our urban home, I felt the past rise up and move toward me like some long-slumbering, pitifully deformed creature. It smelled of pine shavings and kerosene. Its rough, dense texture moved in and out of memory like a tent flap blowing in the breeze. My mother pulsed out a familiar melody on the Hammond organ:Ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down. Ain’t no gra-ave gonna hold my body down.Somewhere a tambourine kept time. The Sawdust Trail1960–1962 THE TWILIGHT SOUND OF CICADASINGING OF A DAYALREADY GONE BY. Dōgen Chapter OneTHE TENT WAITED FOR US, HER CANVAS WINGS HOVERING OVER A FIELD of stubble that sprouted rusty cans, A&P flyers, bits of glass bottles, and the rolling tatter of trash that migrated through town to settle in an empty lot just beyond the city limits. At dusk, the refuse receded, leaving only the tent, lighted from within, a long golden glow stretched out against a darkening sky. She gathered and sheltered us from a world that told us we were too poor, too white trash, too black, too uneducated, too much of everything that didn’t matter and not enough of anything that did.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  THE SILKROAD ^| ccordingtoan ancientChineselegend,oneday intheyear2640 B.C.,PrincessSi Ling-chi was sittingundera mulberrytreewhen la silkworm cocoonfellintoherteacup.Whenshe tried to remove it,shenoticedthatthecocoon hadbeguntounravelinthehotliq- uid.Shehandedtheloose endtohermaidservantandtoldherto walk.Theservantwentoutoftheprincess'schamber,andinto the palacecourtyard,andthroughthepalacegates,andoutoftheFor- biddenCity,andintothecountryside a halfmileawaybeforetheco- coonranout.(IntheWest,thislegendwouldslowlymutate over threemillennia,untilitbecamethestoryof a physicistandanapple. Eitherway, themeaningsarethesame:greatdiscoveries, whetherof silkorofgravity, arealwayswindfalls.Theyhappentopeople loafing under trees.) Ifeel a little likethatChineseprincess, whose discoverygaveDes- demonaherlivelihood. LikeherIunravel mystory, andthe longer thethread, theless thereis left totell. Retracethe filamentandyou gobackto thecocoon'sbeginning inatinyknot,a firsttentative loop.And following mystory'sthread backto whereIleftoff,Isee the Jean Bart dockinAthens.I seemygrandparentson land again, making preparations foranothervoyage. Passports areplacedinto hands, vaccinations administered toupperarms.Anothershipmate- rializes atthe dock, the Giulia. Afoghornsounds. And look: fromthe deckof theGiuliasomethingelseunwinds 63 now. Something multicolored, spinningitself out overthe watersof Piraeus. It was the customin thosedaysforpassengers leavingforAmerica to bring balls of yarnondeck.Relativeson thepierheldtheloose ends. Asthe Giulia blewitshornandmoved awayfromthedock, a few hundred stringsof yarnstretched across the water.People shouted farewells,wavedfuriously,heldup babiesforlast looks they wouldn'tremember. Propellerschurned; handkerchiefsfluttered, and,up ondeck,the ballsofyarn begantospin. Red, yellow,blue, green,they untangledtowardthepier,slowly at first,onerevolution everytenseconds, thenfasterandfaster astheboatpickedupspeed. Passengersheldtheyarnaslongaspossible,maintainingthe connec- tiontothefaces disappearingonshore.Butfinally, onebyone,the ballsranout.The strings ofyarnflewfree,risingonthebreeze. FromtwoseparatelocationsontheGiuliefs deck, LeftyandDes- demona—and I cansayit now,finally, mygrandparents—watched theairyblanketfloat away. Desdemona was standingbetween twoair manifoldsshapedlikegiant tubas. Atmidships Leftyslouchedina braceofbachelors.Inthelastthreehourstheyhadn'tseeneachother. Thatmorning,they'dhadcoffeetogetherin acafe neartheharboraf- terwhich,like professionalspies,they'dpickeduptheir separate suit- cases— Desdemonakeepinghersilkwormbox—andhaddepartedin different directions. Mygrandmotherwas carryingfalsified docu- ments. Her passport,whichtheGreekgovernmenthadgrantedun- der thecondition that sheleavethecountry immediately,boreher mother's maiden name, Aristos,insteadof Stephanides.She'dpre- sentedthis passport alongwithherboardingcardat the topofthe Giuliafs gangway. Thenshe'd goneaft,asplanned, forthesend-off. Attheshipping channel, thefoghornsounded again,astheboat camearound to the westandpicked up more speed.Dirndls,ker- chiefs,andsuit coats flapped inthebreeze.Afewhats flewoffheads, toshouts and laughter. Yarndrift-nettedthesky, barelyvisiblenow. Peoplewatchedas long asthey could. Desdemonawasoneof the firsttogobelow. Lefty lingered ondeck foranother halfhour.This, too,waspart ofthe plan. Forthe firstdayat sea, they didn't speak to each other.Theycame up ondeckat the appointed mealtimesandstood in separatelines. After eating, Lefty joined the men smoking at the railwhileDesde- 64 mona hunched on deck withthewomenand children,stayingoutof the wind. "You have someonemeetingyou?" thewomenasked."A fiance?" "No. Just my cousinin Detroit." "Traveling all by yourself?"themenaskedLefty. "That's right.Free andeasy." Atnight, they descendedto theirrespectivecompartments. In separate bunksof seaweedwrapped inburlap,withlife vestsdou- blingas pillows,theytriedtosleep,toget usedtothemotionof the ship,andto toleratethesmells. Passengershadbroughtonboardall mannerof spicesandsweetmeats, tinnedsardines,octopusin wine sauce,legs oflambpreserved withgarliccloves.Inthose daysyou could identify a person's nationality by smell.Lyingonherbackwith eyes closed,Desdemonacoulddetect thetelltaleonionyaroma ofa Hungarianwomanon herright,andtheraw-meatsmellofanAr- menianonher left.