Relief

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.

Page 26 of 88 · 20 per page

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Yes, Mom.” Oh, if only you knew. There’s an obscenely rich guy I’ve met and he wants some kind of strange kinky sexual relationship, in which I don’t get a say in things. “Have you met someone?” “No, Mom.” I am so not going there right now. “Well, darling, I’ll be thinking of you on Thursday. I love you…you know that, honey?” I close my eyes. Her precious words give me a warm glow inside. “Love you, too, Mom. Say hi to Bob, and I hope he gets better fast.” “Will do, honey. Bye.” “Bye.” I have strayed into my bedroom with the phone. Idly, I switch the mean machine on and fire up the email program. There’s an email from Christian from late last night or very early this morning, depending on your point of view. My heart rate spikes instantly, and I hear the blood pumping in my ears. Holy crap. Perhaps he’s said no. That’s it—maybe he’s canceling dinner. The thought is so painful. I dismiss it quickly and open the email. From: Christian Grey Subject: Your Issues Date: May 24 2011 01:27 To: Anastasia Steele Dear Miss Steele, Following my more thorough examination of your issues, may I bring to your attention the definition of submissive. submissive [suhb-mis-iv]—adjective 1. inclined or ready to submit; unresistingly or humbly obedient: submissive servants. 2. marked by or indicating submission: a submissive reply. Origin: 1580–90; submiss + -ive Synonyms: 1. tractable, compliant, pliant, amenable. 2. passive, resigned, patient, docile, tame, subdued. Antonyms: 1. rebellious, disobedient. Please bear this in mind for our meeting on Wednesday. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. My initial feeling is one of relief. He’s willing to discuss my issues at least, and he still wants to meet tomorrow. After some thought, I reply. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: My Issues… What about Your Issues? Date: May 24 2011 18:29 To: Christian Grey Sir, Please note the date of origin: 1580–90. I would respectfully remind Sir that the year is 2011. We have come a long way since then. May I offer a definition for you to consider for our meeting: compromise [kom-pruh-mahyz]—noun 1. a settlement of differences by mutual concessions; an agreement reached by adjustment of conflicting or opposing claims, principles, etc., by reciprocal modification of demands. 2. the result of such a settlement. 3. something intermediate between different things: The split-level is a compromise between a ranch house and a multistoried house. 4. an endangering, esp. of reputation; exposure to danger, suspicion, etc.: a compromise of one’s integrity. Ana From: Christian Grey Subject: What about My Issues? Date: May 24 2011 18:32 To: Anastasia Steele Good point, well made, as ever, Miss Steele. I will collect you from your apartment at 7:00 tomorrow. Christian Grey CEO, Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. From: Anastasia Steele Subject: 2011—Women Can Drive Date: May 24 2011 18:40 To: Christian Grey Sir, I have a car. I can drive. I would prefer to meet you somewhere.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I felt myself drifting into that lake of eternal hellfire when the front door creaked open and startled me fully awake. A man’s voice. Brother Cotton’s. Then my mother’s and Betty Ann’s. No one screamed or cried. The door closed again. Thank you. I curled around Pam and pressed my knees into the bend of hers. Sleep blanketed my thoughts and everything that could go wrong in the world slipped away. I woke the next morning to a warm, doughy smell. Biscuits. No one had baked biscuits since Brother Terrell started his fast. He could stand the smell of beans bubbling, cornbread baking, and chicken frying, but the smell of biscuits brought him to tears. I inhaled deeply and opened my eyes. A rheumy water spot stared down from the ceiling. On one side of me Randall snored, mouth wide open. On the other side, where Pam should have been, was an empty space. Voices rose and fell in some other part of the house. I pulled myself above the quilt, scooched to the foot of the bed, and lowered my feet to the wooden floor, smooth and cold. I slipped over to the door and pulled it open. Laughter. I walked down the hall to the living room, past the couch, cleaved in two with Gary sleeping in the middle. I wanted to rub my hand over the dark wool of his curly hair but thought better of it. There would be more biscuits if Gary and Randall stayed asleep.Bright light washed across every surface of the kitchen. Shiny enameled stove and round-shouldered fridge, pale no-color countertops, cabinets with peeling white paint, faded linoleum traced with indecipherable patterns. My mother stood on one side of the stove, hand on her hip, stirring a cast-iron fryer full of tomato gravy. The light blurred and softened the strong features of her face and brought out the red and gold in her hair. On the other side of the stove stood Laverne. She flipped one strip of bacon, then another, jumping as the grease popped and splattered, laughing at the brief, sharp pain, so ordinary and expected. Betty Ann faced the counter, cutting into biscuits with a wooden handled knife and spreading butter, then fig preserves into the warm, flaky centers.She let go that deep, throaty laugh, then whipped around to Mama and Laverne. “The steak!”Mama dropped the long-handled spoon into the gravy and knelt in front of the oven broiler. “Laverne, hand me that hot pad.” She pulled out the pan with smoking meat and placed it on the counter in front of Betty Ann. “A burnt offering.” They laughed, voices mingling in a loose, rough harmony.“Hey, can we get some of that food? We got a hungry man over here.” Brother Cotton’s voice drew my attention to the table where Brother Terrell sat, elbows propped on the round white table, a fork in one fist, knife in the other, a shiny white platter in front him.