Resentment

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 Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese had not sent a thoughtful letter, Katrina went on, and this comparing of Katrina to a gentrifier who couldn’t handle spice? Which of them had grown up eating her mother’s Chinese food and which had grown up eating fried bread in Wisconsin? Please! Reese was not the only one who knew how to weaponize identity! Katrina glanced down at her cheese as she made this argument, as if her assertion might be undercut by its presence. Anyway, Katrina concluded, if Reese had disqualified herself, and she had, Ames now faced a decision. After the divorce, after Ames’s coming out, Katrina has come to the conclusion that she needs stability in her life. Especially if she is to have a baby dependent on her. She cannot bear another jolt to her idea of herself, or her plans for how to live. Therefore, she planned to schedule an abortion in the coming week. Ames must decide what he wants. He could either commit to be a parent and raise a child with Katrina or she will plan to end the pregnancy. She will not uproot herself even one more time. Moreover, she said calmly, if she had an abortion, she didn’t see how their relationship together could continue. Jon and Ames meet at a café on the Lower East Side. As always, Jon has driven his SUV in from Jersey and arrives twenty-five minutes late because he circled around looking for parking before giving up and paying at a garage. Jon goes first. He wants to quit his job, but he has a six-year-old son, and Greta has gone back to graduate school for an MBA. They will have only one income for the next couple of years. “Greta takes for granted that I'll be at the firm forever, so that she can go to school, for what, the third time now?” Ames has learned to be tactful when Jon complains about Greta, because Jon turns touchy and protective of his wife if Ames ever agrees with him. When it is Ames’s turn, Jon listens. Jon has recently shaved his head, and its bareness reveals an expressive topography of furrows as he frowns.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  At Michigan Avenue, the taxi pulls off the drive and shoves its way along Chicago’s best rendition of glitz. Their clients have chosen some bistro off the Magnificent Mile that bills its food as “Wisconsin cuisine,” a nouveau supper-club concept that only makes sense as the kind of food Chicagoans would decide New Yorkers need more of. Ames grew up in the Midwest, among the casseroles of St. Paul, which was why, he supposed, he didn’t have much tolerance for Midwestern aw-shucks. Out here, people acted like you were putting on airs if you majored in art history before you went to business school, much less changed your name and started shooting estrogen. The resentful Midwestern inferiority complex. The last time he’d seen his aunt, nearly a decade ago, he’d offered her French press coffee, and she’d sniffed that Folgers was good enough for her. She didn’t need anything delicate and foreign. “Good,” he told her, “because this will be dumping boiling water on grounds and waiting five minutes.” Then he transitioned and they hadn’t spoken since. In his aunt’s schema, changing one’s gender might rank as even more snooty than French press coffee. Now the taxi idles in traffic by Water Tower Place. Ames risks a glance at Katrina, who is gazing at the giant billboards of women in Victoria’s Secret. “Tm glad we’re getting to have dinner together,” Ames says inanely, as though by going with him to a business dinner, she’d agreed to a date. “You made the travel arrangements,” Katrina notes. “T mean, I know it’s for work, but I still love traveling with you. Remember when we made that weekend trip to Montreal?” They had spent almost the entire weekend in bed together. “Yes,” Katrina agrees. “You got me there under false pretenses.” The taxi driver took a peek at him in the rearview mirror. For a moment, Ames casts about for something truly awful to say to her, but he can’t think of anything and the urge subsides. She doesn’t deserve it. The past week without her closeness has illuminated for him just how much he has come to need it, how big a place she’s come to occupy in his emotional habits. At work, he’s spent the past several days maneuvering to spend time with her in situations that cannot devolve into demands that he make a decision about the pregnancy. His efforts had been assisted by their current project, another one of her weird marketing ideas: creating a nineties retro Giga Pet app for a pet insurance company. Because what would get pet owners more alarmed about their pet’s health than gaming out for them the many horrible ways that Fluffy might succumb? They’d have to hire out of house for programmers to create the app, at considerable cost, so Katrina and Ames came to Chicago to convince the clients to sign on to a simpler approach that could be done in-house, and thus add profits to the project.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Wind stirs the water in the puddle beneath them. When Reese speaks, she doesn’t respond directly. “There’s that Reagan-era saying that weed is a gateway to hard drugs like heroin. I feel that way about a vagina. It’s a gateway drug. I used to want surgery; but I’m pretty sure that would just have been the gateway to wanting a uterus. And if I had a uterus, that would be the gateway to wanting a baby in it. I hear how that sounds. You add it all together and it sounds like my deepest desire is to go shopping for some other woman’s organs. I don’t lie to myself about my situation. If I want a baby, I have to take one from some other woman. Can you imagine how that feels for me? I gave everything for my womanhood and here I’m talking about taking things from women. I’m bitter bitter bitter about being in that place.” Katrina pauses, then asks, “Why do you have to use these words? ‘Take’? ‘Give’? This isn’t a zero-sum game. I’m not even offering to give you anything. I’m inviting you to join me, to put in commitment and work. I don’t think of a child as something given back and forth, and I actually think you wouldn’t either. That’s not how families work.” Katrina gestured to where the mom and girl had been on the sidewalk. “You think that scene doesn’t make me ache? That’s a scene that you build, not a scene you take from someone else. That’s what