(Andthey,inturn,could peg Desdemona asa Hellenebyheraromaof garlicandyogurt.)Lefty'sannoyanceswere auditoryaswellas olfactory.To onesidewasa mannamed Callas withasnorelikeaminiaturefoghornitself;ontheotherwasDr. Philobosian, whoweptin hissleep. EversinceleavingSmyrnathe doctorhadbeenbesidehimselfwithgrief. Racked, gut-socked,helay curled upinhiscoat,bluearoundthe eye sockets.He ate almost nothing. Herefusedtogoupondeckto get freshair.Onthefewoc- casions hedidgo,hethreatenedtothrowhimselfoverboard. InAthens, Dr.Philobosianhadtoldthem to leavehimalone.He refused todiscuss plansaboutthefutureandsaidthathehadnofam- ilyanywhere. "My family'sgone. They murderedthem." "Poor man," Desdemona said. "Hedoesn'twanttolive." "Wehave tohelphim,"Leftyinsisted."He gaveme money.He bandaged myhand. Nobody else caredabout us. We'lltakehim with us."While they waited fortheircousin towiremoney,Lefty triedto console thedoctor andfinallyconvincedhim to comewiththemto Detroit. "Wherever's faraway," saidDr. Philobosian.But nowon the boathe talked onlyofdeath. The voyage wassupposedto takefromtwelveto fourteen days. Lefty and Desdemona had the scheduleallworkedout.Onthesec- ond day atsea, directly after dinner,Leftymade a touroftheship. He pickedhis way among the bodiessprawledacrossthesteerage deck. 65

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  While Jon pays, Ames grabs a bat, shares a terse nod with the old- timer behind the counter, then Velcros closed a batting glove tight to his left hand and takes a few practice swings. The old ritual comes to him without thought. Ames’s shoulders hum with loose energy as the bat goes round and he waits for a cage to open. He finds a perverse comfort in the way his body reacts, a bodily experience below thought. Maybe Jon really does know something of somatic therapy, in his own way. Back when Amy and Reese lived together, on certain spring and summer evenings, Amy would walk down to the Parade Ground at Prospect Park, where the high school boys, mostly Dominicans, played baseball. She came for the thwack that occurred when a ball thrown hard and straight struck the leather pocket of a glove. She longed for that sound. She longed for her own high school past that snapped forward out of time’s stream at the necromantic power of baseball’s thwacks and plonks. She’d sit on a bench, far enough away that the boys—or their dads—wouldn’t make eyes at her, and she’d listen as the sounds of the game raised the ghosts of muscle memory. She could feel the batter’s step forward, readying the pendulum of body weight to swing to the timing of the pitcher’s windup. At every heard thwack the muscles in her arm came alive, remembering how her glove jerked back at the impact, how they sprang to snap a throw from third to first. All that smooth power her body had once had, ready to obey her every thought. She had missed it. She missed how obviously impressive it had been. The way women noted that impressiveness with their eyes and other boys chose her as their friend. The ease with which it all had been given to her. Back before all this gender shit, her body was like a good dog. Maybe it wasn’t fully her, but her dog did everything she wanted: she moved so fast, pulled himself up trees, sprinted through forests and across fields, giddy and waggy. She was lucky to have gotten a dog like that. She didn’t deserve such a good dog. She’d thought she’d have that dog forever—when they were both old, he would lay at her feet like a canvas duffel, loyal and obliging and charming to the last. Now, as Jon sends the ball into the chute, Ames’s bat flashes round, and after a few minutes, it is indistinguishable from practice at college: the two of them silent, the chunck as Jon feeds the ball into the machine, the tsing as it hits the aluminum bat, so that their conversation becomes a wordless call-and-response—chunck-tsing, chunck-tsing, chunck-tsing, and on and on—until Jon breaks the meditation with a “my turn.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina gives a shy but pleased smile. The backs of her knees push away her chair as she rises. She carefully picks the sushi plate back up, then bends and sets it in front of Reese before lowering herself onto the rug, so that her bare feet, toes polished dark red, are tucked sideways behind her butt, and her body weight rests on a hip. “When I first moved in here,” Katrina explains, “my ex kept most of the furniture. We bought it all to fit our old place. I was the one who was leaving, and I didn’t feel entitled to take what seemed to belong to that other space—or if I had, it would have felt mean-spirited. So I didn’t have anything and ate sitting on the floor the first weeks I was here. The first night, I remembered that once when I was a little girl, we had to leave our house because it needed some structural repairs. My parents rented a place in Burlington, which was supposed to be furnished but wasn’t. It was too expensive to get furniture just for two months’ rental. But instead of showing me her worry, my mom told me that on very special occasions, a family could have indoor picnics. She put the food on a tray and spread a blanket over the bare linoleum, and made like it was just as fun as eating in a park. When Dad came home a week or two later with a table he’d scrounged somewhere, I was disappointed. When that memory came back to me I cried, maybe ’cause of the divorce, maybe just because of nostalgia. Now, when I’m alone, I prefer to eat on the floor and think of my 9 mom. This is the moment when Reese names the sudden softness and need that she has been developing for Katrina a “mom-crush.