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Celsius, which is experienced as painfully cold, but not intolerable. At the end of the 60 seconds, the experimenter instructed the participant to remove his hand from the water and offered a warm towel. The long episode lasted 90 seconds. Its first 60 seconds were identical to the short episode. The experimenter said nothing at all at the end of the 60 seconds. Instead he opened a valve that allowed slightly warmer water to flow into the tub. During the additional 30 seconds, the temperature of the water rose by roughly 1°, just enough for most subjects to detect a slight decrease in the intensity of pain. Our participants were told that they would have three cold-hand trials, but in fact they experienced only the short and the long episodes, each with a different hand. The trials were separated by seven minutes. Seven minutes after the second trial, the participants were given a choice about the third trial. They were told that one of their experiences would be repeated exactly, and were free to choose whether to repeat the experience they had had with their left hand or with their right hand. Of course, half the participants had the short trial with the left hand, half with the right; half had the short trial first, half began with the long, etc. This was a carefully controlled experiment. The experiment was designed to create a conflict between the interests of the experiencing and the remembering selves, and also between experienced utility and decision utility. From the perspective of the experiencing self, the long trial was obviously worse. We expected the remembering self to have another opinion. The peak-end rule predicts a worse memory for the short than for the long trial, and duration neglect predicts that the difference between 90 seconds and 60 seconds of pain will be ignored. We therefore predicted that the participants would have a more favorable (or less unfavorable) memory of the long trial and choose to repeat it. They did. Fully 80% of the participants who reported that their pain diminished during the final phase of the longer episode opted to repeat it, thereby declaring themselves willing to suffer 30 seconds of needless pain in the anticipated third trial. The subjects who preferred the long episode were not masochists and did not deliberately choose to expose themselves to the worse experience; they simply made a mistake. If we had asked them, “Would you prefer a 90-second immersion or only the first part of it?” they would certainly have selected the short option. We did not use these words, however, and the subjects did what came naturally: they chose to repeat the episode of which they had the less

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I paid for some Dimetapp, the Ambien, a tiny tin of Altoids, and strutted home through the cold—vibrating but relieved, the pills and mints now rattling like snakes, I thought, with each step I took. Soon I’d be home again. Soon, God willing, I’d be asleep. A dog walker passed by with a team of yipping teacups and lapdogs on whiplike leashes. The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazed me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I pictured myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid. “This has been a test.” I felt my teeth chatter, but my face was numb. Soon. The freezer sounded really good. “Some flowers just came for you,” the doorman said as I walked back into my building. He pointed at a huge bouquet of red roses sitting on the mantel over the nonworking fireplace in the lobby. “For me?” Were the roses from Trevor? Had he changed his mind about his fat old girlfriend? Was this good? Was this the beginning of the new life? Renewed romance? Did I want that? My heart reared up like a frightened horse, an idiot. I went over to look at the flowers. The mirror hanging on the wall above the mantel showed a frozen corpse, still pretty. And then I noticed that the glass vase was skull-shaped. Trevor wouldn’t have sent me that. No. “Did you see who dropped these off?” I asked the doorman. “A delivery guy.” “Was he Asian?” I asked. “Old black guy. A foot messenger.” Tucked between the flowers was a small note written in girly ballpoint: “To my muse. Call me and we’ll get started.” I flipped it over: Ping Xi’s business card with his name, number, e-mail address, and the corniest quotation I’d ever read: “Every act of creation is an act of destruction.—Pablo Picasso” I took the vase off the mantel and got into the elevator, the smell of the roses like the stink off a dead cat in the gutter.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  It was just a daily log of numbers, mathematical sums and subtractions, the final results circled and annotated with either smiley or frowny faces. The last entry was marked December 23. Reva seemed to have abandoned her daily numbers game when her mother died. I thought of Reva sleeping in that bed each night, probably drunk and full of Aspartame and Pepcid. In the mornings, she prepped and set out into the world, a mask of composure. And I had problems? Who’s the real fuckup, Reva? I hated her more and more. The bathroom looked like it belonged to a pair of adolescent twins preparing for a beauty pageant. I could smell the mildew and the puke and Lysol. A pink expanded toolbox burst with brushes and applicators of all shapes and sizes, drugstore makeup, nail polish, stolen testers, a dozen shades of Maybelline lip gloss. On the shelf, there were two hair dryers, a curling iron, a flat iron, a bowl of bejeweled barrettes and plastic headbands. Cutouts from fashion magazines were taped to the edges of the mirror over the low vanity and sink: Claudia Schiffer’s Guess Jeans ad. Kate Moss in her Calvins. Runway stick figures. Linda Evangelista. Kate Moss. Kate Moss. Kate Moss. There was a bowl of cotton balls and swabs. A bowl of bobby pins. Two huge bottles of Listerine. Next to the cup that must have held a dozen toothbrushes, each head of bristles yellowed and frayed, a prescription bottle of Vicodin. Vicodin! From the dentist. There were twelve pills left in the bottle. I took one and pocketed the rest. I found more pills under the sink in a wicker box with a pink ribbon tying the lid shut—an Easter relic, I guessed. Maybe when Reva bought it, it was full of chocolate eggs. Clearance sale. Inside: Diurex, ibuprofen, Mylanta, Dulcolax, Dexatrim, Midol, aspirin, fen-phen. A Victoria’s Secret gift bag was tucked into the back corner of the cabinet. Inside, glory! My Ambien, my Rozerem, my Ativan, my Xanax, my trazodone, my lithium. Seroquel, Lunesta. Valium. I laughed. I teared up. Finally, my heart slowed. My hands started trembling a little, or maybe they’d been trembling all along. “Thank God,” I said aloud. The draft sucked the bathroom door shut with a celebratory bang. I counted out three lithium, two Ativan, five Ambien. That sounded like a nice mélange, a luxurious free fall into velvet blackness. And a couple of trazodone because trazodone weighed down the Ambien, so if I dreamt, I’d dream low to the ground. That would be stabilizing, I thought. And maybe one more Ativan. Ativan to me felt like fresh air. A cool breeze, slightly effervescent. This was good, I thought. A serious rest. My mouth watered. Good strong American sleep. Those pills would scrape out the sludge of Infermiterol left in my mind. Then I’d feel better. Then I’d be set. I’d live easy.