I want to build with other people. With children and mothers.” Reese pursed her lips, as if Katrina had invoked something sour. “Do you remember that I just went to a funeral? I’ve been doing this for the better half of my life. I know how things turn out when it comes to trans girls. Believe me, there can only be one mommy. You'll see. It’ll be the one with the right body for it.” Katrina opens her mouth. Abruptly she laughs. “I can’t believe that ’m more willing than you to think openly. Maybe the way you’re seeing things isn’t working. You're so sure how things are, how to do things. But the way you do things ends in funerals. Maybe instead of saying what the inevitable outcome is, just make a fucking leap. Because maybe I’m ready to. Maybe try recognizing the chances you have, recognize this chance with me, and be a mom if you want to. In a few weeks, my doctor is supposed to call and initiate care. I’ll get an ultrasound to hear the heartbeat. Why don’t you come along?” CHAPTER EIGHT Three years before conception

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The tower’s skeleton rises huge above the water, dark against an indigo sky. In each of the empty rooms hanging in the air, a lightbulb burns bare, warding off squatters and thrill seekers. From the ground, the visual effect of all those hundreds of suspended bulbs makes it seem as though a firework has been fixed mid-explosion against the night sky. Reese has thrown on a pair of fleece UGG knockoffs over a pair of pajama pants, and has a lightweight trench coat draped about her shoulders. A breeze abrades the black water’s surface, and tiny waves lap against the rocky revetment where Newtown Creek flows into the East River. Reese leads Ames through the construction debris to sit in the lee of the wind behind the sleeping body of a bulldozer. She pulls her knees to her chest, and wraps her long coat around them, making herself into a gray boulder in the dark shadow of the machine. Ames can’t help but fastidiously touch the treads of the bulldozer, testing how dirty he’d get leaning against them. With a shrug, he sits beside Reese. “So,” he says, “who is this guy?” Reese peers off over the river toward Manhattan. “He’s my boyfriend.” “The way Stanley was your boyfriend?” As Ames says it, an old resentment wells up. A fear that has been with him, and that he’s been trying to ignore. He’s afraid of Reese’s men. The way she finds them, and what she wants from them. The things they can give that she never wanted from him. After Stanley had broken Amy’s nose, Reese had apologized, she’d begged, she’d displayed her guilt. But she’d never given Amy what she really needed: the security that it would never happen again. Amy had never trusted that another Stanley wasn’t on the way, invited in by the woman who supposedly loved Amy, a man ready to call her a faggot and break her face. And she was right to be afraid because here he was again, breaking things in new and unexpected ways. “Ts this about Stanley?” Reese says slowly. “Because if it is, then you've already decided what’s going on and it’s useless for me to explain.” “T can’t help feeling that your men, somehow, they always manage to hurt me.” “You can blame me for cheating on you with Stanley, but nothing that came after was inevitable. You detransitioned because of you. Not because of my men. I won’t take the blame for that.” “Maybe you made me compete with them.” She peers at him in the dark, then laughs, unhappily. “Is that what this is about? This whole thing? Give me a baby, because none of my men can?” Ames rubs at the light stubble at the side of his chin, trying not to take the bait. “Will you at least tell me about this guy? So I don’t only hear it from Katrina?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Please. You come up with the most fucked-up shit,” Reese says. “You are so weird and devious, even when you were doing that Martha Stewart thing you did with me, and definitely while you're doing this fake cis thing. But I get why you think it will work. You pitch her on the idea while she’s confused and trying to figure out a new way of seeing the world. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that your plan?” “No! I actually want to do this right. Be good to her. I think this gives her every option— an extra option, even. If she wants to raise a baby on her own, Ill pay child support and do what I can. If she wants an abortion, obviously I will support that. And finally, if she wants me as a father, I will say yes, and then propose that you enter our lives.” “Ah,” says Reese. “Once again, Reese is your plan C.” “Tm doing my best here, Reese. I can’t force her to do anything. I don’t even want to do that. The thing I am totally against, however, is the outcome where she gets an abortion, then she hates me, while you go on hating me too. The everyone-hates-me option, which, frankly, is looking the most likely. I want to avoid that.” Reese made a scoffing noise. “That’s only the worst outcome for you. Maybe for us, being free of you would be ideal.” “And then you'll pass up yet another chance to be a mother.” Reese flinches slightly and doesn’t respond. “Reese,” Ames continues, “I’m sorry I can’t promise anything. But I’m asking you to consider an option where you're a mother.” “Tm here. I’m entertaining you, even if this is so messed up. But now’ —Reese puts two fingers on his shirt—“I have questions. Tell the truth. Do you love her?” “T want good things for her. I for sure don’t want to hurt her.” “Answer my question, Amy.” “Yes. I love her. We don’t say the word ‘love’ to each other. But I love her.” He can’t seem to make eye contact, and instead peers upward at the breeze rustling through the leaves above. “Second question. Do you still love me?” This was maximum Reese. Asking such a thing at the moment when she had the ultimate advantage—when he’d just laid out his feelings for another woman. “Yes and no. Some days I still love you and some days I don’t.