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Yes, I know it’s a good idea! You should listen to your mother more! Maybe if you put something appealing on the registry, I’ll even approve of it, and generously get it for you.” She winked, and Reese, in that moment, wanted to be her daughter. So now here are Katrina and Reese, scanning bar codes on swaddlers and wearable blankets. Even perusing the socks area had brought them close to choice overload. Who knew infants needed so many styles? Especially since it seemed that a baby would outgrow each sock size in a matter of months. In front of a stand of socks for nine- month-olds, Reese experiences a wave of sentimentality for the impossibly tiny infant socks. Where does the time go; the days when her baby’s feet could be measured by her thumb were so few, so precious, she imagines she will one day lament. “Oh my god,” Reese tells Katrina. “I’m, like, missing the days when our baby was just an infant, and she’s not even born yet.” Reese and Katrina tend to use “she” pronouns for the baby, even though they had yet to find out the sex. Katrina has a pretty solid grasp on the difference between sex and gender and Reese isn’t one to think that sex doesn’t matter. Even if her kid turns out to be trans, it’s helpful to know in which direction that trans will travel. “Premature nostalgia is better than what I’m feeling.” “What are you feeling?” “Consumer fatigue. I knew this shit was going to be expensive, but oh my god, looking at this crap, it’s overwhelming. UGG makes fucking baby shoes! Fifty-five dollars!” “For Sale: Baby UGGs, never worn.” “We are living the saddest short story ever told,” Katrina snorts, then points to the swaddlers. “Can we just dress her in those wearable blankets for the first year? It’s not like she’s going to care if she isn’t in designer clothes, and it'll cost a fortune to have to buy all this every three months. Let’s just put her in blankets, they'll last longer.” Reese shrugs. Now that she has seen that Coach makes little baby shoes, her inner brand whore is crying out to scan them onto the registry. But, really, it would just be in terrible taste to let her first mothering disagreement with Katrina be over whether or not to dress their kid in designer brands. They'd have all of the teenage years for that shit. Downstairs, a glass case displays the breast pumps: sleek electronic affairs that look as though they’ve been designed by Steve Jobs—era Apple. Smooth, white curves, with a minimum of buttons. “Fancy! They even have an app! Can we share one?” Katrina asks. “Or do we each need our own?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Go with your friends,” Reese tells him. She angles a stream of smoke out the side of her mouth, and waves the cigarette cherry in the direction where they’ve slipped away. He nods gratefully and steps lightly after them. A few moments later, Thalia comes out. “Oh my god, I had to escape the baby transes in there. One of them was complaining about how a cis woman looked at her today at the store. That’s how wounded she is, she can’t take being looked at. Two eyes appraising her is trauma. I can’t take it.” Such is the explosion of girls transitioning in and around the Brooklyn drag world, and so devoid are these girls of their own trans history, that Thalia, having been on hormones not quite two years, has found herself forcibly placed in a maternal role. Her tone evinces a teenage mother’s exasperation with children, having just been one herself. Without asking, Thalia takes the cigarette from between Reese’s fingers and puffs hard. Reese laughs. “This is the moment.” “What is the moment?” “The moment you just said your mother would never get. When a daughter finally has kids of her own and begins to understand that her mother knew best all along.” Thalia exhales and hands the cigarette back to Reese, who declines it. “Don’t be smug about it,” Thalia says. “Maternal smugness is very annoying. Remind me to tell that to my mother next time I call her.” She lifts the sole of her shoe behind her, twists herself with easy balance to stub out the cigarette on it, and flicks the filter into the gutter. Her lashes curve luxuriously around her eyes even when she doesn’t wear mascara, and tonight, she’s worn the mascara thickly, making the amber irises appear bright and unearthly by contrast, illuminated as they are by the orange light of the sodium-vapor streetlamps. Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting. Normally that means avoiding the unflattering orangey glare of streetlights. Yet Thalia, with her dark curls and smooth skin, stands resplendent as a Greek pop star in the fiery hues. In Reese’s memories of childhood, night had a different blue- black tone than in her adult life. And, in fact, she later learned when she returned to visit Madison after a long hiatus, this change in the color of night was not an illusion of time and remembrance but a

