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 In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Some people fly. You have to make two or three stops. My mother swears she’ll never go. They hate each other.” “No, they don’t.” “Ever since the crash that killed Mrs. Barnes’s son, all they do is fight.” “But New Year’s Eve...the party, the diamond earrings...” “All an act. God forbid Corinne’s friends think there’s trouble in paradise. One time she slapped his face at a party.” “No.” “She accused him of flirting with one of her friends. I found out from listening in on a phone call between my mother and Ceil Rubin. ‘We all understand,’ Ceil said. Then my mother started crying and I hung up the extension. That’s one good thing about being here. I don’t have to listen to them arguing. They never visit at the same time unless the doctors say they have to. Sometimes I think it would be fun to live in Nevada. No plane crashes. I’d have my own horse.” “But where would you go to school?” “They have schools. At least I think they do. I’d go anywhere to get out of this place. But first I have to eat.” She jumped up and grabbed a banana from the snack table. “I’ve been eating bananas without throwing up. Next is sweet potatoes. Did you know sweet potatoes are a perfect food? All the vitamins and minerals you could want wrapped into one tuber. Come on, let’s go...” She grabbed Miri’s hand and led her down the hall, back to her room. “I’ve been studying food groups in science. My tutor—did you know I have a tutor?” “No.” “She graduated from Teachers College at Columbia. She’s Lulu’s tutor, too.” Natalie pushed open the door to her room. “The trouble with Lulu is she wants to die. I don’t want to die. I really don’t.” Miri reached for Natalie’s hand and for just a moment Natalie looked right into her eyes. “Will you miss me if I go?” “You know I will.” Did she mean die or move to Nevada? Lulu said, “If I wanted to die that badly I’d be dead by now, Goldilocks.” “She pulls out her tubes,” Natalie said. “She tricks the nurses. You know what she has? It’s called anorexia nervosa.” “You have it, too, cutie pie.” Lulu looked at Miri and pointed a finger at Natalie. “She has it, too.”

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Natalie swore he’d made up his mind, from the moment he first saw her, that she was a stuck-up East Coast bitch. She acted like one, muttering, “Cowboy,” loud enough for him to hear. But she didn’t mind shopping for western boots, choosing a two-color style, the most expensive in the store. Irene didn’t bat an eyelash. Just told her she hoped they were as comfortable as they were beautiful. In the afternoons, in the scorching summer sun, 100-plus degrees, she and Natalie drifted on rafts at the pool at the Flamingo hotel, working on their tans. The pool at the Flamingo was the only thing Natalie liked about this ugly bone-dry place. At the Flamingo there was grass around the pool, the only grass Natalie had seen in Las Vegas. Natalie bet the other kids at the pool were sons and daughters of gangsters. Her mother had told her about the Jewish gangsters who were building this town. She’d told her about Bugsy Siegel, who’d built the Flamingo, and Longy Zwillman, her father’s patient, who had lured him here and was a partner in the fanciest new hotel in town, the Sands, due to open in December. These kids would be Miri’s classmates at school. If Natalie stayed they would be her classmates, too. She talked to no one, but Miri did, to a girl whose uncle was involved in the casinos. Janine was her name. She would be a sophomore at the high school, too. Well, la-di-dah, Natalie thought, Miri would have one friend. Not that she cared. Why would she give two cents if Miri had a friend or didn’t? Natalie and Miri didn’t talk about school or anything else. Miri had no idea Corinne told her if she didn’t like it in Birmingham she could go to boarding school in a year. Which she was definitely going to do. Nobody knew about that, including her father. One time Miri tried to draw her into the conversation, introducing her as her stepsister. “Not so fast, cowgirl—there hasn’t been a wedding yet, or am I missing something?” “When they get married we’ll be stepsisters,” Miri said to Natalie. “Why would I want to be your sister, step or otherwise?” Miri was stung—not that she’d expected anything different, but still. All Natalie really wanted was to see the mushroom cloud from an A-bomb, detonated every few weeks at Yucca Flats, not that far from town. But her father said absolutely not. Which made it easier to hate him. That and the pregnancy. —HER FATHER TOOK Natalie to the new office to check her teeth, then took her out to lunch, just the two of them. The whole time they were together she wanted to cry, she wanted to yell and scream and cry, then have him hold her and say everything was going to be all right.