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.

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• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Certainly I prefer to think that Trajan himself, relinquishing his personal prejudices before he died, did of his own free will leave the empire to him whom he judged on the whole most worthy. But it must be admitted that the end, in this case, was of more concern to me than the means; the essential is that the man invested with power should have proved thereafter that he deserved to wield it. The body was burned on the shore, not long after my arrival, as preliminary to the triumphal rites which would be solemnized in Rome. Almost no one was present at the very simple ceremony, which took place at dawn and was only a last episode in the prolonged domestic service rendered by the women to the person of Trajan. Matidia wept unrestrainedly; Plotina's features seemed blurred in the wavering air round the heat of the funeral pyre. Calm, detached, slightly hollow from fever, she remained, as always, cooly impenetrable. Attianus and Crito watched until everything had been duly consumed; the faint smoke faded away in the pale air of unshadowed morning. None of my friends referred to the incidents of those few days which had preceded the emperor's death. Their rule was evidently to keep silent; mine was to ask no dangerous questions. That same day the widowed empress and her companions re-embarked for Rome. I returned to Antioch, accompanied along the way by the acclamations of the legions. An extraordinary calm had come over me: ambition and fear alike seemed a nightmare of the past. Whatever happened, I had always been determined to defend my chance of empire to the end, but the act of adoption simplified everything. My own life no longer preoccupied me; I could once more think of the rest of mankind. TELLUS STABILITA Order was restored in my life, but not in the empire. The world which I had inherited resembled a man in full vigor of maturity who was still robust (though already revealing, to a physician's eyes, some barely perceptible signs of wear), but who had just passed through the convulsions of a serious illness. Negotiations were resumed, this time openly; I let it be generally understood that Trajan himself had told me to do so before he died. With one stroke of the pen I erased all conquests which might have proved dangerous: not only Mesopotamia, where we could not have maintained ourselves, but Armenia, which was too far away and too removed from our sphere, and which I retained only as a vassal state. Two or three difficulties, which would have made a peace conference drag on for years if the principals concerned had had any advantage in lengthening it out, were smoothed over by the skillful mediation of the merchant Opramoas, who was in the confidence of the Satraps. I tried to put into these diplomatic conversations the same ardor that others reserve for the field of battle; I forced a peace.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I didn’t want to pursue this vein, and strolled reflectively along to where the two boys ran, as Charles saw it, towards the water. Or perhaps they were already standing in water, lapping round their long-eroded legs. They were intensely poignant. Seen close to, their curves were revealed as pinked, stepped edges, their moving forms made up of tiny, featureless squares. The boy in full-face had his mouth open in pleasure, or as an indication that he was speaking, but it also gave a strong impression of pain. It was at once too crude and too complex to be analysed properly. It reminded me of the face of Eve expelled from Paradise in Masaccio’s fresco. But at the same time it was not like it at all; it could have been a mask of pagan joy. The second young man, following closely behind, leaning forward as if he might indeed be wading through water, was in profile, and expressed nothing but attention to his fellow. What did he see there, I wondered—a mundane greeting or the ecstasy which I read into it? That it was merely a fragment compounded and rarefied its enigma. Charles rested his hand on my shoulder as I bent over it. ‘Jolly fellows, aren’t they?’ ‘I was thinking they were rather tragic.’ ‘My dear, what I want to ask you is this.’ Feeling the physical weight of him on me, I was sure for a moment that he had some physical demand in mind. Would I let him take my clothes off, or kiss me. A don at Winchester had asked a friend of mine to masturbate in front of him, and though he didn’t, such things can harmlessly be done. I stood up straight and looked away over his shoulder. ‘Will you write about me?’ I caught his eye. ‘Well—how do you mean?’ He looked down, quite bashfully, at the bathers. ‘About my life, you know. The memoirs I’ve never written, as it were. I assume you can write?’ I felt touched, and relieved; I also felt that it was quite impossible. ‘I did once write two thousand words on Coade Stone garden ornaments.’ ‘Oh, it would be much more than that.’ ‘But I don’t know anything about you,’ was a second reservation. He smiled. ‘I thought you might be interested to find out, as you say you haven’t anything else to do. I could pay you, of course,’ he added. ‘It’s not that, Charles,’ I said, resting my hand in turn on his shoulder. He looked almost tearful at having brought his idea to a head and facing possible disappointment.