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  As in a dream (I never would have believed myself capable of it) I got up from the couch (how many years had I been lying there?), picked up my pocket-book, and walked (no, I did not quite “saunter"—though I wish I had) out the door. I closed it gently. No Nora-slamming-the-door routine to undercut the effect. Goodbye Kolner. For a moment in the elevator I nearly cried. But by the time I’d walked two blocks down Madison Avenue I was jubilant. No more eight o’clock sessions! No more wondering was-it-helping as I wrote out the gargantuan check each month! No more arguing with Kolner like a movement leader! I was free! And think of all the money I didn’t have to spend! I ducked into a shoestore and immediately spent $40 on a pair of white sandals with gold chains. They made me feel as good as fifty minutes with Kolner ever had. OK, so I wasn’t really liberated (I still had to comfort myself with shopping), but at least I was free of Kolner. It was a start anyway. I was wearing the sandals on the flight to Vienna, and I looked down at them as we trooped back into the plane. Was it stepping on with the right foot or with the left that kept the plane from crashing? How could I keep the plane from crashing if I couldn’t even remember? “Mother,” I muttered. I always mutter “Mother” when I’m scared. The funny thing is I don’t even call my mother “Mother” and I never have. She named me Isadora Zelda, but I try never to use the Zelda. (I understand that she also considered Olympia, after Greece, and Justine, after Sade.) In return for this lifetime liability, I call her Jude. Her real name is Judith. Nobody but my youngest sister ever calls her Mommy. — Vienna. The very name is like a waltz. But I never could stand the place. It seemed dead to me. Embalmed. We arrived at 9 a.m. —just as the airport was opening up. willkommen in wien , it said. We shuffled in through customs dragging our suitcases and feeling dopey from the missed night of sleep. The airport looked scrubbed and gleaming. I thought of the level of disorder, dirt, and chaos New Yorkers get used to. The return to Europe was always something of a shock. The streets seemed unnaturally clean. The parks seemed unnaturally full of unvandalized benches, fountains, and rose bushes. The public flowerbeds seemed unnaturally tidy.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Shit , I thought. They never can tell the difference. “Yes, could you ring his room please?” “Who shall I say is calling?” “His wife.” The term “wife” apparently had clout back here in the nineteenth century. My friend Bob Cratchit literally sprang for the phone. Maybe it really was a Japanese gentleman. Toshiro Mifune perhaps? Complete with Samurai sword and topknot of hair? One of the rapists of Rashomon? The ghost of Yukio Mishima with his wounds still oozing? “I’m sorry, Madam, there’s no answer,” the deskman said. “May I wait in the room?” “Suit yourself, Madam.” And with that he banged a bell on his desk and called for the porter. Another Dickensian type. This one was shorter than me and had glossily Vase-lined hair. I followed him into the elevator cage. Many whirring minutes later, we arrived on the sixth floor. It was Bennett’s room all right; his jackets and ties hanging neatly in the closet. A stack of playbills on the dresser top, his toothbrush and shampoo on the rim of the old-fashioned sink. His slippers on the floor. His underwear and socks drying on the radiator. It scarcely felt as if I had been away at all. Had I? Was Bennett that able to adjust to my absence, calmly going to plays and coming home to wash his socks? The bed was a single. It was unmade but hardly looked tossed at all. I flipped through the stack of playbills. He’d seen every play in London. He had not cracked up or done anything crazy. He was the same predictable Bennett. I sighed with relief, or was it disappointment? I ran a bath for myself and stripped off my dirty clothes, letting them drop in a trail on the floor. The bathtub was one of those long, deep, claw-footed ones. A regular sarcophagus. I sank in up to my chin. “Hello feet,” I said, as my toes surfaced at the other end of the tub. My arms were bruised and aching from dragging that suitcase, and my feet were blistered. The water was so hot that for a moment I thought I’d pass out. “DROWNED IN ESTRANGED HUSBAND’S BATHTUB,” I wrote in my head for the National Enquirer. I hadn’t the remotest idea of what was going to happen next and for the moment I didn’t care. I floated lightly in the deep tub, feeling that something was different, something was strange, but I couldn’t figure out just what it was. I looked down at my body. The same. The pink V of my thighs, the triangle of curly hair, the Tampax string fishing the water like a Hemingway hero, the white belly, the breasts half floating, the nipples flushed and rosy from the steamy water. A nice body. Mine. I decided to keep it. I hugged myself. It was my fear that was missing.