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Now they were no sooner set down, but in came another company of young men, more in number than was before, whom you would judge at once likewise to be thieves ; for they also brought in their prey of gold and silver money, and plate, and robes both silken and gold-embroidered, and when they had likewise washed, they sat amongst the rest, and casting lots they served one another by order. The thieves drank and ate exceedingly,laying out the meat in heaps, the bread in mounds, and the wine-cups like a marching army, crying, laughing, and making such noise, that I thought I was amongst the tyrannous and wild drunken Lapiths and Centaurs, At length one of them, more stout than the rest, spoke in this sort : * We verily have manfully conquered the house of Milo of Hypata, and besides all the riches and treasure which by force we have brought away, 155 LUCIUS APULEIUS fortunae copiam, quam nostra virtute nacti sumus, et incolumi numero castra nostra petivimus et, si quid ad rem facit, octo pedibus auctiores remeavimus. At vos qui Boeotias urbes appetistis, ipso duce vestro fortis- simo Lamacho deminuti debilem numerum reduxistis, euius salutem merito sarcinis istis quas advexistis omnibus antetulerim. Sed illum quidem utcumque nimia virtus sua peremit ; inter inclitos reges ac duces proeliorum tanti viri memoria celebrabitur: enim vos bonae frugi latrones inter furta parva atque servilia timidule per balneas et aniles cellulas reptantes scrutariam facitis." Suscipit unus ex illo posteriore numero: “Tune solus ignoras longe faciliores ad expugnandum domus esse maiores? Quippe quod, licet numerosa familia latis deversetur aedibus, tamen quisque magis suae saluti quam domini consulat opibus: frugi autem et solitarii homines fortunam parvam, vel certe satis amplam, dissimulanter obtectam protegunt acrius et sanguinis sui periculo muniunt. Res ipsa denique fidem sermoni meo dabit: vix enim Thebas heptapylos accessimus, quod est huic diseiplinae primarium studium, sedulo fortunas inquirebamus popularium. Nec nos denique latuit Chryseros quidam nummu- larius, copiosae pecuniae dominus, qui metu officiorum ac munerum publicorum magnis artibus magnam dissi- mulabat opulentiam : denique solus ac solitarius parva sed satis munita domuncula contentus, pannosus alio- quin ac sordidus aureos folles incubabat, Ergo 156 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV we are all come home safe, none being lost, and are increased the more, if it be worthy of mention, by the eight feet of this horse and this ass. But you, that have roved about among the towns of Boeotia, have lost your valiant captain Lamachus, whose loss I more regarded than all this treasure which you have brought. But it is his own bravery that hath destroyed him, and therefore the memory of him shall be renowed for ever amongst the most noble kings and valiant captains ; but you accustom when you go abroad, like doughty robbers indeed, to creep through every corner and hole for every trifle, doing a paltry business in baths and the huts of aged women.”

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “Sorry that she’d had a daughter and hadn’t bothered to get to know her.” This sequence complements a handful of passages from another book, published sixteen years later by a different author: Randy Blume. After graduating from Wesleyan in 1983, Randy’s professional life took an unexpected turn. She fell in love with flying planes and set out to become a pilot. She worked in commercial aviation for years and in 1999, she wrote Crazy in the Cockpit , a comic novel about a young female pilot trying to break into the male-dominated world of air travel. The book was edited by Dick Jackson, who by then had sold Bradbury and had set up his own imprint elsewhere. Kendra is Crazy in the Cockpit ’s protagonist, the only child of a respected academic who chairs the sociology department at Princeton. Early on in the book, Kendra tells us that her mother, Rachel, was distressed when she learned Kendra had no intention of attending Princeton herself: “You’ve become so self-absorbed that you probably never even considered what my life would be like without you!” Rachel said at the time. Kendra’s college roommate, a psych major, has diagnosed their mother-daughter bond as “ ‘acutely neurotic’ and wanted to use it as a case study for one of her research papers.” Rachel hates that Kendra wants to walk away from her journalism training and pursue flying. When Kendra arrives home for Thanksgiving break, she anticipates a thorough guilting from her mom. But that’s not what happens. “It turned out my mother wouldn’t have noticed if I’d flown an airplane through the living room,” Kendra says. “She was too busy with Norman, her new boyfriend, who I found comfortably ensconced in our town house.” (Is the name “Norman” an Easter egg reference to Wifey ?) Christmas break, at a rental house in Key West, brings more of the same. “My mother and Norman got up early every morning to bike, snorkel, or sail, and I sat by the pool with my books and Jennifer, Norman’s sullen twelve-year-old daughter, who was angry because she’d been dragged away from her friends in Phoenix to a place that didn’t even have a decent mall,” Kendra explains. Throughout the novel, Rachel functions as a mixture of annoying adversary, conscience, and comic relief. When Kendra gets a flying job in Guam, Rachel visits and brings her anxiety with her. “How could she have let me come to this intellectual and cultural wasteland,” Kendra says, aping her mother’s point of view, “this paved rock in the middle of the Pacific?