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

  It’s like I’m always waiting for that second shoe to drop.” After the book came out, thousands of people from all over the country and Canada called in to radio talk shows to describe their feelings. Children of divorce wrote and e-mailed to tell me that they no longer felt alone. Many were vastly relieved. The stories of other young adults in the book enabled them for the first time to make sense out of their own lives: “You are right on the mark. I kept seeing myself over and over in the book. I’ve given copies to my sister, my stepchildren, and friends of my stepchildren. I know so many people who should read it.” “A child of divorce since age seven, I am still recovering from the effects it had on my life. Your book has confirmed the notions I’ve held for 23 years and helped to consolidate my feelings.” “When I picked up your book, I finally found someone who spoke for my experience. Your book described what I have lived through in an honest way that no one else was willing to discuss. I am amazed to hear that you know so intimately the grief of children who have lived through divorce.” Another said, “As I am a child of divorce, your book was very meaningful to me. My parents divorced when I was five and I grew up fully immersed in the divorce culture. Finally I feel freed of the burden of pretending that the divorce did not matter. Your book helped me understand how much my parents’ failed marriage set the stage for the emotional entanglements that would come later.” I did not talk much in the book about religious beliefs in the context of divorce. But several people reported that their faith in God was shaken for several years by their experience as children. Most of these were adults who had been abandoned by a parent when they were very young. It appears that their disappointment stood in the way of relying on their religion for support. On the other hand, some described how religion had helped them, especially in providing the rules and structure that they found lacking in their lives. Others found the community of the church or synagogue a source of comfort. A few letters talked about an enduring anger at aging parents. One woman said, “My parents are getting old. My father is getting frail and my mother needs special attention from time to time. But I still feel so much anger because of their neglect of my feelings over more than 25 years. I am hardly capable of giving the attention that I would normally give. And when I do take care of them, it is without any pleasure at all, only a sense of duty.” One change that may come from these sentiments is that adult children of divorce are starting to speak out.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Verily, it is my turn. My patience is bearing fruit; I suffer less, and life has become almost sweet again. I have ceased to quarrel with physicians; their foolish remedies have killed me, but their presumption and hypocritical pedantry are work of our making: if we were not so afraid of pain they would tell fewer lies. Strength fails me now for the angers of old; I know from a reliable source that Platorius Nepos, for whom I have had great affection, has taken advantage of my confidence; I have not tried to confound him with the evidence, nor have I ordered a punishment. The future of the world no longer disturbs me; I do not try still to calculate, with anguish, how long or how short a time the Roman peace will endure; I leave that to the gods. Not that I have acquired more confidence in their justice, which is not our justice, or more faith in human wisdom; the contrary is true. Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods of war; the words humanity, liberty, and justice will here and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and other pediments will arise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality. If ever the barbarians gain possession of the world they will be forced to adopt some of our methods; they will end by resembling us. Chabrias fears that the pastophor of Mithra or the bishop of Christ may implant himself one day in Rome, replacing the high pontiff. If by ill fate that day should come, my successor officiating in the vatical fields along the Tiber will already have ceased to be merely the chief of a gang, or of a band of sectarians, and will have become in his turn one of the universal figures of authority. He will inherit our palaces and our archives, and will differ from rulers like us less than one might suppose. I accept with calm these vicissitudes of Rome eternal.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  She’ll have to talk fast to convince her to get inside, but when she does, she has a hiding spot where they’ll put on wigs and change clothes.” “Isn’t that a little extreme?” “It’s a small town, Regina. If anybody sees Rosie in a car with Cherie, they’ll call Cookie, then Cookie will call the cops, then Cherie will get arrested. Cherie has to play it safe. Then the two of them will rush to the airport in Boise and fly back to New York.” “You feel like this plan is foolproof?” “As foolproof as it ever will be.” “Okay. I have a test to take tomorrow, then I’ll hop on a bus to Manhattan and catch the train out to you and Frank so we can wait together.” “No, Regina—you have school. You can’t screw it up.” “Camille, I screwed up the thing that’s most important to me in the world the day I signed that affidavit when I was fourteen! Rosie’s life has never been the same, and nothing matters more to me than this.” Two of my neighbors groggily stick their necks out of their rooms. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I whisper into the receiver. “I’ll call you when the train drops me at the Ronkonkoma station.” I ARRIVE AT four thirty and spot Camille’s car with the headlights on. I knock on her car trunk. “Hey, open up!” She climbs out of the car and pops the trunk with her key. “Why did you haul a garbage bag of clothes? You need to do laundry this weekend?” “No. I want to be ready if this takes awhile.” “Regina, what about school?” “Camille,” I tell her. “Please.” Frank’s warming himself on the front porch when we arrive at their house. “Cherie just called,” he says. “She got Rosie to the airport, piece of cake.” “So we still have hours before Cookie even notices Rosie’s gone!” I’ve calculated the logistics of the escape, considering every possible glitch. This is the best-case scenario; exactly what we prayed for. There’s a feeling of relief beginning to rise in me . . . but this is no time to get comfortable. “They’re probably boarding right this second,” Frank says. “Cherie said they’re scheduled to land at JFK just after nine o’clock. You two have time to eat. Come in and let me make you a sandwich—” “No,” I tell him. He and Camille look at me, alarmed. “I want to go to the airport now . If that plane touches down early, I want to be there the second our bambina walks off of it.” Frank looks at Camille. “Let me clear out the car so there’s room for the four of you. Hey,” he says, “why don’t you let me drive you?” “No, sweetie,” Camille tells him. “Stay home with Frankie and close to the phone. Cookie could call—she doesn’t know you.