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Your own estrogen levels seem to have run low,” Reese says, but without much venom, like she’s too tired for niceties, rather than really trying to hurt him. “Tm told my crow’s feet are dashing.” Reese sighs. “I don’t want to talk about how you look, Amy. I’m not going to do that.” “Of course. That’s fair.” He ignores the “Amy” part. The name doesn’t offend him, it’s just a name no one says anymore. “I just wanted you to know you look great.” Reese shrugs, then licks the edge of the ice cream sandwich he had brought her. Her disinterest surprises him. He had figured on the compliment mattering to her. “Hey, he says, affecting a light tone, “’'m putting myself out there, admitting how great you look.” She gives him a look like he’s just stepped off a spaceship. “Oh,” she says finally, “I get it. You were giving me that compliment as a guy. You're used to women acknowledging compliments like you’re a 29 guy. It’s true. His compliments tend to have, at a minimum, the effect of being noticed. She performs a gruesome parody of batting her lashes and clutching her heart. “My stars! Lil ol’ me?” “All right, Reese.” “You're lucky I even agreed to come here. You're not getting a boy-crazy teenager on top of it.” “T can see that.” They had first met at a picnic here. A trans lady picnic. He still had his apartment near the north side of Prospect Park. The one they had lived in together. Over time his memories with Reese in the park had been replaced by new ones. The places where he jogged, where he read by the pond, or watched birds—hoping for one of the red- tailed hawks that nested there, often settling for an escaped songbird, or, if hard-pressed, a swan. But seeing Reese reframes everything, conjures up the past. He can’t quite figure out if she suggested meeting him here as a tactical move. Something to throw off his confidence. He can feel the lack of their prior intimacy—though whether or not that absent closeness is forever gone or like a child playing hide-and-go-seek, he’s not quite sure. The rusty hinge of a grackle sounds from the trees overhead. He’s about to apologize, to say that he made a mistake and go home, when she offers him the ice cream sandwich. For the first time all afternoon, she lowers her guard, with something like a smile. “Look,” she says. “I played along a little. I waited with those other women and let you buy me ice cream like we were just another hetero couple out on our hetero Sunday date with the boringly hetero idea to go to the park. Now have some ice cream, I don’t want to eat all of it.” He takes a bite, and she pulls it back. “One thing I'll tell you, though,” she says. “You move differently than before.” “Move differently?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Friends,” Reese says aloud, suddenly placing the déja vu. She walks over to examine the banks of glass panes, then whirls to let Katrina in on her discovery. “These windows—they look like windows on the set of Rachel and Monica’s apartment on Friends.” “T know,” replies Katrina. She pops open the plastic container holding the delivery sushi—fish for Reese, vegetarian rolls for Katrina in her pregnancy—from the place down the block. “I’m sure it’s on purpose. They added them when they remodeled this whole building. I think they saw a perfect way to tap into the nostalgia of Gen Xers. Give them the New York experience they saw as teenagers on TV.” “Who wants to live in Friends? That show is a Disneyland of New York.” Katrina pours the soy sauce packets into little ramekins. “You don’t have to spend much time in marketing to understand that even though New Yorkers are snobs about it”—she smiles apologetically at having to implicitly include Reese among her misinformed fellow snobs—“they secretly like the television fantasy version of the city. Who wouldn’t like to live in a huge loft on a waitress’s salary?” “Okay, I see the appeal,” Reese concedes. “If you put a couple Friends replica apartments in a remodeled building in Fort Greene and have it overlooking the airshaft, then, when sad ladies are in the middle of a divorce and need a comforting place, they subconsciously can rent a spot in Friends—a show that comforted them as a child.” Reese doesn’t mull Katrina’s point too deeply, instead she thinks about the words “sad ladies”: how when Katrina seems like she’s bullshitting through some borderline show-offy intellectual riff, her thoughts often curve back around in a scorpion’s tail to reveal an emotional barb. When, Reese wonders, did Katrina learn to dress up her feelings like that? Was it a defense or a skill, or maybe both? Reese presses her fingers against the cold panes of glass to peer down over the balcony into the concrete bottom of the gloomy air shaft. Beside Reese, the plants Katrina has hung to catch the daylight that penetrates the air shaft at certain hours give off a lush, living scent. The air in the apartment is thick and dark, but soothing, as on a forest floor. “You're a sad divorced lady susceptible to nineties Friends nostalgia? But I thought you left him?” Reese asks. “T did. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t suffer over it and want comfort and familiarity. Every time he told me I was making a mistake, I believed him—I just believed it was a mistake I had to make.” Reese understands exactly. She tells Katrina, “You should paint the walls purple. Weren’t the walls in Monica and Rachel’s place some awful nineties color scheme? Purple and green or something?” Katrina makes a face. “Gross! I would never!”