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Zwillman, her father’s patient, who had lured him here and was a partner in the fanciest new hotel in town, the Sands, due to open in December. These kids would be Miri’s classmates at school. If Natalie stayed they would be her classmates, too. She talked to no one, but Miri did, to a girl whose uncle was involved in the casinos. Janine was her name. She would be a sophomore at the high school, too. Well, la-di-dah, Natalie thought, Miri would have one friend. Not that she cared. Why would she give two cents if Miri had a friend or didn’t? Natalie and Miri didn’t talk about school or anything else. Miri had no idea Corinne told her if she didn’t like it in Birmingham she could go to boarding school in a year. Which she was definitely going to do. Nobody knew about that, including her father. One time Miri tried to draw her into the conversation, introducing her as her stepsister. “Not so fast, cowgirl—there hasn’t been a wedding yet, or am I missing something?” “When they get married we’ll be stepsisters,” Miri said to Natalie. “Why would I want to be your sister, step or otherwise?” Miri was stung—not that she’d expected anything different, but still. All Natalie really wanted was to see the mushroom cloud from an A-bomb, detonated every few weeks at Yucca Flats, not that far from town. But her father said absolutely not. Which made it easier to hate him. That and the pregnancy. — HER FATHER TOOK Natalie to the new office to check her teeth, then took her out to lunch, just the two of them. The whole time they were together she wanted to cry, she wanted to yell and scream and cry, then have him hold her and say everything was going to be all right. She wanted him to beg her to stay, to live with him, but then she remembered living with him would mean this godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere. It would mean Rusty and a new baby and Miri. She and Miri would never be best friends again. She saw the writing on the wall. It was over between them. She ordered a Waldorf salad without dressing. —

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  So we stayed with Mama and Papa for the sake of “good north light” and “real gold leaf"—or at least my mother said so. 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.)

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The French are very abstract thinkers—but they could also produce a poet of particularity like Ponge, who writes an epic poem on soap. How does this connect with French toilets? Japanese: Squatting as a basic fact of life in the Orient. Toilet basin recessed in the floor. Flower arrangement behind. This has something to do with Zen. (Cf. Suzuki.) — It was after twelve when we finally got to our hotel and we found we had been assigned a tiny room on the top floor. I wanted to object, but Bennett was more interested in getting some rest. So we pulled down the shades against the noonday sun, undressed, and collapsed on the beds without even unpacking. Despite the strangeness of the place, Bennett went right to sleep. I tossed and fought with the feather comforter until I dozed fitfully amid dreams of Nazis and plane crashes. I kept waking up with my heart pounding and my teeth chattering. It was the usual panic I always have the first day away from home, but it was worse because of our being back in Germany. I was already wishing we hadn’t returned. At about three-thirty we got up and rather languidly made love in one of the single beds. I still felt that I was dreaming and kept pretending Bennett was somebody else. But who? I couldn’t get a clear picture of him. I never could. Who was this phantom man who haunted my life? My father? My German analyst? The zipless fuck? Why did his face always refuse to come into focus? By four o’clock, we were on the Strassenbahn bound for the University of Vienna to register for the Congress. The day had turned out to be clear with blue skies and absurdly fluffy white clouds. And I was clumping along the streets in my high-heeled sandals, hating the Germans, and hating Bennett for not being a stranger on a train, for not smiling, for being such a good lay but never kissing me, for getting me shrink appointments and Pap smears and IBM electrics, but never buying me flowers. And not talking to me. And never grabbing my ass anymore. And never going down on me, ever. What do you expect after five years of marriage anyway? Giggling in the dark? Ass-grabbing? Cunt-eating? Well at least an occasional one. What do you women want? Freud puzzled this and never came up with much. How do you ladies like to be laid? A man who’ll go down on you when you have your period? A man who’ll kiss you before you brush your teeth in the morning and not say Yiiich? A man who’ll laugh with you when the lights go out? A stiff prick, Freud said, assuming that their obsession was our obsession. Phallocentric, someone once said of Freud. He thought the sun revolved around the penis. And the daughter, too. And who could protest? Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  A black gay writer like Baldwin had a hard time integrating his two themes. His most explicit and extended look at homosexuality, Giovanni’s Room , has no black characters. In Another Country the most vivid character is gay and black, but he is killed off in the opening pages. Not until his last novel, Just Above My Head , did Baldwin write at length about a black gay gospel singer, but the narrator is his straight brother, as if this distance were needed to make the difficult subject palatable to black heterosexual readers. Although writers pretend they are indifferent to their audience, in fact they are usually more sensitive to it than they admit. The audience, naturally, can be a small coterie rather than the general public, but a coterie’s expectations can be all the more tyrannical. Gay novelists of my generation, especially those who emerged in the 1970s (Larry Kramer, Felice Picano, Andrew Holleran, Armistead Maupin, Paul Monette), were subjected to a rigorous examination, book after book. For instance, I can remember my 1978 novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples , was criticized at the time for showing a gay man as the “product” of a suffocating mother and absent father—the neo-Freudian explanation of homosexuality that the gay community had rejected. Of course I argued feebly that I had been showing one mother, a particular father, and an individual son, and that I was not at all proposing a general etiology. But at that moment in gay history there were still so few representations of gay men or lesbians that inevitably each portrait was taken as generic. Gay critics asked if a new novel gave young gays positive role models. Did it endorse clichés about gay effeminacy, bitchiness, immaturity? Did it show the gay community as suitably progressive and socialist and united with blacks, women, and other minorities? Did it overpraise youth (ageism) and beauty (looksism)? Did it show Asian men as sexually passive (a dangerous cliché)? Did it present black men as well-endowed studs (an equally destructive assumption)? Some of this emphasis on political correctness, which visited the gay community a good decade before it beset the rest of America and England, was a useful corrective to unexamined prejudices, but gay writers often perceived gay critics as narrow and Stalinist. Of course gay writers were enjoying the benefits and prestige and excitement of being spokesmen for a newly emerging culture, but they were reluctant to have their freedom as artists trammeled by the same readers. One solution was to insist that gay critics did not speak for the general gay reader. In any event, this early clash between critics and novelists eventually developed into a much larger split, with gay academics and queer theorists on one side and the gay creative community on the other.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  She warns Sandy: “I’d get out while the going’s good and move up to the Hills.” In another conversation, Gordon, Sandy’s brother-in-law, takes it even further. “The natives are restless everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before it really hits here,” he says over dinner in the city. “Remember the riots in Newark in ’67? Plainfield is next. You better get out before it’s too late.” Beyond what these characters say, there’s never any indication that Plainfield is roiling with civil unrest. Blume uses racism as a shorthand for this wealthy community’s small-mindedness. Norman’s scheme to unload the house without upsetting Enid—sell to a Realtor, who will then turn around and sell it to a Black family—makes him look deceptive, and cowardly, in Sandy’s eyes. As she and Norman are signing the house over to Four Corners Realty Company, the representative assures them they’ll be covert about flipping the property. “Don’t worry Mr. Pressman, we’re known for our discretion at Four Corners,” he says. “We’ll bring our clients in after dark, on nights when you and the family are out.” “Is that even legal?” Sandy interrupts. “Damn right it’s legal!” Norman answers. Despite their differences and Sandy’s sexual escapades, the couple stays together in the end, with all the security and sameness that entails. Even with her wandering heart, Sandy is still her mother’s daughter, with a lifetime of good-girl conditioning that she’s never quite able to shake. After Shep ends their affair, Sandy faces the truth—she was destined for suburban ennui, no matter what. “Marriage to him would have meant a life very much like the one I lead with Norman,” she thinks to herself about Shep. “Yes, a house in the suburbs, kids, car pools… Okay, so [sex] would have been better but after a while, even with him, it would probably have become routine.” Neither Isadora Wing in Fear of Flying nor Bettina Balser in Diary of a Mad Housewife end up leaving their husbands, either. Isadora, after getting batted around like a cat toy by Adrian, shows up contrite in Bennett’s hotel room. Bettina experiences a marital miracle when Jonathan confesses he’s been talking to an analyst and has come to see himself, and not her, as the root of their problems. Like Sandy, these women can still imagine happy endings alongside their spouses. They want versions of what their mothers had—intact families, material comfort—but better. Isadora recounts an argument she once had with her mom, Jude, who dressed in attention-grabbing getups and compulsively redecorated their Upper West Side apartment. The teenage Isadora pined for a less eccentric female role model. But as an adult, Isadora realizes that Jude’s flair for unusual fashion wasn’t really the issue. “When I think of all the energy, all the misplaced artistic aggression which my mother channeled into her passion for odd clothes and new decorating schemes, I wish she had been a successful artist instead,” Isadora says. She goes on: “There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When I threw in my lot with Adrian Goodlove, I entered a