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Dandy's strength, but also the Dandy's problem, is that he or she often works through transgressive feelings relating to sex roles. Although this activity is highly charged and seductive, it is also dangerous, since it touches on a source of great anxiety and insecurity. The greater dangers will often come from your own sex. Valentino had immense appeal for women, but men hated him. He was constantly dogged with accusations of being perversely unmasculine, and this caused him great pain. Salomé was equally disliked by women; Nietzsche's sister, and perhaps his closest friend, considered her an evil witch, and led a virulent campaign against her in the press long after the philosopher's death. There is little to be done in the face of resentment like this. Some Dandies try to fight the image they themselves have created, but this is unwise: to prove his masculinity, Valentino would engage in a boxing match, anything to prove his masculinity. He wound up looking only desperate. Better to accept society's occasional gibes with grace and insolence. After all, the Dandies' charm is that they don't really care what people think of them. That is how Andy Warhol played the game: when people tired of his antics or some scandal erupted, instead of trying to defend himself he would simply move on to some new image—decadent bohemian, high-society portraitist, etc.—as if to say, with a hint of disdain, that the problem lay not with him but with other people's attention span. Another danger for the Dandy is the fact that insolence has its limits. Beau Brummel prided himself on two things: his trimness of figure and his acerbic wit. His main social patron was the Prince of Wales, who, in later years, grew plump. One night at dinner, the prince rang for the butler, and Brummel snidely remarked, "Do ring, Big Ben." The prince did not appreciate the joke, had Brummel shown out, and never spoke to him again. Without royal patronage, Brummel fell into poverty and madness. Even a Dandy, then, must measure out his impudence. A true Dandy knows the difference between a theatrically staged teasing of the powerful and a remark that will truly hurt, offend, or insult. It is particularly important to avoid insulting those in a position to injure you. In fact the pose may work best for those who can afford to offend—artists, bohemians, etc. In the work world, you will probably have to modify and tone down your Dandy image. Be pleasantly different, an amusement, rather than a person who challenges the group's conventions and makes others feel insecure. Child- hood is the golden paradise we are always consciously or unconsciously try- ing to re-create. The Natural embodies the longed-

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Outside, I heard the pay phone ring. Given the fact that 190 boarders shared five pay phones, I was amazed at how infrequently it rang. We weren’t supposed to have cell phones, but I’d noticed that some of the Weekday Warriors carried them surreptitiously. And most non-Warriors called their parents, as I did, on a regular basis, so parents only called when their kids forgot. “Are you going to get that?” the Colonel asked me. I didn’t feel like being bossed around by him, but I also didn’t feel like fighting. Through a buggy twilight, I walked to the pay phone, which was drilled into the wall between Rooms 44 and 45. On both sides of the phone, dozens of phone numbers and esoteric notes were written in pen and marker (205.555.1584; Tommy to airport 4:20; 773.573.6521; JG—Kuffs?). Calling the pay phone required a great deal of patience. I picked up on about the ninth ring. “Can you get Chip for me?” Sara asked. It sounded like she was on a cell phone. “Yeah, hold on.” I turned, and he was already behind me, as if he knew it would be her. I handed him the receiver and walked back to the room. A minute later, three words made their way to our room through the thick, still air of Alabama at almost-night. “Screw you too!” the Colonel shouted. Back in the room, he sat down with his ambrosia and told me, “She says I ratted out Paul and Marya. That’s what the Warriors are saying. That I ratted them out. Me. That’s why the piss in the shoes. That’s why the nearly killing you. ’Cause you live with me, and they say I’m a rat.” I tried to remember who Paul and Marya were. The names were familiar, but I had heard so many names in the last week, and I couldn’t match “Paul” and “Marya” with faces. And then I remembered why: I’d never seen them. They got kicked out the year before, having committed the Trifecta. “How long have you been dating her?” I asked. “Nine months. We never got along. I mean, I didn’t even briefly like her. Like, my mom and my dad—my dad would get pissed, and then he would beat the shit out of my mom. And then my dad would be all nice, and they’d have like a honeymoon period. But with Sara, there’s never a honeymoon period. God, how could she think I was a rat? I know, I know: Why don’t we break up?” He ran a hand through his hair, clutching a fistful of it atop his head, and said, “I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do. I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The only deserted place on board. An absolutely perfect place—both symbolically and practically (except that it had no bed): the Jewish Chapel in tourist class. “This is fantastic!” I yelled when we fumbled for the light and realized what room it was we had found. What a setting! Pews! A Star of David! Even a Torah—for Christ’s sake! I was really turned on. “I’ll just pretend I’m a vestal virgin or something,” I said, starting to unzip Charlie. “But there’s no lock on the door!” he protested. “Who’s going to come in here anyway? Certainly not all our WASP fellow-travelers and Anglican crewmen. Besides, we can just turn out the light again. Anyone who stumbles in will think we’re davining or something. What do they know about Jewish services?” “They’ll probably mistake you for the burning bush,” he said snidely. “Very funny.” I was stepping out of my underpants and switching off the light. But we only got to screw in the sight of God once, because the next day when we returned to our little temple of love, we found it padlocked. We never knew why. Charlie, of course, was sure (in his paranoid fashion) that somebody (God?) had photographed our vigorous coupling and also tape-recorded all our moans. He spent the rest of the trip panicked. He was positive we’d be met in Le Havre by an Interpol vice squad. The remainder of the crossing was pretty dull for me. Charlie sat in one of the lounges studying his scores and conducting imaginary musicians, while I watched him, seething with resentment about Sally, who I was sure he intended to see in Paris. I tried to put