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Masculinity had always been what allowed Amy not to feel. Early on after transition, Amy had fled that numbness; she had been for a time, with Reese, gloriously there and present and fragile. Amy had never shed her numbness completely, and later came to appreciate her own capacity for it as a useful tool. Iris, who excelled at sex work, talked about dissociation the same way: the superpower that let her succeed lucratively and heroically where the average mortal failed, succumbing to all the feels. Reese, however, didn’t believe in that spin; she could never quite complete the dogmatically radical leap that would transform dissociation from coping mechanism to superpower. In the back of Amy’s closet—her literal closet, mind you, the one that they shared in their apartment—lurked a gorgeous men’s Zegna suit, cut classically slim, in a deep black matte of fine carded wool. Amy had bought the suit her last year in college, from a resale shop where she pulled it off the rack, put it on, and with no tailoring necessary, discovered the Reservoir Dog in herself. In the post- transition culling of boy clothes, Amy had spared the suit, allowed it to survive, and granted it a clandestine life in the back reaches of the closet. Reese would have happily understood the suit as a sentimental keepsake, except for the fact that on rare occasions, she’d come home to find Amy actually wearing it, those malamute eyes a thousand yards away, slinking around like some kind of louche, androgynous James Bond. Generally and specifically, Reese had no patience for this nostalgic boy dress-up. Reese, despite herself, succumbed to a grudging respect for Amy in Her Suit, if only for how completely shut off and thus invulnerable Amy became when wearing it. Though the next day, she made sure Amy felt sheepish and bashful, as you do to a hungover friend whose careless drunkenness the night before forced you into a state of resentful awe. Detransition had been Amy’s slow ossification across this unreachable distance. A place where Reese could no longer touch her to hurt her anew. That is not gender, Reese’s guilt would argue, that is pain. All pain merits care, but not dogmatically egalitarian relativism. Katrina and Reese sit cross-legged on a four-by-five-foot scrap of Astroturf laid over the black iron of the apartment’s fire escape to

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Matsushima, and, though at first I was moved by the With the night's music still ringing in her ears, the woman would show beauty of the place and up at Ellington's hotel room. He would be dressed in a stylish suit—he clapped my hands with 422 • The Art of Seduction admiration, saying to loved good clothes—and the room would be full of flowers; there would myself, "Oh, if only I be a piano in the corner. He would play some music. His playing, and his could bring some poet here elegant, nonchalant manner, would come across to the woman as pure the-to show him this great wonder!" —y et, after I had ater, a pleasant continuation of the performance she had just witnessed. been gazing at the scene And when it was over, and Ellington had to leave town, he would give her from morning until night, a thoughtful gift. He would make it seem that the only thing taking him the myriad islands began to away from her was his touring. A few weeks later, the woman might hear a smell unpleasantly of seaweed, the waves that new Ellington song on the radio, with lyrics suggesting that she had in-beat on Matsuyama Point spired it. If ever he passed through the area again, she would find a way to became obstreperous; before be there, and Ellington would often renew the affair, if only for a night. I knew it I had let all the cherry blossoms at Sometime in the 1940s, two young women from Alabama came to Shiogama scatter; in the Chicago to attend a debutante ball. Ellington and his band were the enter-morning I overslept and tainment. He was the women's favorite musician, and after the show, they missed the dawn snow on Mount Kinka; nor was I asked him for an autograph. He was so charming and engaging that one of much impressed by the the girls found herself asking what hotel he was staying at. He told them, evening moon at Nagané with a big grin. The girls switched hotels, and later that day they called up or Oshima; and in the end Ellington and invited him to their room for a drink. He accepted. They I picked up a few white and black pebbles on the wore beautiful negligees that they had just bought. When Ellington ar-cove and became engrossed rived, he acted completely naturally, as if the warm greeting they gave him in a game of Six Musashi were completely usual. The three of them ended up in the bedroom, when with some children. one of the young women had an idea: her mother adored Ellington. She —IHARA SAIKAKU, THE LIFE OF AN AMOROUS WOMAN, had to call her now and put Ellington on the phone. Not at all put out by TRANSLATED BY IVAN MORRIS