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  13 Beacons of Light 2004 to 2012 FOR CHRISTMAS 2004 I treat myself to what I’ve wanted my whole life when a small package arrives in my mailbox. The return address reads: State of New York Department of Health, Vital Records Section When I step inside my kitchen and hang my coat and bag over a chair, I gently open the envelope. It’s my birth certificate. My complete birth certificate. The first time I’d ever needed to retrieve my birth records from the Islip town hall was in high school when I applied for my first job, at Rickel’s. Viewing my birth certificate as a teenager, the mere few “vital statistics” it displayed did nothing to surprise me . . . in fact, it would have struck me harder if all the details had been filled in. What I saw then was my residence at birth—Lindenhurst, which my meeting Julia revealed is the very same town where the entire Accerbi family resides. The certificate listed in which hospital I was born, the presiding medical doctor, the date and time of my birth; and of course, next to the space for Mother it listed: CAMILLE DIANE CALCATERRA But the line next to Father had been blank. At age thirty-eight, for the first time ever, the facts of my existence are all here. Next to the line reading Father is typed in bold, perfect letters: PAUL ACCERBI Paul fought long and hard to hide our connection . . . but in the end, he signed the court’s judgment, stating his awareness that we are father and child. The next day I take both birth certificates to the framing shop in my neighborhood and choose a bold, red matting. “I’d like this birth certificate to go here,” I explain to the gentleman behind the counter, placing the original in the top box, “and this one to go”—I put the new one on the bottom—“right here.” When the frame is finished, I call Camille. “Now I just need to find the right spot to hang it,” I tell her. “I know where,” she says. “Here.” “At your house? The whole point is to keep it just for me. Besides, you have a house full of kids. Your walls are covered enough.” “Not at my house, Gi,” she says. “I mean here, in Suffolk County. Why don’t you just do it? Make the move, come back home for good.” Where is this coming from? I spent my childhood trying to get out of Suffolk County. Why would Camille believe I’d want to move back? Given how intent she always was to break away from our past, I never would have expected that she’d be the one to find her happiness on Long Island. Of course, the people with whom I share the deepest connections all live there, but it is still the place where all the hurt in my life took place.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  On November 13, 2012, he appointed a panel of esteemed commissioners to preside over this investigation . . . and on November 20, Governor Cuomo appointed me as the Commission’s executive director. As I write this epilogue, I am a few weeks into the Commission’s vital tasks. My sister Camille is still working to build up her strength from multiple consecutive strokes, and her doctors still have not concluded what caused them on that cloudy September day. It was while Camille’s entire family was huddled around her hospital bed that I suggested we change the topic and try, as a family, to select a title for this story. Considering the main events I’d detailed in the manuscript, we reflected on our countless homes—fragile, temporary sand castles that we were forced to create in the most resourceful ways, only for them to be knocked down by the rising tides and uncontrollable elements around us. Thus, we decided together that my book should be titled Etched in Sand . I am also writing this on December 16, a day which I acknowledge is the anniversary of Cookie’s death—but I much prefer to remember it as Aunt Julia’s birthday. This is the first year since 1999 that I have not called nor visited Julia for her birthday: She passed in April 2012, one day before the passing of my uncle Sonny. That simple, beautiful message that Rosie wrote almost three years ago has closed that gaping hole in my heart that was ripped open on that dark November day in 1980 when I revealed to the social worker that indeed we were being abused. Further healing came when Cherie moved from Pennsylvania back to Suffolk County this past spring. Her fiftieth birthday celebration this past September brought all five of us together again in one place . . . for the second time in thirty-two years. Despite the challenging seas we had to navigate and the limited beacons of light that were available to guide us on our journey, we all landed safely. We pushed ourselves up through the riptides. Through our journey, my siblings blessed me with plenty of nieces and nephews, who through Etched in Sand will be learning our story for the very first time. We created a whole generation of children that will never suffer intense poverty, homelessness, or abuse. Together, we stopped the cycle. Through his strength of character, stoicism, and love of family (and my pets), Todd has guided me and for the first time in my life provided me the consistency and stability that I actually welcome. Today, I have my own happy home. However, every year in the United States, forty thousand children in foster care will age out of the system and have nowhere to go and no one to help them. It is still a generally accepted policy to deem older foster children unadoptable.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  feint succeeded in creating just enough delay to let the universe resolve itself happily. She remained inviolate, and when she eventually rejoined her husband, she could boast to him, “I remain pure for you, having contrived every device [ mēchanē] for the preservation of chastity.” He, too, protested his unimpeachable fi delity, and they “easily persuaded each other, since that was what they wanted.” Anthia’s escape from the brothel is a paradigm of the heroine’s chastity in the romance. Parallel endangerments from pimps and pirates, slave owners and other ruffi ans, recur throughout the entire genre. Th e most direct parallel, and the only rival to the Ephesian Tale in the transparency of its conventionality, survives in the pop u lar History of Apollonius, King of Tyre. Th e History of Apollonius is a family romance rather than an erotic romance, but the pattern of separation, endurance, and reunion is structurally parallel. In this story, which survives in Latin, it is the protagonist’s daughter, Tarsia, who has been cast on the cruel winds of fate and endures lurid threats to her virginal purity. In the climactic scene of the History, Tarsia, like Anthia, is placed for sale in a slave market. Th e prince of the city and the town’s most notorious procurer enter a bidding war for the beautiful girl, with equally prurient interests. As the price escalates, the prince reckons that the purchase of this one creature would force him to sell off a number of his other slaves. With the dispassionate logic of a cost- cutting accountant, he reasons that he can let the pimp buy her, then pay to be the fi rst customer for just a fraction of the girl’s sale price. “I’ll go in fi rst and snatch the knot of her  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N virginity at a low price and it will be the same as if I had bought her.” Th e deep material and ideological connection between the fl esh trade and the sex trade was rarely exposed to such direct view. Th e demand for sex was a major impetus behind the circulation of human chattel in the Roman world. Th e pimp in this story, a monochromatic villain, ignores Tarsia’s pleas for compassion. “Don’t you know that supplications and tears have no force with pimps and executioners?” Like the executioner, the pimp is an agent of death. He sends her to the brothel. Th e prince, with his face covered, en- tered fi rst. Tarsia prostrated herself at his feet and in the most desperate terms begged for his pity. “Listen to the misfortune that brought me to this unhappy state, weigh the fact of my respectable ancestry.” Th e prince was