it out of my mind but it kept popping up like a candy wrapper which refuses to sink into Central Park Lake. What could I do? I tried writing but concentration was beyond me. All I could think of was Sally—that super-phony. She was keeping Charlie on the hook like Charlie was keeping me on the hook. All the problems of love are problems of maldistribution, goddamn it. There’s plenty to go around, but it always goes to the wrong people, at the wrong times, in the wrong places. The loved get more love and the unloved get more unloved. The closer we got to France, the more I included myself among the latter. Of course, Charlie lost the conducting competition. And in the first round. Despite his ostentatious studying, he never could remember scores. He was not cut out to be a conductor, either. On the podium, he always seemed to go as limp as he had that first night in bed. His whole body sagged. His shoulders curled over and his back arched like an overcooked cannelloni which had lost its stuffing.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  At the private all girls’ high school I went to, I’d had a flock of Reva-like adorers. I was emulated and gossiped about. I was blond and thin and pretty—that’s what people noticed. That’s what those girls cared about. I learned to float on cheap affections gleaned from other people’s insecurities. I didn’t stay out late. I just did my homework, kept my room clean, bided my time until I could move out and grow up and feel normal, I hoped. I didn’t go out with boys until college, until Trevor. When I was applying to schools, I overheard my mother talking to my father about me one more time. “You should read her college essay,” said my mother. “She’ll never let me look at it. I’m worried she might try to do something creative. She’ll end up at some awful state school.” “I’ve had some very bright graduate students who went to state schools,” my father replied calmly. “And if she just wants to major in English or something like that, it doesn’t really matter where she goes.” In the end I did show my college essay to my mother. I didn’t tell her that Anton Kirschler, the artist I wrote about, was a character of my own invention. I wrote that his work was instructive for how to maintain “a humanistic approach to art facing the rise of technology.” I described various made-up pieces: Dog Urinating on Computer, Stock Market Hamburger Lunch. I wrote that his work spoke to me personally because I was interested in how “art created the future.” It was a mediocre essay. My mother seemed unperturbed by it, which shocked me, and handed it back with the suggestion that I look up a few words in the thesaurus because I’d repeated them too often. I didn’t take her advice. I applied to Columbia early decision and got in. On the eve of my move to New York, my parents sat me down to talk. “Your mother and I understand that we have a certain responsibility to prepare you for life at a coed institution,” said my father. “Have you ever heard of oxytocin?” I shook my head. “It’s the thing that’s going to make you crazy,” my mother said, swirling the ice in her glass. “You’ll lose all the good sense I’ve worked so hard to build up in you since the day you were born.” She was kidding. “Oxytocin is a hormone released during copulation,” my father went on, staring at the blank wall behind me. “Orgasm,” my mother whispered. “Biologically, oxytocin serves a purpose,” my father said. “That warm fuzzy feeling.” “It’s what bonds a couple together. Without it, the human species would have gone extinct a long time ago. Women experience its effects more powerfully than men do. It’s good to be aware of that.” “For when you’re thrown out with yesterday’s trash,” my mother said. “Men are dogs. Even professors, so don’t be fooled.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “And the next day on the news they were interviewing a guy who was on the lower deck of the freeway and they were like, ‘What will you take with you from this experience?’ And he goes, ‘When I got out of my car, there was a brain jiggling on the ground. A whole brain, jiggling like a Jell-O mold.’” “People die all the time, Reva.” “But isn’t that just horrific? A brain jiggling on the ground like Jell-O?” “Sounds made up.” “And the newscaster was silent. Speechless. So the guy goes, ‘ You wanted to know. You asked. So I’m telling you. That’s what I saw.’” “Please, Reva, just stop.” “Well, I’m not saying that would happen here.” “That didn’t happen anywhere. Brains don’t pop out of people’s heads and jiggle.” “I guess there were aftershocks.” I turned up the volume on the radio and rolled my window down. “You know what I mean, though? Things could be worse,” Reva shouted. “Things can always be worse,” I shouted back. I rolled the window back up. “I’m a very safe driver,” Reva said. We were quiet for the rest of the ride, the car filling with the smell of cinnamon gum. I already regretted that I’d agreed to let Reva sleep over. Finally, we crossed the bridge and drove up the FDR. The road was slushy. Traffic was very slow. By the time we got to my block, it was half past ten. We got lucky with parking, fitting into a spot right in front of the bodega. “I just want to pick up a couple things,” I told Reva. She didn’t protest. Inside, the Egyptians were playing cards behind the counter. There was a display of cheap champagne set up on a stack of boxes by the cases of beer and soda. I watched Reva eye the display, then open the freezer and lean in, struggling to excavate something stuck in the ice. I got my two coffees. Reva paid. “Is she your sister?” the Egyptian asked Reva, nodding in my direction as I sucked down my first coffee. It was extra burnt, and the cream I’d used had soured so that squishy strands of curd got caught on my teeth. I didn’t care. “No, she’s my friend,” Reva replied with some hostility. “You think we look alike?” “You could be sisters,” said the Egyptian. “Thank you,” Reva said dryly. When we got to my building on East Eighty-fourth, the doorman put down his newspaper to say “Happy New Year.” In the elevator, Reva said, “Those guys at the corner store, do they look at you funny?” “Don’t be racist.” Reva held my coffees while I unlocked the door. Inside my apartment, the television was on mute, flashing large bare breasts. “I’ve got to pee,” said Reva, dropping her gym bag. “I thought you hated porn.