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “The expression. It refers to vinyl records, you know. Not that ’m old enough to have ever owned one.” He didn’t take the bait. “Whatever, you're the one telling me about vinyl.” Watching Stanley speak was like watching a movie she’d seen dozens of times—the familiarity of his expressions and gestures. She knew when Stanley would tilt his head, when he’d make that mock bashful expression and look sneakily to one side. Just then, the store manager walked back with Mark-Paul Gosselaar in tow. Here was distant TV and the distant past come to life at the same moment. Reese stood suddenly. “Oh, Stanley, I have to work now.” But Stanley stuck out his hand to Gosselaar, who shook it, and asked Stanley, “You’re Reese?” Stanley pointed at Reese. “No, sorry, that’s Reese. I’m just shopping.” Gosselaar took this in stride. He smiled, those good-natured nineties megawatts clouded only slightly by the beard and crow’s feet that now surrounded them. Clearly the man had grown accustomed to strangers shaking his hand on little pretext. “Nice seeing you,” Reese said to Stanley, because the manager had pulled out a set of keys to brusquely unlock a door, and was by then holding it open for Gosselaar. “Yeah,” said Stanley. But when Reese emerged from the storeroom twenty minutes later, she found Stanley still browsing sweaters. “I found the brevity of that encounter entirely unsatisfying,” he said. “Now can you show me which sweaters Zack Morris took? I’m going to get those.” “T have to go.” He stood in her path. “Please?” And this word, a simple “please,” had occurred so infrequently in the vocabulary that he’d once used with her that she had to wonder whether he’d changed and how much. And this, in turn, made her curious, or at least curious enough to acquiesce. That evening, Reese swept into Stanley’s apartment, holding shopping bags of clothing, mostly his, but he’d bought some for her from the various stores to which she’d taken him. He had sublet a loft in Williamsburg, owned by a chef, who was spending three months away on a culinary tour. That meant that Stanley was living among the chef's tasteful belongings, making it difficult for Reese to suss out clues as to the state of Stanley’s life. A weathered wooden upright piano stood against a wall in the living room, and Reese plinked a few keys. Along the other wall, shelves held glasses of all shapes, and above that, a selection of liquor put the average craft cocktail bar to shame. A collection of bottles of all colors, some gleaming, others ancient-looking, and half of them with labels she didn’t recognize. “Are you allowed to drink these?” she asked him. “Tm allowed to do anything I want. I haven’t yet, but I'll replace the bottles of anything you use,” Stanley replied. “Make me something. I haven’t had a woman bring me a drink in a while.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina gives a shy but pleased smile. The backs of her knees push away her chair as she rises. She carefully picks the sushi plate back up, then bends and sets it in front of Reese before lowering herself onto the rug, so that her bare feet, toes polished dark red, are tucked sideways behind her butt, and her body weight rests on a hip. “When I first moved in here,” Katrina explains, “my ex kept most of the furniture. We bought it all to fit our old place. I was the one who was leaving, and I didn’t feel entitled to take what seemed to belong to that other space—or if I had, it would have felt mean-spirited. So I didn’t have anything and ate sitting on the floor the first weeks I was here. The first night, I remembered that once when I was a little girl, we had to leave our house because it needed some structural repairs. My parents rented a place in Burlington, which was supposed to be furnished but wasn’t. It was too expensive to get furniture just for two months’ rental. But instead of showing me her worry, my mom told me that on very special occasions, a family could have indoor picnics. She put the food on a tray and spread a blanket over the bare linoleum, and made like it was just as fun as eating in a park. When Dad came home a week or two later with a table he’d scrounged somewhere, I was disappointed. When that memory came back to me I cried, maybe ’cause of the divorce, maybe just because of nostalgia. Now, when I’m alone, I prefer to eat on the floor and think of my 9 mom. This is the moment when Reese names the sudden softness and need that she has been developing for Katrina a “mom-crush.”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She hesitated. “Well, if you’re in a rush, go ahead. But here, let me give you my card.” Alice had her business card ready in her hand. “It’s our new phone number. Why don’t you call?” They said it was good seeing each other, made more stunted hugging gestures and settled for hand squeezes. Connie walked three blocks before hailing a cab. “You think you know what you’re doing, but you don’t,” a huddled drunk informed her. She gave him a dollar bill and walked on, silently agreeing. Why hadn’t she waited for Alice? “Alice loves you, Connie,” Franklin had said. A couple across the street were embracing against a crumbling brick wall; the man’s hand was under the woman’s short leather skirt. Because she’d been ending a cycle and they weren’t friends anymore, Constance thought. She stopped before a garbage-choked wastebasket and pulled Alice’s card from her pocket. She started to throw it away and then changed her mind. You never know. One day she might come upon this card and decide it would be good to talk to somebody she hadn’t spoken to in years. She pocketed the little piece of cardboard and hailed a cab that was roaring down the street like a desperate animal. Heaven When Virginia thought of their life in Florida, it was veiled by a blue-and-green tropical haze. Ocean water lapped a white sand beach. Starfish lay on the shore and lobsters awkwardly strolled it. There was a white house with a blue roof. On the front porch were tin cans housing smelly clams and crayfish that walked in circles, brushing the sides of the cans with their antennae; they had been brought by her son Charles, and left for him and his brother, Daniel, to squat over and