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But nothing came of it, neither attack nor sedition, nor even complaints. I was no longer the newcomer trying to win public opinion after the execution of four men of consular rank; nineteen years of just rule arbitrated in my favor; my enemies were execrated as a group, and the crowd approved me for having rid myself of a traitor. Fuscus was commiserated, but without being judged innocent. The Senate, I well knew, would not pardon me for having once more struck down one of its members, but it kept quiet, and would remain quiet until my death. As formerly, also, an admixture of clemency soon mitigated the dose of severity: not one of the partisans of Servianus was disturbed. The only exception to this rule was the eminent Apollodorus, the malevolent depositary of my brother-in-law's secrets, who perished with him. That talented man had been the favorite architect of my predecessor; he had piled up the great stone blocks of Trajan's Column with art. We did not care much for each other: he had of old derided my unskilled amateur paintings, my conscientious still-lifes of pumpkins and gourds; I had on my side, with a young man's presumption, criticized his works. Later on he had disparaged mine: he knew nothing of the finest period of Greek art; that literal mind reproached me for having filled our temples with colossal statues which, if they were to rise, would batter their brows against the vaults of their sanctuaries. An inane criticism that, and one to hurt Phidias even more than me. But the gods do not rise; they rise neither to warn us nor to protect us, nor to recompense nor to punish. Nor did they rise on that night to save Apollodorus. By spring the health of Lucius began to cause me rather grave concern. One morning in Tibur we went down from the bath to the palaestra where Celer was exercising with other youths; someone proposed one of those contests where each participant runs bearing his shield and his spear. Lucius managed to excuse himself from the sport, as he usually did, but finally yielded to our friendly raillery; in equipping himself he complained of the weight of the bronze shield; compared with the firm beauty of Celer that slender body seemed frail. After a few strides he fell breathless, and spit blood. The incident had no sequel, and he recovered without difficulty; but I had been alarmed. I should not have been so soon reassured. I resisted these first symptoms of his illness with the stupid confidence of a man who had long been robust, and who had implicit faith in the undepleted reserves of youth and in the capacities of bodies to function as they should. It is true that he was mistaken, too; some light flame sustained him, and his vivacity created the same illusion for him as for us.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Hooks eagerly told investigators that he had driven by Jackson Cleaners near the time of the crime and had seen a truck tear away from the cleaners with two men inside. At the jail, Hooks positively identified Walter’s truck as the one he’d seen at the cleaners nearly six months earlier. This second witness gave law enforcement officials what they needed to charge Walter McMillian with capital murder in the shooting death of Ronda Morrison. — When the indictment was announced, there was joy and relief in the community that someone had been charged. Sheriff Tate, the district attorney, and other law enforcement officers who had become targets of criticism were cheered. The absence of an arrest had disrupted life in Monroeville, and now things could settle down. People who knew Walter found it difficult to believe he could be responsible for a sensational murder. He had no history of crime or violence, and for most folks who knew him, robbery just didn’t make sense for a man who worked as hard as Walter. Black residents told Sheriff Tate that he had arrested the wrong man. Tate still had not investigated McMillian himself, his life or background, or even his whereabouts on the day of the murder. He knew about the affair with Karen Kelly and had heard the suspicion and rumors that Walter’s independence must mean he was dealing drugs. Given his eagerness to make an arrest, this seemed to be enough for Tate to accept Myers’s accusations. As it turned out, on the day of the murder, a fish fry was held at Walter’s house. Members of Walter’s family spent the day out in front of the house, selling food to passersby. Evelyn Smith, Walter’s sister, was a local minister, and she and her family occasionally raised money for the church by selling food on the roadside. Because Walter’s house was closer to the main road, they often sold from his front yard. There were at least a dozen church parishioners at the house all morning with Walter and his family on the day Ronda Morrison was murdered. Walter didn’t have a tree job that day. He had decided to replace the transmission in his truck and called over his mechanic friend, Jimmy Hunter, to help. By 9:30 in the morning, the two men had dismantled Walter’s truck, completely removing the transmission. By 11 o’clock, relatives had arrived and had started frying fish and other food to sell.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I’ll watch anything on cable. We have to clean our own rooms and do our own laundry, which is no bother to me. “You mean you have a washing machine?” I ask. Addie looks at Pete and folds her hands in her lap. “Yes, dear. And a dryer, too.” “Then why don’t we just do all your laundry while we’re at it?” I ask her, looking between the two of them. “It’s no problem.” She dabs the sides of her mouth with her paper napkin. “Don’t you worry about our laundry—just know the washer and dryer are yours to use anytime they’re free.” Addie informs us that she and Pete had asked to see our report cards before they took us in. Camille and I transact a puzzled amusement: If our most recent grades were acceptable, what kind of kids have they turned down ? Then Camille helps clear the dishes while I carry the leftover broccoli to the counter. We stand in the doorway of the kitchen and thank them for letting us stay there a few nights, before heading into Camille’s room where we shut the door and, sitting arm to arm, speak in whispers. “You want to sleep in here