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  6A word about Gaston Godin. The main reason why I enjoyed—or at least tolerated with relief—his company was the spell of absolute security that his. ample person cast on my secret. Not that he knew it; I had no special reason to confide in him, and he was much too self-centered and abstract to notice or suspect anything that might lead to a frank question on his part and a frank answer on mine. He spoke well of me to Beardsleyans, he was my good herald. Had he discovered mes goûts and Lolita’s status, it would have interested him only insofar as throwing some light on the simplicity of my attitude toward him, which attitude was as free of polite strain as it was of ribald allusions; for despite his colorless mind and dim memory, he was perhaps aware that I knew more about him than the burghers of Beardsley did. He was a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor tapering upward to a pair of narrow, not quite level shoulders and a conical pear-head which had sleek black hair on one side and only a few plastered wisps on the other. But the lower part of his body was enormous, and he ambulated with a curious elephantine stealth by means of phenomenally stout legs. He always wore black, even his tie was black; he seldom bathed; his English was a burlesque. And, nonetheless, everybody considered him to be a supremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow! Neighbors pampered him; he knew by name all the small boys in our vicinity (he lived a few blocks away from me) and had some of them clean his sidewalk and burn leaves in his back yard, and bring wood from his shed, and even perform simple chores about the house, and he would feed them fancy chocolates, with real liqueurs inside—in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement, with amusing daggers and pistols arrayed on the moldy, rug-adorned walls among the camouflaged hot-water pipes. Upstairs he had a studio—he painted a little, the old fraud. He had decorated its sloping wall (it was really not more than a garret) with large photographs of pensive André Gide, Tchaïkovsky, Norman Douglas, two other well-known English writers, Nijinsky (all thighs and fig leaves), Harold D. Doublename (a misty-eyed left-wing professor at a Midwestern university) and Marcel Proust. All these poor people seemed about to fall on you from their inclined plane. He had also an album with snapshots of all the Jackies and Dickies of the neighborhood, and when I happened to thumb through it and make some casual remark, Gaston would purse his fat lips and murmur with a wistful pout “Oui, ils sont gentils.” His brown eyes would roam around the various sentimental and artistic bric-a-brac present, and his own banal toiles (the conventionally primitive eyes, sliced guitars, blue nipples and geometrical designs of the day), and with a vague gesture toward a painted wooden bowl or veined vase, he would say “Prenez done une de ces poires. La bonne dame d’en face m!en offre plus que je n’en peux savourer.” Or: “Mississe Taille Lore vient de me donner ces dablias, belles fleurs que j’exècre.” (Somber, sad, full of world-weariness.)

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The cold stone I had worn inside my chest for twenty-nine years was gone. Not suddenly. And maybe not for good. But it was gone. Perhaps I had only come to take a bath. Perhaps I would leave before Bennett returned. Or perhaps we’d go home together and work things out. Or perhaps we’d go home together and separate. It was not clear how it would end. In nineteenth-century novels, they get married. In twentieth-century novels, they get divorced. Can you have an ending in which they do neither? I laughed at myself for being so literary. “Life has no plot” is one of my favorite lines. At least it has no plot while you’re still living. And after you die, the plot is not your concern. But whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I’d go on working. Surviving meant being born over and over. It wasn’t easy, and it was always painful. But there wasn’t any other choice except death. What would I say if Bennett walked in. “I’ve only come to take a bath?” Naked as I was, could I be noncommittal? How noncommittal can you be in the nude? “If you grovel, you’ll be back at square one,” Adrian had said. I knew for sure I wasn’t going to grovel. But that was all I knew. It was enough. I ran more hot water and soaped my hair. I thought of Adrian and blew him bubble kisses. I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man? I hummed and rinsed my hair. As I was soaping it again, Bennett walked in. Henry Miller on Fear of Flying C ertainly anyone whose book is on the bestseller list (even if at the bottom) needs no review, no boosting. These few words, therefore, are gratuitous, or, if you like, homage from one writer to another. Above all, a warm, heartfelt tribute to a woman writer, the likes of which I have never known. In some ways, this book— Fear of Flying —is the feminine counterpart to my own Tropic of Cancer. Fortunately, it is not as bitter and much funnier. The author has quite a gripe about shrinks, which most of us share with her. I say the author, but in my head I cannot separate the author from her chief protagonist, Isadora Zelda. In the case of Tropic of Cancer , on the other hand, critics and readers alike were inclined to think I had invented Henry Miller. To this day many people refer to it as a novel, despite the fact that I have said again and again that it is not. Erica Jong, the author, said to me in a letter that she thought it silly to make distinctions regarding the genre or category of a book. A book is a book is a book, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I think I can do it if I really set my mind to it. The doctor said the abortion won’t cause any dramatic weight loss, but I’ll take it. I’ll take whatever I can get. Especially now. Size twos are a challenge for my hips, you know. You’re sure you won’t want any of this back?” She was gleeful and flushed. “Take the jewelry, too,” I said, and returned to the bedroom, which now felt hollowed and cool. Thank God for Reva. Her greed would unburden me of my own vanity. I started picking through my jewelry, then decided just to give her the whole box. She didn’t ask why. Maybe she thought I was in a blackout, and if she questioned me, I’d wake up. Don’t disturb the sleeping beast. The white fox in the meat freezer. I went down in the elevator with her, the bags in our fists heavy yet cloudlike, the air in the elevator shifting pressure as though we were flying through a storm. But I felt almost nothing. The doorman held the door for us as we walked out. “Oh, thank you so much, that’s so kind of you,” Reva said, suddenly a lady, gracious and verbose. “That is just so sweet of you, Manuel. Thank you.” His name. I’d never bothered to learn it. I gave her forty dollars cash for the ride crosstown. The doorman whistled for a taxi. “I’m going on a trip, Reva,” I said. “Rehab?” “Something like that.” “For how long?” Just the slightest twitch in her eye, barely balking at the lie that was obvious in its vagueness. But what could she say? I’d paid her off in high fashion to leave me alone. “I’ll be back on June first,” I said. “Or maybe I’ll stay longer. They won’t let me make phone calls. They told me it’s best not to have contact with people from my past.” “Not even me?” She was being polite. I could tell she was already hatching plans, all the hunting for love and admiration she’d do with this new wardrobe, flashy armor, the brightest camouflage. She blew on her hands to warm them and craned her neck at the approaching cab. “Good luck with the abortion.” Reva nodded sincerely. In that moment, I think our friendship ended. What would come later would be only airy remembrances of the thing called love she used to give me. I felt a kind of peace about Reva seeing her off that day. I’d cost her so much dignity, but the bounty she was now shoving into the trunk of the cab seemed to make up for it. I was absolved.