watch from time to time. She imagined her young daughters in matching red shorts, their blond hair pulled back by rubber bands. The muscles of their long legs throbbed as they jumped rope or chased each other, rubber thongs patting their small, dirty heels with every step. A family picnic was being held in the front yard on an old patchwork quilt. Watermelon juice ran down their sleeves. Jarold was holding Magdalen in the ocean so she could kick and splash without fear. He was laughing, he was pink; his hair lay in wet ridges against his large, handsome head. Twenty years later, Virginia thought of Florida with pained and superstitious but reverent wonder, as though it was a paradise she had forfeited without knowing it. She thought of it almost every night as she lay on the couch before the humming, fuzzing TV set in the den of their New Jersey home.

• From The Lover (1984)

  Now evening comes. He tells me I’ll remember this afternoon all my life, even when I’ve forgotten his face and name. I wonder if I’ll remember the house. He says, Take a good look at it. I do. I say it’s like everywhere else. He says yes, yes, it’s always the same. I can still see the face, and I do remember the name. I see the whitewashed walls still, the canvas blind between us and the oven outside, the other door, arched, leading to the other room and to an open garden—the plants are dead from the heat—surrounded by blue balustrades like those at the big villa in Sadec with its tiers of terraces overlooking the Mekong.

• From The Lover (1984)

  The liners used to go up the Saigon River, engines off, drawn by tugs to the port installations in the bend of the Mekong that’s on the same latitude as the town of Saigon. This bend or branch of the Mekong is called the River, the Saigon River. The boats stopped there for a week. As soon as they berthed, you were in France. You could dine in France and dance there, but it was too expensive for my mother, and anyway for her there was no point. But with him, the lover from Cholon, you could have gone. But he didn’t go because he’d have been afraid to be seen with the little white girl, so young. He didn’t say, but she knew. In those days, and it’s not so long ago, scarcely fifty years, it was only ships that went all over the world. Large parts of all the continents were still without roads or railways. Hundreds, thousands of square kilometers still had nothing but prehistoric tracks. It was the handsome ships of the Messageries Maritimes, the musketeers of the shipping lines, the Porthos, D’Artagnan, and Aramis, that linked Indochina to France. The voyage lasted twenty-four days. The liners were like towns, with streets, bars, cafés, libraries, drawing rooms, meetings, lovers, weddings, deaths. Chance societies formed, fortuitous as everyone knew and did not forget, but for that very reason tolerable, and sometimes unforgettably pleasant. These were the only voyages the women ever made. And for many of them, and for some men too, the voyage out to the colony was the real adventure of the whole thing. For our mother those trips, together with our infancy, were always what she called “the happiest days of her life.” Departures. They were always the same. Always the first departures over the sea. People have always left the land in the same sorrow and despair, but that never stopped men from going, Jews, philosophers, and pure travelers for the journey’s own sake. Nor did it ever stop women letting them go, the women who never went themselves, who stayed behind to look after the birthplace, the race, the property, the reason for the return. For centuries, because of the ships, journeys were longer and more tragic than they are today. A voyage covered its distance in a natural span of time. People were used to those slow human speeds on both land and sea, to those delays, those waitings on the wind or fair weather, to those expectations of shipwreck, sun, and death. The liners the little white girl knew were among the last mailboats in the world. It was while she was young that the first airlines were started, which were gradually to deprive mankind of journeys across the sea.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune—those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed. On the paths of the yard the shadows of the cinnamon-apple trees are inky black. The whole garden is still as marble. The house too—monumental, funereal. And my younger brother, who was walking beside me, now looks intently at the gate open on the empty road. One day he’s not there outside the high school. The driver’s alone in the black car. He says the father’s ill and the young master’s gone back to Sadec. He, the driver, has been told to stay in Saigon to take me to school and back again to the boarding house. The young master came back after a few days. Again he was there in the back of the black car, his face averted so as not to see people looking at him, still afraid. We kissed, without a word, kissed there outside the school, we’d forgotten. While we kissed, he wept. His father was going to live. His last hope was vanishing.