tonight?” Camille asks me. I nod, getting ready to cry again. “Yes.” We both stare at the ceiling, knowing that somewhere on this island, Norman and Rosie are probably doing the same thing. We wake early the next morning and enter the bathroom together, mindful not to hog it from Danny and the Petermans. Addie’s left us each a toothbrush—“You can have the purple one!” I tell Camille. “I’ll take the orange.” I squeeze a long strip of toothpaste from a fat tube onto the bristles; it feels like a wild indulgence. “Don’t use so much, or they’ll take it away!” Camille says. I smile at her with a mouthful of minty foam. When we walk out to the kitchen, looking for coffee—a habit I developed to get me through low-energy mornings in junior high, and which, according to last night’s rules, is not off limits—we find Addie in the kitchen, stirring her own mug. “You’re welcome to coffee, girls,” she tells us, pointing to the cupboard. “Wow,” I say, finding all the shelves in the cupboard stacked with dozens of Mickey Mouse mugs. “You’re big fans of Mickey, huh?” “Well, sure we are, we don’t drive our RV to Disney World every year to see nature!” She takes a sip of coffee and gets that grave look on her face again. “Girls, you should know, you’ll be staying home from school today.” Instantly, my stomach tightens—my face must be too scary for the little kids at their neighborhood bus stop. But Addie goes on to explain that, because it’s Friday and they want to keep our case moving into next week, Ms. Davis is on her way over to help us write our emancipation affidavit. “Can we call our sister?” I ask her. “Right now?” “Yeah.

• From Untrue (2018)

  When things got serious, these women separated from their spouses. Their beaus put them and their children up in apartments until their respective divorces came through. There were consequences, sure, but they might strike us today as rather minimal. When Elaine told her parents she was leaving her husband for Irwin, for example, her mother was upset, but her father slipped her cash. One of her girlfriends helped her move, with the kids, out of the house she shared with her soon-to-be-ex-husband—women were granted full custody as a matter of course in those days—and she and Irwin eventually married. In fact, all the older women in the “Florida-via-northeastern-suburbs group” married the men with whom they’d had affairs. A few went on to have additional affairs and husbands. Anthropologists might characterize the Florida group’s particular style of having an affair as “bridging.” Among women worldwide who have extra-pair involvements, some do it as a way to test out a potential mate while still garnering the benefits—mostly material, but also companionship and partnership in child-rearing, plus enhanced social status—of being coupled. The affair is a potential exit from one marriage via another marriage. As Brooke Scelza, who studies female infidelity in Namibia but whose observations in this case have broader application, wrote in a review of women and affairs around the world, “Having an affair may allow a woman to gain reproductive access to the man of her choosing…or to assess the quality of a potential future spouse while continuing to secure investment from her current one.” The description is not exactly romantic, but it underscores that even when it comes to affairs of a lifetime, ones that end in marriage and to which we might attribute great passion and excitement, the unsparing logic of the life-history trade-off ticks beneath the surface. Elaine and Nancy and Co. found their basherts by design. The bridging or “mate-switching” strategy is one women can use when ecological and environmental conditions are right: when they have kin or peer support to buffer them from blowback—think of Elaine’s dad slipping her cash or her girlfriend helping her move out. Or when the ideology in place and the division of labor dictates that dependent women should segue from one man to another or, in Druckerman’s apt formulation, from the protection of their fathers to the protection of a series of husbands and lovers. Or when a powerful figurehead—at the time, President John F. Kennedy—is doing it and so is everybody else. Indeed, one of the interviewees said that when she went to her rabbi to discuss her feelings of guilt about upending so many lives by divorcing her husband for another, he told her she was destroying lives by staying in an unhappy union. The rabbi himself was divorced. She felt not only relieved but emboldened by his advice, and by the culture where affairs—both men’s and women’s—were more or less a fact of life.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Fortunately, there’s a string attached to an upside-down lightbulb that serves as a light, but when I pull on the string, the bulb is burned out. I take a few more slow steps and notice that a window leading into the basement is broken. That means I’ll have to figure out how to secure the inside basement door that leads back into the kitchen. There’s no water heater in sight; the basement is dank and empty, except for an old washing machine with its plumbing yanked out in the back and a few boxes containing nothing but old, smelly mildewed clothes and a lampshade. At least, I figure, the clothes can serve as curtains or pillow stuffing. Then I spot gray metal shelves and feel around for nails . . . yes! My fingers locate about eight screws and nails to add to my collection. As I put my hardware inside the box of clothes and make my way back toward the stairs, I spot a filthy old iron and I grab that, too. I lock the back door and lean a chair under the handle so if someone tries to come in, the chair’s fall will warn us loudly. Then I move into the vestibule that leads to the basement, where I use the scissors to cut the cord off the iron. Using the iron as my hammer, I bang a nail into the door frame and wrap the snipped cord between the doorknob and the nail, creating a tight figure eight that would slow down an intruder trying to come into the first level of the house through the basement door. I place all the broom and rake handles and tree limbs on the kitchen table, using the saw to cut them so they’ll fit diagonally in the windows and serve as window jambs. After securing all the downstairs windows plus the one in my bedroom, I rummage through the box of clothes I found in the basement. From window to window on the first floor, I pound nails on both sides of the windowpanes. I drape button-down shirts, sweatshirts, and T-shirts across each window for curtains. Closing the windows will cut off any air circulation through the house . . . but it’s better to be sweaty than sorry. During this process I realize we’ll be sleeping downstairs every night because it’s cooler than upstairs, and because we could run out either the front or back door if someone were to break in. With the two living room couches and Cookie’s bed, we’ll each have our own place to sleep. Whew: good work! Now the pillow dilemma. I stuff the gray Hanes T-shirt and another shirt with the stuffing and close the openings in the shirts. The kids will have pillows for tonight. Mine will wait until tomorrow. The kids agree to move downstairs.