world in which the rules we lived by were his rules—although, of course, he pretended there were no rules. It was forbidden, for example, to inquire what we would do tomorrow. Existentialists were not supposed to mention the word “tomorrow.” It was to be banished from our vocabulary. We were forbidden to talk about the future or to act as if the future existed. The future did not exist. Only our driving existed and our campsites and hotels. Only our conversations existed and the view beyond the windshield (which Adrian called the “windscreen”). Behind us was the past—which we invoked more and more to pass the time and to amuse each other (in the way that parents make up games of geography or identify-the-song-title for their bored children during long car rides). We told long stories about our pasts, embellishing, embroidering, and dramatizing in the manner of novelists. Of course, we pretended to be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but nobody (as Henry Miller says) can tell the absolute truth; and even our most seemingly autobiographical revelations were partly fabrications—literature, in short. We bought the future by talking about the past. At times I felt like Scheherazade, amusing my king with subplots to keep the main plot from abruptly ending. Each of us could (theoretically) throw in the towel at any point, but I feared that Adrian was more likely to do it than me, and that it was my problem to keep him amused. When the chips are down and I’m alone with a man for days on end, then I realize more than ever how unliberated I am. My natural impulse is to toady. All my high-falutin’ rebelliousness is only a reaction to my deep-down servility. It’s only when you’re forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present, how much of daily life is usually spent making plans and attempting to control the future. Never mind that you have no control over it. The idea of the future is our greatest entertainment, amusement, and time-killer. Take it away and there is only the past—and a windshield spattered with dead bugs. Adrian made the rules, but he also had a tendency to change them frequently to suit himself. In this respect, he reminded me of my older sister Randy when she and I were kids. She taught me to shoot craps when I was seven (and she was twelve) but she used to change the rules around from minute to minute depending on what she rolled. After a ten-minute session with her, I would be divested of the entire contents of my carefully hoarded piggybank, while she (who started out broke) wound up as flush as Sky Masterson. No matter how Lady Luck had smiled on me, I always ended up a loser. “Snake eyes—I win!” my sister would yelp.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  you listening to me? I’m not an idiot.’ He was sitting on his heels and now laid his back right along the floor. His T-shirt rode up his rigid chest. There was not an extra piece of flesh on his body. He blew a large smoke ring into the air and then another one that fit into that. Levi kept flicking through his thousand songs. ‘You think we’re all peasants,’ said Choo, but without any sign of rancour, as if objectively interested in the proposition. ‘But we don’t all live in dumps like this. Felix lives in Wellington – no, you didn’t know that. Big house. His brother runs the taxis there. He saw you there.’ Levi knelt up, still with his back to Choo. He never could lie straight to someone’s face. ‘Well, that’s ’cos my uncle , see, he lives there . . . and, I like, I do small jobs for him, stuff around his yard and – ’ ‘I was there Tuesday,’ said Choo, ignoring him. ‘In the college .’ He treated this word like ink upon his tongue. ‘Fucking serving like a monkey . . . teacher becomes the servant. It’s painful! I can tell you, because I know.’ He thumped his breast. ‘It hurts in here! It’s fucking painful!’ He sat up straight suddenly. ‘I teach, I am a teacher, you know, in Haiti. That’s what I am. I teach in a high school. French literature and language.’ Levi whistled. ‘Bro, I hate French, man. We have to do that shit. I hate that.’ ‘And now,’ continued Choo, ‘my cousin says – come and do this, serve them one night, thirty dollars in the hand, swallow your pride! Wear a monkey suit and look a monkey and serve them their shrimps and their wine, the big white professors. We didn’t even get thirty dollars – we had to pay to dryclean our own uniforms! Which leaves twenty-two dollars!’ Choo passed Levi the joint. Once more Levi declined it. ‘How much do you think their professors get paid? How much?’ Levi said he didn’t know and it was true, he didn’t. All he knew was how hard it was to get even twenty bucks out of his own father. ‘And then they pay us in cents to serve them. The same old slavery. Nothing changes. Fuck this, man,’ said Choo, but it sounded  On Beauty harmless and comic in his accent. ‘Enough American music. Put some Marley on! I want to hear some Marley!’ Levi obliged with the only Marley he had – a ‘Best Of ’ collection copied off his mother’s CD. ‘And I saw him,’ said Choo, kneeling and staring past Levi, his bloodshot eyes acute and fixed upon some demon not in this room.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But we finally found a place. 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.