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He rapped at the door. I sat on the floor and rocked my knees. I had no intention of getting up. Such a lovely smell of mothballs and Joy. “Isadora!” Really, I thought, sometimes I would like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche. With no toadying servility and no ingratiating seductiveness. A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was neither bitchy nor mealymouthed because she didn’t hate her mother or herself. “Isadora!” What I really wanted was to give birth to myself— the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world. I hugged my knees. I felt strangely safe there, under my mother’s fur coat. “Isadora!” Why did they have to keep rushing me and trying to cram me into the same molds that had made them so unhappy? I would have a child when I was ready. Or if I wasn’t ever ready, then I wouldn’t. Was a child any guarantee against loneliness or pain? Was anything? If they were so happy with their lives, why did they have to proselytize all the time? Why did they insist that everyone do as they did? Why were they such goddamned missionaries? “Isadora!” Why did my sisters and my mother all seem to be in a conspiracy to mock my accomplishments and make me feel they were liabilities? I had published a book which even I could still stand to read. Six years of writing and discarding, writing and changing, trying to get deeper and deeper into myself. And readers had sent me letters and called me in the middle of the night to tell me that the book mattered, that it was brave and honest, that I was brave and honest. Brave! Here I was in a closet hugging my knees! But to my family I was a failure because I had no children. It was absurd. I knew it was absurd. But something in me repeated the catechism. Something in me apologized to all the people who complimented my poems: something in me said: “Oh but remember, I have no children.” “Isadora!” Almost thirty. Strangers sometimes take me for twenty-five, but I can see the relentless beginnings of age, the beginnings of death, the gradual preparation for nonexistence. Already there are light furrows in my forehead. I can spread them with my fingers, but they fall back into creases immediately. Under the eyes, a fine network of lines is beginning: tiny canals, the markings of a miniature moon. In the corners of my eyes are one, two, three fine lines, as if made with a Rapidograph pen using invisible ink. Hardly perceptible—except to the artist herself. And the mouth is more set in its ways than it used to be.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  spread to his pancreas, then his stomach—and my mother busy being herself, which in the end seemed worse than having cancer. She visited me just once in New York, my sophomore year. She took the train down and was an hour late to meet me at the Guggenheim. I could smell alcohol on her breath as we wandered around. She was skittish and quiet. “Oh, isn’t that pretty?” she said about a Kandinsky, a Chagall. She left me abruptly when we got to the top of the ramp, saying she’d lost track of time. I followed her down and out of the museum, watched her try to hail a cab, seething and flabbergasted when each passing taxi was occupied. I don’t know what her problem was. Maybe she’d seen a piece of art that unnerved her. She never explained it. But she called me later from her hotel and had me meet her for dinner that evening. It was as if nothing strange had happened at the museum. She was accountable for nothing when she was drunk. I was used to it. I paid for my apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street in cash from my inheritance. From the windows in the living room, I could see some of Carl Schurz Park and a sliver of the East River. I could see the nannies with their strollers. Wealthy housewives milled up and down the Esplanade in visors and sunglasses. They reminded me of my mother—pointless and self-obsessed—only she had been less physically active. If I leaned out my bedroom window, I could see the uppermost tip of Roosevelt Island with its weird geometry of low brick buildings. I liked to think those buildings housed the criminally insane, though I knew that wasn’t the case, at least anymore. Once I started sleeping full time, I didn’t look out my windows very often. A glimpse was all I ever wanted. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. That hadn’t changed, and it never would. • • • THE SPEED OF TIME VARIED, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. I became very sensitive to the taste of the water from the tap. Sometimes it was cloudy and tasted of soft minerals. Other times it was gassy and tasted like somebody’s bad breath. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And meanwhile my father traveled around the world for his tzatzka business and my mother stayed home and had babies and screamed at her mother and father. My father was designing ice buckets which looked like beer steins and beer steins which looked like ice buckets. He was designing families of ceramic animals chained together with tiny gold chains. And he was making quite a fortune at it—amazingly enough. We could easily have moved away, but obviously my mother would not or could not. A little gold chain chained my mother to her mother, and me to my mother. All our unhappiness was strung along the same (rapidly tarnishing) gold chain. Of course my mother had a rationalization for it all—a patriarchal rationalization, the age-old rationalization of women seething with talent and ambition who keep getting knocked up. “Women cannot possibly do both,” she said, “you’ve got to choose. Either be an artist or have children.” With a name like Isadora Zelda it was clear what I was supposed to choose: everything my mother had been offered and had passed up. How could I possibly take off my diaphragm and get pregnant? What other women do without half thinking was for me a great and momentous act. It was a denial of my name, my destiny, my mother. My sisters were different. Gundra Miranda called herself “Randy” and married at eighteen. She married a Lebanese physicist at Berkeley, had four sons in California, and then moved her family to Beirut where she proceeded to have five daughters. Despite the seeming rebelliousness of a nice Jewish girl from Central Park West marrying an A-Rab, she led the most ordinary