• From Untrue (2018)

  To Lily’s surprise, Tim told her that he thought she needed to continue the relationship with her boyfriend. “You need to figure it out,” he advised her, “and think about what this is going to mean for you and me.” Lily was enormously relieved, Tim said, when he reassured her, “I’m going to be cool. It’s all going to be good. And it’s not going to be a situation where I say, ‘Oh yeah, Lily? Well, now watch what I’m going to go out and do!’ No. I felt compassionate toward her, and toward me, and our marriage.” They had been together for ten years at this point. Reflecting on it, Tim said, “We weren’t having sex that often anymore, because of the kids, and I think I talked to her about the kids a lot because I was the one taking care of them mostly, and we were in a rut in that way. Plus her father had a slow, lingering death that was really terrible for her, for our family. She was hurting.” Having agreed to weather the challenge of remaining open, they decided it was okay for Lily to go stay with her boyfriend one or two nights per week. She didn’t stay more often than that. She didn’t talk to Tim about him much; Tim didn’t ask. But over time, Tim learned Lily’s boyfriend was everything Tim was not—big and strapping, a physical laborer who also loved to cook. Eventually, after several months, the two men met. Tim was relieved that he did not dislike Lily’s new boyfriend. He described him to me as “Not the kind of person I would seek out, but a nice and basically very decent guy.” Eventually, Lily’s boyfriend, whom I’ll call Rick and who was divorced, began spending some time at their home. Many years later, when Tim was back at work and his career was booming and busy, Lily’s boyfriend moved in to Lily and Tim’s second home, where he became their caretaker, chef, and a kind of “uncle” to the twins. On his end, Tim has long had relationships with other women. He says that what has kept things going in his marriage is a sense that he and Lily are allies. And he says the most important thing is that in their first conversation when things got difficult, “there was no feinting, no dodging, no machismo on my part. There wasn’t room for it.” He told me that there had been a learning curve to their open marriage: “During those early years, I started experimenting. I started having relationships, just little relationships is how I would describe them, with other people. I would say always with Lily’s knowledge, one way or another. With her approval or her disapproval from time to time. And she’s my friend, and she’s a protector of me and of our marriage, and so sometimes she’ll say, ‘That’s going to be a problem. Don’t do it!’”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  You’re looking wildly wicked and young.’ ‘I am wildly wicked and young,’ was the best I could do before I, as the French say, saved myself—inevitably bumping into Miss Manners as I did so. ‘Clumsy little slut!’ he hissed, with such venom that I couldn’t help laughing. On the train home I carried on with Firbank. I was on Prancing Nigger now, though I shared James’s preference for its other title, Sorrow in Sunlight. How Miami longed to lift up Bamboo’s crimson loincloth! ‘She had often longed to snatch it away.’ I lolled into reflection on Bamboo’s charming words, ‘I dat amorous ob you, Mimi’; and as I approached the house they were becoming a catchphrase of the sort I sometimes keep nonsensically saying to myself and anyone else for days on end, or singing in the style of Handel arias or Elvis Presley songs. I found myself muttering it, with mounting intensity and irrelevance, when I came into the flat, called out, searched round and found that Arthur had gone. 10 As I came up he was dithering on the doorstep and had a look, not uncommon with him, of bitten-back anxiety and determined self-control. He gripped my arm and said, ‘God, this is intolerable. I’ve just had a call.’ ‘Don’t worry, old girl, I’ll wait for you.’ I patted him on the shoulder and smiled with a quiet confidence that I didn’t altogether feel after this traumatic night. A gorgeous summer day was unfolding and as James went off flapping his car keys I stood at the gate and let it sink in. The steady rumble of far-off traffic, the thinning haze, the suited people hurrying past, all seemed invitations to some wearying and majestic happening. I almost seemed to see, above the houses across the street, an immense golden athlete stretching into the sky like the drop-curtain of a ballet or a gigantic banner at a Soviet rally, full of appalling promise. It was a relief to go indoors. James’s flat was quite nice—clean and roomy and safely sandwiched half-way up a house of geriatrics and absentee Greeks. The little cosmopolis of Notting Hill, its littered streets, its record exchanges, its international newsagents, late-night cinemas, late-night delis, was to hand. The elegant vacancy of the Park was admirably near; you could walk to the museums, to Knightsbridge even, and a little later in the year, to the Proms. And at the back, a block away, you were in Carnival country. Even so, the very convenience and accessibility of James’s house gave it a bleak and transitory feel. The shelf in the hallway was always stacked with post addressed to former tenants whom nobody knew—bills, circulars, mailing-shots aimed with desolate regularity at a population of migrants.