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Or would he be scared off by my presence? My mother had met a handsome man much younger than she who wanted her to buy him a fishing camp in Kentucky; luckily his greed finally caused her to drop him. On the way down to join him one time in Kentucky, Mother kept the radio tuned to a hillbilly station, but my sister and I mocked the corn-pone accents and sad lyrics. Once we were in Kentucky the handsome man, mustached and cologned, took us out fishing in a rented boat. It rained. No one caught anything. A strict silence had to be maintained when the man cast his rod as though blessing the waters. At night my sister and I slept in bunk beds in the man’s sister’s house. My mother wore a new, dazed expression and treated us with great politeness, as though my sister and I were guests she didn’t know very well. She spoke of our accomplishments and of her own trials and powers of recuperation. The man laid a strong hand on my shoulders, but withdrew it when my mother left the room. At night his family and ours sat together; everyone visited as a bowl of pecans and a nutcracker were passed around the room from one grown-up to another on down to silent children in pajamas stained with orange juice. Our mother was betraying us into this dingy house permeated by the smell of hot grease. Mother was losing interest in me; she’d willingly hand me over to this good-looking fool. During the night they fought. The engagement was broken off and the next morning we were in the car again, blinking and exhausted, the radio blaring, the temperature noticeably warmer, familiar plants unseasonably in bloom. Mother started reciting the litany of our lives. She questioned us once more about our father and how he behaved toward his new wife. Each twisted or colored fact we gave her she plaited into a heavy weave. Then she tore that up and started again. He would soon leave his wife or he would never leave her, he was being blackmailed by that woman, no he loved her, he was a man of honor, no he was a man without principle, he had failed us, no he stayed true, he’d tire of her, no she was a born fascinator, this was just an adventure, it was a life, she made him feel superior, she made him feel cheap, he’d soon be back or he’d never return—oh, my mother was a tedious Penelope weaving her tales and tearing them up. I listened to everything, smiling and in possession of my secret power. And then there were her other men—the one in California with all the money, who was Catholic and brought brandy alexanders to Mama’s bedside in the morning. Or the captain in the army with the sports car whom she’d met at Hot Springs, Arkansas.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Well, someone thought I was robbin ’ you again.’  kipps and belsey ‘Surely not,’ said Howard cautiously. He disliked and feared conversations with his children that concerned race, as he suspected this one would. ‘And don’t be telling me I’m paranoid,’ snapped Levi, slinging his damp vest on the table. ‘I just don’t want to live here any more, man . . . all everybody does is stare.’ ‘Has anyone seen the cream?’ said Kiki, appearing from behind the door of the fridge. ‘ Not the canned, not the single, not the half and half – the double English. It was on the table.’ She spotted Levi’s vest. ‘ Not there, young man. In your room – which , by the way, is an absolute disgrace . If you want to move out of that basement any day soon, you’re going to have to make some changes. I’d be ashamed to have your room where anybody could see it!’ Levi frowned and continued speaking to his father. ‘And then some crazy old lady on Redwood started asking about my mom.’ ‘Levi,’ said Kiki, walking over to him, ‘are you here to help or what?’ ‘How do you mean? About Kiki?’ asked Howard with interest, taking a seat at the table. ‘This old lady on Redwood – I was minding my business – and she’s looking at me, looking at me, all the way down the street, like everybody in this town – she stops me, speaking to me – she looked like she was trying to work out if I was gonna kill her.’ This of course was not true. But Levi had a point to make, and he would have to bend the truth to make it. ‘And then she started talking about my mom this, my mom that. Black lady.’ Howard made a noise of objection, but was overruled. ‘No, no, but that don’t make no difference. Any black lady who be white enough to live on Redwood thinks ’ zackly the same way as any old white lady.’ ‘Who is white enough,’ corrected Zora. ‘It’s the worst kind of pretension, you know, to fake the way you speak – to steal somebody else’s grammar. People less fortunate than you. It’s grotesque.  On Beauty You can decline a Latin noun, but apparently you can’t even – ’ ‘The cream – anybody? It was right here .’ ‘I think you might be overreacting just a tad,’ said Howard, exploring the fruit bowl with his fingers. ‘Where was this?’ ‘On Redwood . How many times, yo? This crazy old black lady.’ ‘I don’t know how come it is that I put down something and five minutes later it . . . Redwood? ’ asked Kiki sharply. ‘How far down Redwood?’ ‘Just on the top corner, before the nursery.’ ‘A black old lady? No one like that lives on Redwood. Who was she?’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I just don’t get that – how you can love someone who says no to the world like that – I mean, so consistently? It’s only when I’m away from home and I’m talking to non-family people that I can see how psychotic he is. The only music in the house now is, like, Japanese electro . Soon we’ll just have to tap on pieces of wood. This is a guy who wooed his wife by singing half of The Magic Flute outside her apartment . Now he won’t even let her have a painting she likes in the house. Because of some deranged theory in his head, everybody else has to suffer. It’s such a denial of joy – I don’t even know how you can stand living there.’ Through a straw, Levi blew bubbles in his Americano. He swivelled on his stool and, for the third time in fifteen minutes, checked the clock on the back wall. ‘Like I say, I’m out a lot. I don’t see how it goes down.’  the anatomy lesson ‘What I’ve really realized is Howard has a problem with gratitude,’ pressed Jerome, more to himself than to his brother. ‘It’s like he knows he’s blessed, but he doesn’t know where to put his gratitude because that makes him uncomfortable, because that would be dealing in transcendence – and we all know how he hates to do that . So by denying there are any gifts in the world, any essentially valuable things – that’s how he shortcircuits the gratitude question. If there are no gifts, then he doesn’t have to think about a God who might have given them. But that’s where joy is . I’m on my knees to God every day. And it’s amazing, Lee,’ he asserted, turning on his stool to look at Levi’s impassive profile, ‘it really is.’ ‘Cool,’ said Levi, with total equanimity, God being as welcome within the borders of Levi’s conversation as any other subject. ‘Everybody got they own way of getting through the day,’ he added truthfully and commenced picking the blueberries out of his second blueberry muffin. ‘Why do you do that?’ asked Zora, reclaiming her seat between her brothers. ‘I like blueberry flavour ,’ explained Levi, betraying a slight impatience; ‘I’m just not that into blue berries .’ Now Zora swivelled in her seat so that her back was to her younger brother and she might speak more privately with the elder. ‘S’funny you mention that concert . . . So you remember that guy?’ said Zora, tapping her fingers on the glass in a vague way meant to suggest that what she was about to say had only just occurred to her. ‘The concert guy – who thought I stole his thing – remember?’ ‘Sure,’ said Jerome. ‘So he’s in my class now. Claire’s class.’ ‘ Claire’s class? The guy from the park?’ ‘He’s an amazing lyricist – as it turns out.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I was wishing I’d had the nerve to belt him one. If only I were one of those wise women who carry aerosol cans of Mace or study karate. Or maybe I needed a guard dog. A huge dog trained for every sort of service. It was likely to come in handier than a man. It wasn’t until I was settled, facing a nice little family group—mother, daddy, baby—that it dawned on me how funny that episode had been. My zipless fuck! My stranger on a train! Here I’d been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me! Puzzling, wasn’t it? A tribute to the mysteriousness of the psyche. Or maybe my psyche had begun to change in a way I hadn’t anticipated. There was no longer anything romantic about strangers on trains. Perhaps there was no longer anything romantic about men at all? The trip to London proved purgatorial. First, there were my companions in the compartment: a stuffy American professor, his dowdy wife, and their drooly baby. The husband led off with the interrogation. Was I married? What answer could I make to that? I didn’t really know anymore. It might have been an easy enough situation for a more taciturn person, but I am one of those morons who feels compelled to spill the story of her life to any passerby who asks. It took all my will power to say quite simply: “No!” “Why isn’t a nice girl like you married?” I smiled. Isadora Sphinx. Should I begin a little tirade about marriage and the oppression of women? Should I plead for sympathy, saying my lover dumped me? Should I make a brave front of it and say my husband drowned in jargon in Vienna? Should I hint at lesbian mysteries beyond their ken? “I don’t know,” I said, smiling hard enough to crack my face. Change the subject fast, I thought, before I tell them. If there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s self-concealment. “Where are you headed for?” I asked brightly. They were off to London for a vacation. The husband talked and the wife fed the baby. The husband issued policy statements and the wife kept her mouth shut. “Why isn’t a nice girl like you single?” I thought. Oh shut up Isadora, don’t meddle…. The train wheels seemed to be saying: shut up…shut up…shut up…. The husband was a chemistry professor. He was teaching on a Fulbright at Toulouse. He really liked the French system. “Discipline,” he said. We needed more of it in America—didn’t I agree? “Not really,” I said. He looked vexed. Actually, I informed him, I’d taught in college myself. “Really?”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  lanciolarum quoquoversum fluente purpura depictas cingulo subligati, pedes luteis induti caleeis ; deamque serico contectam amiculo mihi gerendam imponunt brachiisque suis humero tenus renudatis, attollentes immanes gladios ac secures, evantes exsiliunt incitante tibiae cantu lymphaticum tripudium. Nec paucis pererratis casulis ad quandam villam possessoris beati perveniunt et ab ingressu primo statim absonis ululatibus constrepentes fanatice pervolant, diuque capite demisso cervices lubricis intorquentes motibus crinesque pendulos in circulum rotantes, et nonnun- quam morsibus suos incursantes musculos, ad postre- mum aneipiti ferro quod gerebant sua quisque brachia dissicant. Inter haec unus ex illis bacchatur effusius ac de imis praecordiis an- helitus crebros referens, velut numinis divino spiritu repletus, simulabat sauciam vecordiam, prorsus quasi deum praesentia soleant homines non sui fieri me- 28 liores sed. debiles effici vel aegroti. Specta denique quale caelesti providentia meritum | reportaverit. Infit vaticinatione clamosa conficto mendacio semet ipsum incessere atque criminari, quasi contra fas sanctae religionis dissignasset aliquid et insuper iustas poenas noxi facinoris ipse de se suis manibus exposcere. Arrepto denique flagro, quod semiviris ilis proprium gestamen est, contortis taeniis lanosi velleris prolixe fimbriatum et multiiugis talis ovium tesseratum, indidem sese multinodis commulcat 390 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VIII