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva helped me up off the floor. I was relieved that she had no elaborately wrapped gift for me. Although Reva was Jewish, she celebrated every Christian holiday. I went to the bathroom, took my coat off, turned the pocket inside out and threw it in the tub. I let the water rinse away the melted Klondike bar. As the chocolate flowed down toward the drain, it looked like blood. “What are you doing here?” I asked Reva when I came back into the living room. She ignored the question. “It’s snowing again,” she said. “I took a cab.” She sat on the sofa. I reheated my half-drunk second cup of coffee in the microwave. I went to the VCR, moved the little elephant statue that I’d positioned to cover the glare from the digital clock. I rubbed my eyes. It was ten thirty. Christmas was almost over, thank God. When I looked at Reva, I saw that under her long black wool cape she was wearing a sparkly red dress and black stockings with boughs of holly embroidered on them. Her mascara was smudged, her face was droopy and swollen and caked with foundation and bronzer. Her hair was slicked back into a bun, shiny with gel. She had kicked off her heels and was now cracking her toe knuckles against the floor. Her shoes lay under the coffee table, tipped over on their sides like two dead crows. She wasn’t giving me any jealous, scornful looks, wasn’t asking if I’d eaten anything that day, wasn’t tidying up or putting the videotapes on the coffee table back in their cases. She was quiet. I leaned against the wall and watched her take her phone out of her purse and turn it off, then open the tin of popcorn, eat some, and put the cover back on. Something had happened, that was clear. Maybe Reva had gone to Ken’s Christmas party and watched him carouse with his wife, who she’d told me was petite and Japanese and cruel. Maybe he’d finally ended the affair. I didn’t ask. I finished my coffee and picked up the tin of popcorn, took it to the kitchen and emptied it into the garbage, which Reva had taken out, apparently, while I was washing my coat. “Thanks,” she said, when I sat down beside her on the sofa. I grunted and turned on the TV. We split the rest of the M&M’s and watched a show about the Bermuda Triangle and I ate some melatonin and Benadryl and drooled a little. At some point I heard my phone ring from wherever I’d last hidden it. “Is it a vortex to a new dimension? Or a myth? Or is there a conspiracy to cover up the truth?

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I knew exactly what I had to do: I needed to be locked up. If one tablet of Infermiterol put me into a state of vacuous unconsciousness for three days, I had enough to keep me in the dark until June. All I needed was a jailkeeper, and I could live in constant sleep without fear of going out and getting involved in anything. This all seemed like a practical matter. The Infermiterol would work for me. I was relieved, almost happy. I didn’t mind at all that when Reva finally came home and wrestled the bathroom door open, she shrieked, expressed her grave concern for my sanity, all while rushing me out the door, I guessed, because she had a stomach full of junk she wanted to puke up. I left the pills with her, all but the Infermiterol. At home, I called a locksmith, arranged a meeting with Ping Xi for the following afternoon, and called Dr. Tuttle to tell her I was going off the grid for the next four months. “Hopefully I won’t ever need to see you again,” I told her. “People say that to me all the time,” she said. That was the last time we spoke. Seven “ARE YOU SURE you won’t wear this stuff? What if I stretch something out, and then you want it back?” I had called Reva to say that I was cleaning out my closets. She brought over a collection of large paper shopping bags from various Manhattan department stores, bags she’d obviously saved in case she had to transport something and needed a vessel that would connote her good taste and affirm that she was respectable because she’d spent money. I’d seen housekeepers and nannies do the same thing, walking around the Upper East Side with their lunch in tiny, rumpled gift bags from Tiffany’s or Saks Fifth Avenue. “I never want to see any of these clothes again,” I told Reva when she arrived. “I want to forget it all existed. Whatever you don’t take, I’ll donate or throw away.” “But all of it?” She was like a kid in a candy store, methodically and vampirically pulling out every dress, every skirt, every blouse, hangers and all. Every pair of designer jeans, every bit of packaged lingerie, every pair of shoes except for the filthy slippers I wore on my feet. “They kind of fit,” she said, trying on an unworn pair of Manolo Blahniks. “Good enough.” She packed everything into the shopping bags with the urgent efficiency of someone building a sand castle at sundown, as the tide comes in. Like a dream you know will end. If I move fast enough, I won’t wake the gods. Most of the clothes still had the tags on them. “This is good motivation to stick to my diet,” Reva said, lugging the bags into the living room. “Atkins, I think. Bacon and eggs for the next six months.