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The sandglass proved to me that I had slept barely an hour, but a brief moment of complete repose, at my age, is equal to sleep which formerly lasted throughout half a revolution of the stars; my time is measured from now on in much smaller units. An hour had sufficed to accomplish the humble and unexpected prodigy: the heat of my blood was rewarming my hands; my heart and my lungs had begun to function with a kind of good will, and life was welling up like a spring which, though not abundant, is faithful. Sleep, in so short a time, had repaired my excesses of virtue with the same impartiality which it would have applied to the repair of my vices. For the divinity of the great restorer consists in bestowing his benefits upon the sleeper without concern for him, exactly as water charged with curative powers cares not at all who may drink from its source. But if we think so little about a phenomenon which absorbs at least a third of every life it is because a certain modesty is needed to appreciate its gifts. Asleep, Caius Caligula and Aristides the Just are alike; my important but empty privileges are forgotten, and nothing distinguishes me from the black porter who lies guard at my door. What is our insomnia but the mad obstinacy of our mind in manufacturing thoughts and trains of reasoning, syllogisms and definitions of its own, refusing to abdicate in favor of that divine stupidity of closed eyes, or the wise folly of dreams? The man who cannot sleep, and I have had only too many occasions for some months to establish the point for myself, refuses more or less consciously to entrust himself to the flow of things. Brother of Death. . . . Isocrates was wrong, and his sentence is a mere exercise in rhetoric. I begin to have some acquaintance with death; it has other secrets, more alien still to our present condition as men. And nevertheless, so intricate and so profound are these mysteries of absence and partial oblivion that we feel half assured that somewhere the white spring of sleep flows into the dark spring of death.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Archie asked in tones of gossipy shock. I had to think for a second. There was a Desmond at the Corry; but he must mean ‘little’ Des, dancing Des. It was yet another sentimental history salvaged from the nightclub floor. ‘You mean little Des?’ ‘Yeah, you know. You had that threesome with him and that bloke from Watford.’ ‘You seem to know a lot about my sex life.’ ‘Yeah, well, he told me. Anyway, he got involved in some other really heavy scene. This taxi-driver that tied him up and whipped him. Anyway, one night things got well out of hand and this cunt goes off and leaves little Des tied up in some garridge, with rats and stuff, and he’s got burns all over him. He was there for three days till some old bird found him. He’s in hospital now, and he don’t look good.’ Archie was pleased to be able to tell me this horrible news, but I saw him swallow and knew he was as shocked in the retelling as I was, hearing it for the first time. While he was speaking the lighting system had gone over to ultra-violet, so that the dancers’ teeth and any white clothes they were still wearing glowed blueish white. Seen through the tank these gleaming dots and zones themselves seemed to be swimming and darting in the water and to mingle with the pale phosphorescence of the fish. There were two or three sickening seconds. The vulnerability of little Des. The warped bastard who had hurt him. A face passing beyond the glass, turning to look in, mouth opening in a luminous yawn. I got up with such suddenness that Archie and Phil, leaning on either side of me, tumbled together. ‘Must have a piss,’ I said. But I was hardly thinking of them: my heart was racing, excited relief rose in a physical sensation through my body, I felt angry—I didn’t know why—and frightened at my own lack of control. Over and over, under my breath, or perhaps not even vocalised, just the shouting of my pulse, I said, ‘He’s alive, he’s alive.’ I caught up with him on the far side of the dance floor, was on him even before he recognised me, and flung my arms round him; we fell back against the wall, where he held me off a moment to look at me. ‘Will,’ he said, and smiled only a little. I was kissing him and then bundling him down the passage and through the swing door. A couple of guys were rolling joints on the edge of the washbasin and looked up nervously. A lock-up was empty and I pushed him in in front of me, falling back with amazement against the door when I had bolted it.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Conversation by conversation, article by article, expert by expert, I learned things that enriched the picture of what it is to be female and sexually autonomous, and chipped away at my suspicion that my friends, my interview participants, and I were somehow pathological or extreme in our sexual desires, fantasies, and, in some cases, practices. The things I learned also challenged my deep and unexplored presumption that there was one right or best way to be part of a couple or a relationship. The experts and participants I interviewed for this book, the literature I reviewed, the fieldwork I did, the anecdotes others shared with me, gave me a wholly new sense of how and why women refuse sexual exclusivity, or just long to; how they live with it; and what it means to be true. Chapter One Free Your MindI wasn’t sure what to wear to an all-day workshop on consensual non-monogamy. It was a typically disappointing early spring morning in Manhattan, rainy and colder than you’d hope. The program I was attending was designed for mental health professionals but open to curious writers and everyday citizens like me who paid the $190 fee. Maybe I was overthinking things as I stood in front of my cramped closet, considering my options. But this keenly felt need not only to find something appropriate to wear but to be appropriate, and at the same time a little rebellious, reminded me of all the bargaining we do with ourselves about monogamy. I stared at blouses and trousers and dresses and thought of the big concessions we make and the little ones, and of the greatest trade-off of all, in which we surrender complete, dizzying sexual autonomy and self-determination for the security of the dyad. This conundrum—I must extinguish the part of me that lusts for a universe of Others in exchange for the ability to raise kids, get work done, and sleep through the night without obsessing about what exactly You, my One and Only Other, are up to while we’re not together—is the beating, bleating heart of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and much else written on the topic of coupling for life. Relinquish your libido, or tame it, for stability. Somehow we presume this is a developmental imperative of sorts, the hallmark of maturity and health, and that it will be easier for women, that it comes “naturally” to them. Was there any way around this particular compromise, with its implicit assumptions about gender and desire? Maybe today I would learn something new from people trying to circumvent it. I imagined them—the pointedly and deliberately non-monogamous, and those there to support them—as ninjas in sexy black jumpsuits and aviator style sunglasses, stealthy, well versed in self-defense, and exceedingly limber.