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Interpretation. Napoleon always thought of France, and his army, as a target to be wooed and seduced. As General de Ségur wrote of Napoleon: "In moments of sublime power, he no longer commands like a man, but seduces like a woman." In the case of his escape from Elba, he planned a bold, surprising gesture that would titillate a bored nation. He began his return to France among the people who would be most receptive to him: the peasantry who had revered him. He revived the symbols—the revolutionary colors, the eagle standards—that would stir up the old sentiments. He placed himself at the head of his army, daring his former soldiers to fire on him. The march on Paris that brought him back to power was pure theater, calculated for emotional effect every step of the way. What a contrast this former amour presented to the dolt of a king who now ruled them. Napoleon's second seduction of France was not a classical seduction, following the usual steps, but a re-seduction. It was built on old emotions 428 • The Art of Seduction and revived an old love. Once you have seduced a person (or a nation) there is almost always a lull, a slight letdown, which sometimes leads to a separation; it is surprisingly easy, though, to re-seduce the same target. The old feelings never go away, they lie dormant, and in a flash you can take your target by surprise. It is a rare pleasure to be able to relive the past, and one's youth—to feel the old emotions. Like Napoleon, add a dramatic flair to your re-seduction: revive the old images, the symbols, the expressions that will stir memory. Like the French, your targets will tend to forget the ugliness of the separation and will remember only the good things. You should make this second seduction bold and quick, giving your targets no time to reflect or wonder. Like Napoleon, play on the contrast to their current lover, making his or her behavior seem timid and stodgy by comparison. Not everyone will be receptive to a re-seduction, and some moments will be inappropriate. When Napoleon came back from Elba, the Parisians were too sophisticated for him, and could see right through him. Unlike the peasants of the South, they already knew him well; and his reentry came too soon, they were too worn out by him. If you want to re-seduce someone, choose one who does not know you so well, whose memories of you are cleaner, who is less suspicious by nature, and who is dissatisfied with present circumstances. Also, you might want to let some time pass. Time will restore your luster and make your faults fade away. Never see a separation or sacrifice as final. With a little drama and planning, a victim can be retaken in no time. Symbol: Em- bers, the remains of the fire on the morning after. Left to themselves, the embers will

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  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. 2 I 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. My mother’s elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father’s had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity—the fatal rigidity—of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was outrageous that Colin should have joined the brutes. I could see him clearly in memory, his tan and his weird eyes—hungry and yet chilly—and his habit of hanging about, the feeling he gave that something might happen. Afterwards I went to have my hair cut. A while ago I had affected an old-fashioned barber in Neal Street, who would keep me trimmed and tidy for £1.05—a guinea, as he always insisted. In the window were black-and-white photographs of men tipping their heads forward, and inside, where one waited, a colour poster of the Prince and Princess of Wales simpered above the boxes of Durex. The shop was an outpost of neighbourly simplicity amid the chic revamping of Covent Garden, and Mr Bandini, who ran it with his middle-aged bachelor son Lenny, would talk with motiveless fluency about boxing and about life during the war, and the hard time he had had then. Unlike modern studios, where each haircut has the pretensions of a work of art, Mr Bandini’s shop, with its floral linoleum, its clippers and ivory-handled razors, gave me the reassuring feeling that exactly the same thing had been happening in it for half a century. There was something melancholy but entrancing in imagining the hundreds of thousands of identical, routine haircuts that Mr Bandini had given as the decades slipped by. Though, like other Soho Italians, he had been interned in the war, he had been at work on this spot for almost forty years. I could easily imagine Charles, in handsome middle age, popping in for his fortnightly short back and sides and a friction of eau de quinine. Wartime London, which I had always imagined half bombed to bits, the rest of it keeping going on five-shilling dinners and a lot of selflessness and doing without, emerged quite differently in Charles’s journal. It appeared (and I suppose this was the other side of my apprehension about war) as an era of extraordinary opportunity, when all kinds of fantasy became suddenly possible, and when the fellow-feeling of allies and soldiers could be creamed off in sex and romance. September 26, 1943: My birthday … It’s so dull being as old as the century, it makes one’s progress seem so leaden & inevitable, with no scope for romantic doubts about one’s age. However, a beautiful, hazy pre-war sort of day—lunch at the Club with Driberg, who was very flattering & said he thought I only looked 42. He told me about some of his exploits, though I was perhaps a shade reticent about mine: with him one simply doesn’t know where they’ll end up—careless talk etc. We lamented the still frequent attacks & insults meted out to coloured servicemen, by the English though mainly of course by the Yanks.