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  When the solution to my problems came to me, it landed in my mind like a hawk on a cliff. It was as though it had been circling up there the whole time, studying every little thing in my life, putting all the pieces together. “This is the way.” I knew exactly what I had to do: I needed to be locked up. If one tablet of Infermiterol put me into a state of vacuous unconsciousness for three days, I had enough to keep me in the dark until June. All I needed was a jailkeeper, and I could live in constant sleep without fear of going out and getting involved in anything. This all seemed like a practical matter. The Infermiterol would work for me. I was relieved, almost happy. I didn’t mind at all that when Reva finally came home and wrestled the bathroom door open, she shrieked, expressed her grave concern for my sanity, all while rushing me out the door, I guessed, because she had a stomach full of junk she wanted to puke up. I left the pills with her, all but the Infermiterol. At home, I called a locksmith, arranged a meeting with Ping Xi for the following afternoon, and called Dr. Tuttle to tell her I was going off the grid for the next four months. “Hopefully I won’t ever need to see you again,” I told her. “People say that to me all the time,” she said. That was the last time we spoke. Seven “ARE YOU SURE you won’t wear this stuff? What if I stretch something out, and then you want it back?” I had called Reva to say that I was cleaning out my closets. She brought over a collection of large paper shopping bags from various Manhattan department stores, bags she’d obviously saved in case she had to transport something and needed a vessel that would connote her good taste and affirm that she was respectable because she’d spent money. I’d seen housekeepers and nannies do the same thing, walking around the Upper East Side with their lunch in tiny, rumpled gift bags from Tiffany’s or Saks Fifth Avenue. “I never want to see any of these clothes again,” I told Reva when she arrived. “I want to forget it all existed. Whatever you don’t take, I’ll donate or throw away.” “But all of it?” She was like a kid in a candy store, methodically and vampirically pulling out every dress, every skirt, every blouse, hangers and all. Every pair of designer jeans, every bit of packaged lingerie, every pair of shoes except for the filthy slippers I wore on my feet. “They kind of fit,” she said, trying on an unworn pair of Manolo Blahniks. “Good enough.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The snow was coming down hard by then. The women were collecting the plates and mugs from the coffee table in the living room. I found Reva sitting on the sofa, eating from a bag of frozen peas in front of the muted television. “Can I use the phone?” I asked. “I’ll drive you back to the city,” Reva said calmly. “But, Reva, do you think that’s safe?” one of the women asked. “I’ll drive slow,” Reva said. She got up, left the bag of peas on the coffee table, and took my arm. “Let’s go before my dad tries to stop me,” she said. From the kitchen she grabbed my bouquet of white roses from where they’d gotten stuck between the dirty dishes in the sink. They were still wrapped. “Take a few of those,” she said, pointing the roses at the bottles of wine on the counter. I took three. The women watched. I laid them in the Big Brown Bag on top of my jeans and sweatshirt and dirty sneakers. “I’ll be right back,” Reva said, and went down the dark hallway. “You’re Reva’s friend from college?” a woman asked. She spoke to me through the bright doorway to the kitchen as she unloaded the dishwasher. “Good that you have each other. You’ve got friends, you’re all right, no matter what.” Steam filled the air around her. She looked exactly how I’d pictured Reva’s mother. Her hair was brown and short. She wore big fake pearl earrings. Her dress was dark brown with gold flecks, long and tight and stretchy. I could see the cellulite on her legs through the material. The steam from the dishwasher smelled like vomit. I took a step back. “Reva’s mother was my best friend,” she continued. “We talked every day on the phone. I don’t talk to my own children that much. Sometimes friends are better than family, because you can say anything. Nobody gets mad. It’s a different kind of love. I’ll really miss her.” She paused as she looked into a cabinet. “But she’s still here in spirit. I feel it. She’s standing right beside me, saying, ‘Debra, the tall glasses go on the shelf with the wine glasses.’ She’s bossing me around, like always. I just know it. The spirit never dies, and that’s the truth.” “That’s nice,” I said, yawning. “I’m sorry for your loss.” Reva appeared wearing a huge beaver coat—her mother’s, no doubt— big snow boots, and her gym bag slung over her shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said roughly. “I’m ready.” We headed for the door to the garage. “Tell Dad I’ll call him tomorrow,” she said to the women in the living room. They started to protest, but Reva kept walking. I followed her out and into her mother’s car again. • • • REVA AND I DIDN’T TALK MUCH on the ride back into the city. Before we got on the highway, I suggested we stop for coffee, but Reva didn’t respond.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Why, the Innkeeper's daughter had little strength." She cried almost bitterly, as if to say in her soft wordless way that it was all true but it was so difficult. It was an explosion of stinging pain on the hot surface of her flesh, and the second spank came much more swiftly than she had thought possible and then there was the third and the fourth, and in spite of herself she was crying aloud. He stopped and gently kissed her all over her face. "Beauty, Beauty," he said. "Now, I give you permission to speak...tell what it is you would have me know..." "I want to please you, my Prince," she struggled, "but it hurts so, and I've tried so hard to please you." "But, my darling, you please me by bearing this pain. I explained to you earlier that punishment would not always be for a transgression. Sometimes it would be for my pleasure only." "Yes, my Prince," she cried. "I shall tell you a little secret about the pain. You are as a tight bowstring. And the pain loosens you, makes you soft as I want you to be. It is worth a thousand little orders and scoldings, and you must not think of resisting it. Do you know what I am saying? You must give yourself over to it. With each crack of the paddle you must think of the next and the next and that it is you Prince doing it to you, giving you this pain." "Yes, my Prince," she said softly. He lifted her chin again without further ado and spanked her hard again and again on the buttocks. She felt her buttocks growing hotter and hotter with pain, and the cracks of the paddle sounded loud and somehow