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  secret ser vice to be the instrument of her salvation. He paid the guard for a night with the girl, went in, and gave her his clothes. She escaped in disguise, “inviolate and unpolluted.” Th e next day “the drama was known, the agent was seized and thrown to the beasts.” He was a martyr twice over, both for his own sake and for “the blessed girl.” In this story, the recalibration of romance for Christian ends is so transparent that it aff ords an opportunity to peer directly inside the artifi ce of fi ction. Th e social grammar is directly taken over from romance: the girl’s high birth and good looks are in the exaggerated style of the romantic heroine. If the Christian maiden’s “device of chastity” is slightly less appealing than the equally desperate contrivances of Anthia or Tarsia, it is nevertheless structurally identical. Th e providential rescue of the girl’s chastity is familiar, as is the high- pitched self- awareness of the episode as a “drama.” Th e atmospherics of the story deliberately arouse the expectations of a romance, so the departures from the traditional script are all the more resonant. In the Christian version, the story is not set against a timeless Mediterranean but a distinctly recognizable Roman Empire. Th e heroine relies not on the implicit order of the fi ctional cosmos to rescue her but on the Christian God. Her chastity is saved, but not as a precondition for marriage. Instead, it is an end in itself. And her rescuer suff ers the ultimate penalty for securing her salvation. Th e Christian story ends not with marriage and re- generation but with the double martyrdom of virginity and death. Th e spirit of eros has been evicted, replaced by a grim sexual austerity that dictates the shape of the narrative quite as much as the fervent sensuality of the classical romance ever did. Th ese stories of Christian girls who escaped from the brothel are minor but revealing marks of a closely shared imaginative space, and they point to the central place of sex in the fi ctional economy of both traditions. Th e writings known, somewhat unhappily, under the moniker of the apocryphal Acts of the apostles, bear a telling family resemblance to contemporary Greek novelistic writing. Th e apocryphal Acts are the primary vehicle of early Christian romance. Th e apostles, the wandering heroes of early Chris- tianity, were an endlessly fertile source of Christian legend. Close to the divine presence, the aura of the miraculous clung to them. Th e institutional church claimed descent from them. Th e canonical scriptures testifi ed to their historicity but left ample room to the imagination. An enormous body of Christian legend, continuously reshaped, came to attach to the heroic R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  generation. Th

• From Untrue (2018)

  As for Himba women, specific social circumstances work in their favor as well when it comes to affairs and omoka children. While a Himba woman moves to her husband’s compound upon marriage, she usually maintains very strong ties to her own parents and siblings and other relatives, visiting their compound often. If she has co-wives, as many Himba women do, owing to more or less formal arrangements, they can watch her children and keep her husband happy while she visits with her family for days at a time, or while she gives birth and then recovers among her own kin. Where women have strong ties and access to their own kin in marriage, they have increased autonomy, including sexual autonomy. Among the Himba, the reality of the omoka child proves this is the case. And, Scelza told me, there are plenty of benefits for the Himba woman with a lover. If her husband is away and there is a drought and she needs to pay for supplementary food, or she needs to take a child or herself to the clinic, she has a larger circle of helpers. “Unlike the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where cheating is an incredibly risky strategy if you’re married to someone with high status and high wealth, for Himba women it makes complete sense and insulates against risk,” Scelza explained, making the importance of context dramatically clear and personal for me. So why doesn’t every Himba woman of childbearing age have an omoka child? In her research, Scelza discovered something else. Reviewing her data, she realized there were no omoka children born to women in love matches. Of the seventy-nine women she interviewed who had chosen their own husbands, not a single one had an omoka child. Meanwhile, there were omoka children in nearly a quarter of arranged marriages. Far from the choosy, coy female that Darwin and Bateman imagined, or the specter of the more heavily invested mother who would naturally want quality over quantity, some Himba women assertively and actively exercise choice after their options have been circumscribed, Scelza concluded, going for both quantity and quality. In the face of coercion—being compelled to marry a man they have not themselves selected—their counterstrategy is to do what they are asked to do but also to do what they want. They have affairs. And then they have babies with their lovers. Omoka children and the high rate of extra-pair paternity among the Himba prove that Himba women are what Hrdy wants us to understand all primate females, including women, to be: not essentially retiring and naturally monogamous because of our biology but creatures who live at the intersection of biology and culture and ecology, making us “flexible and opportunistic individuals who confront recurring reproductive dilemmas and trade-offs within a world of shifting options.”