family life imaginable in Beirut. She was almost religiously in favor of Kinder, Küche , and Kirche— especially the Catholic Church, which she attended in order to impress the Arabs with her non-Jewishness. Not, of course, that they liked Catholicism that much, but it was better than the other alternative. Both she and Pierre, my brother-in-law, believed in Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and Lionel Tiger as if they were Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. “Instinct!” they snorted. “Pure animal instinct!” They came to hate the Berkeley beatniks of their college days and to preach territoriality, the immorality of contraception and abortion, and the universality of war. At times they honestly seemed to believe in the Great Chain of Being and the Divine Right of Kings. And meanwhile, they just kept on breeding. (“Why should people with superior genes use contraception when all the undesirables are breeding the world into extinction?"—the old refrain whenever Randy was announcing a new pregnancy.) Lalah (the other middle daughter after me) was four years younger and had married a Negro.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  After Randy’s Arab and Lalah’s Negro and my first husband’s conviction that he was Jesus Christ, my parents were actually quite relieved when I married Bennett. They had nothing whatsoever against his race, but they greatly resented his religion: psychoanalysis. They suffered from the erroneous impression that Bennett could read their minds. Actually, when he looked most penetrating, ominous, and inscrutable, he was usually thinking about changing the oil in the car, having chicken noodle soup for lunch, or taking a crap. But I could never convince them of that. They insisted on thinking that he was looking deep into their souls and seeing all the ugly secrets which they themselves wanted to forget. That only leaves Chloe Camille, born in 1948 and six years my junior. The baby of the family. Chloe with her sharp wit, sharp tongue, and utter lassitude about doing anything with it. Plump, beautiful Chloe, with her brown hair and blue eyes and perfect skin. With the only really gorgeous set of knockers in a fairly flat-chested family. Chloe, of course, married a Jew. Not a domestic Jew, but an import. (Nobody in the family would stoop to marrying the boy next door.) Chloe’s husband, Abel, is an Israeli of German-Jewish ancestry. (Members of his family once owned the gambling casino at Baden-Baden.) And Abel, of course, went into my father’s tzatzka business. To a business dominated by former Catskill Mountain comedians, he brought lessons learned at the Wharton School. My parents rebelled at first and then virtually adopted him as everyone got richer. Abel and Chloe had one son, Adam, who was blond and blue-eyed and obviously the favorite grandchild. At Christmas reunions, when the whole family regrouped at my parents’ apartment, Adam looked like the sole Aryan in a playground of Third World children. So I was the only sister ohne kinder, and I was never allowed to forget it. When Pierre and Randy last visited New York with their brood, it was just during the time my first book was being published. In the midst of one of our usual noisy fights (about something unmemorably idiotic), Randy called my poetry “masturbatory and exhibitionistic” and reproached me with my “sterility.” “You act as if writing is the most important thing in the world!” she screamed. I was trying to be rational and calm and well-analyzed about my family that week so I was painfully withholding the explosion I felt coming. “Randy,” I pleaded, “I have to think writing is the most important thing in the world in order to go on doing it, but nothing says that you have to share my obsession, so why should I have to share yours?” “Well I won’t have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing—do you hear me? I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all. And if I don’t kill you myself, then Pierre will. Do you understand?”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva would show up at my apartment with a bottle of wine from time to time and insist on keeping me company. Her mother was dying of cancer. That, among many other things, made me not want to see her. “You forgot I was coming over?” Reva would ask, pushing her way past me into the living room and flipping on the lights. “We talked last night, remember?” I liked to call Reva just as the Ambien was kicking in, or the Solfoton, or whatever. According to her, I only ever wanted to talk about Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg, which she said was fine. “Last night you recounted the entire plot of Frantic. And you did the scene where they’re driving in the car, with the cocaine. You went on and on.” “Emmanuelle Seigner is amazing in that movie.” “That’s exactly what you said last night.” I was both relieved and irritated when Reva showed up, the way you’d feel if someone interrupted you in the middle of suicide. Not that what I was doing was suicide. In fact, it was the opposite of suicide. My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life. “Now get in the shower,” Reva would say, heading into the kitchen. “I’ll take out the trash.” I loved Reva, but I didn’t like her anymore. We’d been friends since college, long enough that all we had left in common was our history together, a complex circuit of resentment, memory, jealousy, denial, and a few dresses I’d let Reva borrow, which she’d promised to dry clean and return but never did. She worked as an executive assistant for an insurance brokerage firm in Midtown. She was an only child, a gym rat, had a blotchy red birthmark on her neck in the shape of Florida, a gum-chewing habit that gave her TMJ and breath that reeked of cinnamon and green apple candy. She liked to come over to my place, clear a space for herself on the armchair, comment on the state of the apartment, say I looked like I’d lost more weight, and complain about work, all while refilling her wine glass after every sip. “People don’t understand what it’s like for me,” she said. “They take it for granted that I’m always going to be cheerful. Meanwhile, these assholes think they can go around treating everyone below them like shit. And I’m supposed to giggle and look cute and send their faxes? Fuck them. Let them all go bald and burn in hell.”