shattering to her, as if the sound itself were as dreadful as the pain. She could not understand it. When he stopped again, she was breathless and almost frantic in her tears, as if the torrent of blows had so humiliated her it was far worse than even a greater pain would have been. But the Prince folded her in his arms. And feeling his rough clothing against her, and his hard naked chest, and the strength of his shoulders, she felt such a soothing pleasure that her sobs grew soft and open mouthed and languid against him. His rough breeches were against her sex, and she found herself pressing against him only to have him guide her gently back as if silently reproving her. "Kiss me," he said, and such a shock of pleasure went through her at the closing of his open mouth over hers that she was almost unable to stand, letting her weight fall against him. He turned her toward the bed. "That's enough for tonight," he said softly. "We have a hard journey tomorrow." And he told her to lie down. It occurred to her suddenly that he was not going to take her.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “women in the arts,” mostly profiles of rich art-party girls who were starting their own fashion lines or opening galleries or nightclubs or starring in indie movies. Her father was the president of Citibank. Zaza Nakazawa was a nineteen-year-old heiress who had written a book about being in a sexual relationship with her aunt, the painter Elaine Meeks. Eugenie Pratt was the half sister of the documentary filmmaker and architect Emilio Wolford who famously made her eat a raw lamb’s heart on camera when she was twelve. There was Claudia Martini-Richards. Jane Swarovski-Kahn. Pepper Jacobin-Sills. Kylie Jensen. Nell “Nikita” Patrick. Patsy Weinberger. Maybe these were the girls in the photos. I wouldn’t have recognized them outside the gallery. Imogene Behrman. Odette Quincy Adams. Kitty Cavalli. I remembered their names. Dawn’s Early must have been some new after-hours club for the next generation of rich kids and art hags if Ping Xi was hanging out there, presumably among his devotees. I vaguely remembered Natasha saying he’d gone to boarding school with a set of gay royal twins from Prussia. But how had I found him? Or had he found me? I collected the photos and stuffed them under the sofa cushion, then got up to peek into my bedroom to make sure nobody was there. All my bedding was in a heap on the floor, the mattress bare. I stepped closer to make sure there was no human-sized bloodstain, nobody wrapped up in the sheets, no corpse tucked under the bed. I opened the closet and found nobody bound and gagged. Just the little plastic Baggies of Victoria’s Secret lingerie spilled out. Nothing was amiss. I was alone. Back in the living room, my phone was dead on the windowsill next to a single sneaker I’d used as an ashtray. I snagged down a slat in the blinds to look out the window. The snow was already beginning to fall. That was good, I thought—I’d stay home through the blizzard and get some hard sleeping done. I’d return to my old rhythm, my daily rituals. I needed the stability of my familiar routine. And I wouldn’t take any more Infermiterol, at least for a while. It was working against my goal of doing nothing. I plugged my phone in to charge and threw the sneaker away in the kitchen. The trash was filled with the brittle peels of clementines and cloudy plastic packaging from single-serving slices of cheese, which I couldn’t remember buying or eating. The fridge contained only the small, light wood crate the clementines came in, and a second gallon jug of distilled water.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  As Chiang lay in prison, he could only imagine the worst. Several days later he received a visit from Zhou Enlai—a former friend and now a leading Communist. Politely and respectfully, Zhou argued for a united front: Communists and Nationalists against the Japanese. Chiang could not begin to hear such talk; he hated the Communists with a passion, and became hopelessly emotional. To sign an agreement with the Communists in these circumstances, he yelled, would be humiliating, and would lose me all honor among my own army. It's out of the question. Kill me if you must. Zhou listened, smiled, said barely a word. As Chiang's rant ended he told the Nationalist general that a concern for honor was something he understood, but that the honorable thing for them to do was actually to forget their differences and fight the invader. Chiang could lead both armies. Finally, Zhou said that under no circumstances would he allow his fellow Communists, or anyone for that matter, to execute such a great man as Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalist leader was stunned and moved. The next day, Chiang was escorted out of prison by Communist guards, transferred to one of his own army's planes, and sent back to his own headquarters. Apparently Zhou had executed this policy on his own, for when word of it reached the other Communist leaders, they were outraged: Zhou should have forced Chiang to fight the Japanese, or else should have ordered his execution—to release him without concessions was the height of pusillanimity, and Zhou would pay. Zhou said nothing and waited. A few months later, Chiang signed an agreement to halt the civil war and join with the Communists against the Japanese. He seemed to have come to his decision on his own, and his army respected it—they could not doubt his motives. Working together, the Nationalists and the Communists expelled the Japanese from China. But the Communists, whom Chiang had previously almost destroyed, took advantage of this period of collaboration to regain strength. Once the Japanese had left, they turned on the Nationalists, who, in 1949, were forced to evacuate mainland China for the island of For-mosa, now Taiwan. Now Mao paid a visit to the Soviet Union. China was in terrible shape and in desperate need of assistance, but Stalin was wary of the Chinese, and lectured Mao about the many mistakes he had made. Mao argued back. The Charmer • 89 Stalin decided to teach the young upstart a lesson; he would give China nothing. Tempers rose. Mao sent urgently for Zhou Enlai who arrived the next day and went right to work.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief. One of my favorite doctors, a charming cynical chap with a little brown beard, had a brother, and this brother was about to lead an expedition into arctic Canada. I was attached to it as a “recorder of psychic reactions.” With two young botanists and an old carpenter I shared now and then (never very successfully) the favors of one of our nutritionists, a Dr. Anita Johnson—who was soon flown back, I am glad to say. I had little notion of what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number of meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair (somewhere on Prince of Wales’ Island, I understand) the wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton. A third studied tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a film photographer—an insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made to partake in a good deal of menial work (he, too, had some psychic troubles)—maintained that the big men on our team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of the arctic fox. We lived in prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian world of granite. We had heaps of supplies—the Reader’s Digest, an ice cream mixer, chemical toilets, paper caps for Christmas. My health improved wonderfully in spite or because of all the fantastic blankness and boredom. Surrounded by such dejected vegetation as willow scrub and lichens; permeated, and, I suppose, cleansed by a whistling gale; seated on a boulder under a completely translucent sky (through which, however, nothing of importance showed), I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He stopped sleeping, in fact, and he used to keep me up all night telling me about the Second Coming of Christ and how this time Jesus just might come back as a Jewish medievalist living on Riverside Drive. Of course we were living on Riverside Drive, and Brian was a spellbinding talker. But still, I was so wrapped up in his fantasies, such a willing member of a folie à deux that it took a whole week of staying up every night listening to him before it dawned on me that Brian himself intended to be the Second Coming. Nor did he take very kindly to my pointing out that this might be a delusion; he very nearly choked me to death for my contribution to the discussion. After I caught my breath (I make it sound simpler than it was for the sake of getting on with the story), he attempted various things like flying through windows and walking on the water in Central Park Lake, and finally he had to be taken forcibly to the psycho ward and subdued with Thorazine, Compazine, Stelazine, and whatever else anyone could think of. At which point I collapsed with exhaustion, took a rest cure at my parents’ apartment (they had become strangely sane in the face of Brian’s flagrant craziness), and cried for about a month. Until one day I woke up with relief in the quiet of our deserted apartment on Riverside Drive, and realized that I hadn’t been able to hear myself think in four years. I knew then that I’d never go back to living with Brian—whether he stopped thinking he was Jesus Christ or not. Exit husband numero uno. Enter a strange procession of opposite numbers. But I knew at least what I was looking for in numero due: a good solid father figure, a psychiatrist as an antidote to a psychotic, a good secular lay as an antidote to Brian’s religious fervor which seemed to preclude fucking, a silent man as an antidote to a noisy one, a sane gentile as an antidote to a crazy Jew. Bennett Wing appeared as in a dream. On the wing, you might say. Tall, good-looking, inscrutably Oriental. Long thin fingers, hairless balls, a lovely swivel to his hips when he screwed—at which he seemed to be absolutely indefatigable. But he was also mute and at that point his silence was music to my ears. How did I know that a few years later, I’d feel like I was fucking Helen Keller? Wing. I loved Bennett’s name. And he was mercurial, too. Not wings on his heels but wings on his prick. He soared and glided when he screwed. He made marvelous dipping and corkscrewing motions. He stayed hard forever, and he was the only man I’d ever met who was never impotent—not even when he was depressed or angry.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  It’s possible that the brain of a chronic pain sufferer received intense nociceptive input sometime in the past, and as the injury healed, the brain didn’t get the memo. It keeps predicting and categorizing anyway, generating chronic pain. It’s also possible that predictions about inner-body movements are turning up the volume for nociceptive input as it heads from the body to the brain. 2 2 If you’re unlucky enough to suffer from chronic pain, then you’ve probably faced skeptics who don’t understand what you’re going through. They try to explain away your pain by saying, “It’s in your head,” by which they mean, “You have no tissue damage, so go see a psychiatrist.” I’m saying that you’re not crazy. There is something wrong with you. Your predictive brain, which is indeed located “in your head,” is generating authentic pain that continues past the point when your body has already healed. It’s similar to phantom limb syndrome, when an amputee can still feel his missing arm or leg because his brain keeps issuing predictions about it. 2 3 We already have intriguing evidence that some types of chronic pain work by prediction. Animals who have stress or injury early in life become more likely to develop persistent pain. Human infants who have surgery are more likely to have heightened pain in later childhood. (Incredibly, infants prior to the 1980s were routinely not anesthetized during major surgery, on the belief that they couldn’t feel pain!) There’s also a medical condition called complex regional pain syndrome, in which pain from an injury spreads inexplicably to other areas of the body, which appears to be linked to bad nociceptive predictions. 2 4 So “Pain,” like “Stress,” is another concept with which you make meaning of physical sensations. You could characterize pain and stress as emotions, or even emotion and stress as types of pain. I’m not saying that instances of emotion and pain are indistinguishable in the brain, but neither has a fingerprint. If I scan your brain while you’re having a toothache and when you’re angry, the scans will look somewhat different. But then, if I scan your brain during different instances of anger, they look somewhat different too. Different instances of dental pain likely vary as well. This is degeneracy; variation is the norm.