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

  My neighbors grew bolder as the encounter dragged on. Even though it was late, people were coming out of their homes to watch. I could hear them talking about all the burglaries in the neighborhood. There was a particularly vocal older white woman who loudly demanded that I be questioned about items she was missing. “Ask him about my radio and my vacuum cleaner!” Another lady asked about her cat who had been absent for three days. I kept waiting for my apartment light to come on and for Charlie to walk outside and help me out. He had been dating a woman who also worked at Legal Aid and had been spending a lot of time at her house. It occurred to me that he might not be home. Finally, the officer returned and spoke to his partner: “They don’t have anything on him.” He sounded disappointed. I found my nerve and took my hands off the car. “This is so messed up. I live here. You shouldn’t have done this. Why did you do this?” The older officer frowned at me. “Someone called about a suspected burglar. There have been a lot of burglaries in this neighborhood.” Then he grinned. “We’re going to let you go. You should be happy,” he said. With that, they walked away, got in their SWAT car, and drove off. The neighbors looked me over one last time before retreating back into their homes. I couldn’t decide whether I should race to my door so that they could see that I lived in the neighborhood or wait until they were all gone so that no one would know where the “suspected criminal” lived. I decided to wait. I gathered up my papers, which the cop had scattered all over the car and onto the sidewalk. I unhappily threw my M&Ms into a trash can on the street and then walked into my apartment. To my great relief, Charlie was there. I woke him to tell the story. “They never even apologized,” I kept saying. Charlie shared my outrage but soon fell back asleep. I couldn’t sleep at all. The next morning I told Steve about the incident. He was furious and urged me to file a complaint with the Atlanta Police Department. Some folks in the office said I should explain in my complaint that I was a civil rights attorney working on police misconduct cases. It seemed to me that no one should need those kinds of credentials to complain about misconduct by police officers. I started writing my complaint determined not to reveal that I was an attorney. When I replayed the whole incident in my mind, what bothered me most was the moment when the officer drew his weapon and I thought about running. I was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer who had worked on police misconduct cases. I had the judgment to speak calmly to the officer when he threatened to shoot me.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  She would probably qualify as an alcoholic. But she was right about me. I was “on drugs.” I took upwards of a dozen pills a day. But it was all very regulated, I thought. It was all totally aboveboard. I just wanted to sleep all the time. I had a plan. “I’m not a junkie or something,” I said defensively. “I’m taking some time off. This is my year of rest and relaxation.” “Lucky you,” Reva said. “I wouldn’t mind taking time off from work to loaf around, watch movies, and snooze all day, but I’m not complaining. I just don’t have that luxury.” Once she was drunk, she’d put her feet up on the coffee table, scooching my dirty clothes and unopened mail to the floor, and she’d go on and on about Ken and catch me up on the latest episode of their soap opera drama, Office Romance. She’d brag about all the fun things she was going to do over the weekend, complain that she’d gone off her most recent diet and had to do overtime at the gym to make up for it. And eventually, she’d cry about her mother. “I just can’t talk to her like I used to. I feel so sad. I feel so abandoned. I feel very, very alone.” “We’re all alone, Reva,” I told her. It was true: I was, she was. This was the maximum comfort I could offer. “I know I have to prepare for the worst with my mom. The prognosis isn’t good. And I don’t even think I’m getting the full story about her cancer. It just makes me feel so desperate. I wish there was someone to hold me, you know? Is that pathetic?” “You’re needy,” I said. “Sounds frustrating.” “And then there’s Ken. I just can’t stand it. I’d rather kill myself than be all alone,” she said. “At least you have options.” If I was up for it, we’d order salads from the Thai place and watch movies on pay-per-view. I preferred my VHS tapes, but Reva always wanted to see whatever movie was “new” and “hot” and “supposed to be good.” She took it as a source of pride that she had a superior knowledge of pop culture during this period. She knew all the latest celebrity gossip, followed the newest fashion trends. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff. Reva, however, studied Cosmo and watched Sex and the City. She was competitive about beauty and “life wisdom.” Her envy was very self-righteous. Compared to me, she was “underprivileged.” And according to her terms, she was right: I looked like a model, had money I hadn’t earned, wore real designer clothing, had majored in art history, so I was “cultured.” Reva, on the other hand, came from Long Island, was an 8 out of 10 but called herself “a New York three,” and had majored in economics. “The Asian nerd major,” she named it.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  My father slept on the sofa in the den that year. I remember his thick glasses perched on the oak end table, their greasy lenses magnifying the dark grain of the wood. Without his glasses on, I barely recognized him. He was fairly nondescript—thinning brown hair, loosening jowls, a single wrinkle of worry etched deep into his brow. That wrinkle made him look perpetually perplexed, yet passive, like a man trapped behind his own eyes. He was kind of a nonentity, I thought, a stranger gently puppeting his way through his life at home with two strange females he could never hope to understand. Each night, he’d plop an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of water. I stood by as it dissolved. I remember listening to the fizzing sound as he silently removed the cushions from the sofa and stacked them in the corner, his sad colorless pajamas dragging across the floor. Maybe that’s when his cancer started, a few odd cells forming during a bad night’s sleep in the living room. My father was neither an ally nor a confidant, but it seemed backward to me that this hardworking man would be relegated to the sofa while my lazy mother got the king-size bed. I resented her for that, but she seemed immune to guilt and shame. I think she got away with so much because she was beautiful. She looked like Lee Miller if Lee Miller had been a bedroom drunk. I assume she blamed my father for ruining her life—she got pregnant and dropped out of college to marry him. She didn’t have to, of course. I was born in August 1973, seven months after Roe v. Wade. Her family was the country club brand of alcoholic Southern Baptists—Mississippi loggers on one side, Louisiana oilmen on the other—or else, I assumed, she would have aborted me. My father was twelve years older than my mother. She’d been just nineteen years old and already four months pregnant when they got married. I’d figured that out as soon as I could do the math. Stretch marks, loose skin, scars across her belly she said looked like “a raccoon had disemboweled her,” glaring at me as if I’d wrapped my umbilical cord around my neck on purpose. Maybe I did. “You were blue when they cut me open and pulled you out. After all the hell I went through, the consequences, your father, and the baby goes and dies? Like dropping a pie on the floor as soon as you pull it out of the oven.” The only intellectual exercise my mother got was doing crossword puzzles. She’d come out of the bedroom some nights to ask my father for hints. “Don’t tell me the answer. Just tell me what the word sounds like,”

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "It is not excessive love," the Prince answered sharply, but then he stopped as if Lord Gregory had hit upon the truth. "Maybe you should take her to the Slaves' Hall," he murmured, "though only for the day." As soon as Lord Gregory had taken her out of the room, he unfastened the paddle attached to his belt and gave her several cruel spanks as she hurried on her hands and knees before him. "Keep your eyes down and your head down," he said coldly, "and lift your knees gracefully. Your back is to be a straight line at all times, and you are not to look to either side, is this clear to you?" "Yes, my Lord," Beauty answered timidly. She could see a great expanse of stone before her, and though the paddle smacks had not been very hard, she found she resented them enormously. They had not come from the Prince. And it was just coming to her that now she was in Lord Gregory's power. Perhaps she'd fancied he couldn't strike her, wouldn't be allowed to, but that was obviously not the case, and she realized he might tell the Prince she had disobeyed when she had not, and she might not be allowed to speak for herself. "Move faster," he told her. "You are always to take a rapid pace showing your eagerness to please your Lords and Ladies," he said, and again there came one of those sharp degrading little spanks that seemed suddenly quite worse than harder ones. They had come to a narrow doorway and Beauty perceived that a long curving ramp lay before her. It was quite clever as she could not have gone down the staircase on her hands and knees, but this she could follow, and she did with Lord Gregory's pointed leather boots right beside her. Several times he availed himself of the paddle, so that by the time they reached the door of a vast room on the lower floor, her buttocks were burning a little. But what concerned her much more was that there were people here. She had seen no one in the passage above. And she felt torturously shy as she realized that there were many people in this hall moving about and talking to one another. Now she was told to sit up and back on her heels, with her hands clasped to the back of her neck. "This will always be your position when you are told to rest," Lord Gregory said, "and keep your eyes down."

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  They are prone to whining and com- plaining, two very anti-seductive traits. Test them by telling a gentle joke or story at their expense: we should all be able to laugh at ourselves a little, but the Reactor cannot. You can read the resentment in their eyes. Erase any reactive qualities in your own character—they unconsciously repel people. The Vulgarian. Vulgarians are inattentive to the details that are so impor- tant in seduction. You can see this in their personal appearance—their or sees that he has no patience, or is stained with the vice of pride. There is nothing which appears more appropriate to the character of any lover than to be clad in the adornment of humility, utterly untouched by the nakedness of pride. • Then too the prolixity of a fool or a madman often diminishes love. There arc many keen to prolong their crazy words in the presence of a woman, thinking that they please her if they employ foolish, ill-judged language, but in fact they are strangely deceived. Indeed, he who thinks that his foolish behavior pleases a wise woman suffers from the greatest poverty of sense. —ANDREAS CAPELLANUS,"HOW LOVE IS DIMINISHED," TRANSLATED BY P. G.WALSH Real men \ Shouldn't primp their good looks. . . . \ Keep pleasantly clean, take exercise, work up an outdoor \ Tan; make quite sure that your toga fits \ And doesn't show spots; don't lace your shoes too tightly \ Or ignore any rusty buckles, or slop \ Around in too large a fitting. Don't let some incompetent barber \ Ruin your looks: both hair and beard demand \ Expert attention. Keep your nails pared, and dirt-free; \ Don't let those long hairs sprout \ In your nostrils, make sure your breath is never offensive, \ Avoid the rank male stench \ That wrinkles noses. . . . \ I was about to warn you [women] against rank goatish armpits \ And bristling hair on your legs, \ 136 • The Art of Seduction clothes are tasteless by any standard—and in their actions: they do not know that it is sometimes better to control oneself and refuse to give in to one's impulses. Vulgarians will blab, saying anything in public. They have no sense of timing and are rarely in harmony with your tastes. Indiscretion is a sure sign of the Vulgarian (talking to others of your affair, for example); it may seem impulsive, but its real source is their radical selfishness, their in- ability to see themselves as others see them. More than just avoiding Vul- garians, you must make yourself their opposite—tact, style, and attention to detail are all basic requirements of a seducer. Examples of the Anti-Seducer 1. Claudius, the step-grandson of the great Roman emperor Augustus, was considered something of an imbecile as a young man, and was treated badly by almost everyone in his family. His nephew Caligula, who became em- peror in A.D.