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  And there’s the rub! Because while my mother claims to respect originality above all, what she really respects is money and prizes. Moreover, there is the implication in all her remarks about other artists that there is scarcely any point in their persevering just for the piddling rewards they get. Now if her novelist-friend had won a Pulitzer or an NBA—or sold a book to the movies—that would be something. Of course, she would put that down, too. But the respect would be written all over her face. On the other hand, the humble doing of the thing means nothing to her; the inner discoveries, the pleasure of the work. Nothing. With an attitude like that, no wonder she turned to upholstery. Re: her interest in predation. She started out, I think, with the normal Provincetown-Art Students League communism of her day, but gradually, as affluence and arteriosclerosis overtook her (together, as is often the case), she converted to her own brand of religion composed of two parts Robert Ardrey and one part Konrad Lorenz. I don’t think either Ardrey or Lorenz intended what she extracted in their names: a sort of neo-Hobbesianism in which it is proven that life is nasty, mean, brutish, and short; the desire for status and money and power is universal; territoriality is instinctual; and selfishness, therefore, is the cardinal law of life. (“Don’t twist what I’m saying, Isadora; even what people call altruism is selfishness by another name.”) How all this clogged up every avenue of creative and rebellious expression for me is clear: I couldn’t be a hippy because my mother already dressed like a hippy (while believing in territoriality and the universality of war). I couldn’t rebel against Judaism because I hadn’t any to rebel against. I couldn’t rail at my Jewish mother because the problem was deeper than Jewishness or mothers. I couldn’t be an artist on pain of being painted over. I couldn’t be a poet on pain of being crossed out. I couldn’t be anything else because that was ordinary. I couldn’t be a communist because my mother had been there. I couldn’t be a rebel (or, at very least, a pariah) by marrying Bennett because my mother would think that was “at any rate, not ordinary.” What possibilities remained open to me? In what cramped corner could I act out what I so presumptuously called my life? I felt rather like those children of pot-smoking parents who become raging squares. I could, perhaps, take off across Europe with Adrian Goodlove, and never come home to New York at all. —

• From On Beauty (2005)

  We heard him at the Bus Stop – all of the class, we went to see him, and then Claire invited him to sit in. He’s been to two sessions.’ Jerome looked into his coffee mug. ‘Claire’s waifs and strays . . . she should try taking care of her own life.’ ‘And so, yeah, so it turns out that he’s pretty amazing,’ said Zora, talking over Jerome, ‘and I think you’d be really interested in his  On Beauty stuff, you know . . . narrative poetry . . . I was saying to him, you should probably . . . because he’s so talented, you know, you could, like, invite him round or – ’ ‘He ain’t all that,’ interjected Levi. Zora spun round. ‘You need to deal with your envy?’ She turned back to Jerome and filled him in: ‘Levi and – who were those guys? – like, some guys he just met in the harbour, right off the boat – anyway, they got destroyed by Carl at the Bus Stop. De- stroyed . Poor baby. He’s smarting.’ ‘That ain’t got nothing to do with it,’ said Levi very calmly, without raising his voice. ‘I’m just saying he’s all right, ’cos that’s all he is.’ ‘ Right . Whatever.’ ‘He’s just the kind of rapper white folk get excited about.’ ‘Oh, shut up . That’s so pathetic .’ Levi shrugged. ‘It’s true. He don’t do no wilding out, he got no crunk, no hyphy, no East Coast vibe to test what be happening on the West Coast,’ he said, thus happily rendering himself incomprehensible both to his siblings and . per cent of the world’s population. ‘That’s my boys, they got the suffering people behind them – that dude just got a dictionary, man.’ ‘Sorry – ’ began Jerome, shaking his head to clear it. ‘Why would I want to invite this guy – Carl – round?’ Zora looked startled. ‘No reason. I just . . . you’re back in town. I thought it might be good for you to make a few friends and maybe – ’ ‘I can make my own friends, thanks.’ ‘OK, fine.’ ‘Good.’ ‘ Fine .’ Zora’s silent sulks were always oppressive, and as belligerent as if she were screaming at you from the top of her lungs. They ended only with your apology or with Zora’s delivery of something a little poisonous, wrapped up in pretty paper. ‘Anyway, a good thing is . . . well, that Mom’s been getting out a lot more,’ she said, taking a spoonful of froth from off the top of  the anatomy lesson her Mocha. ‘It’s been liberating for her, in that way, I think. She sees people and stuff.’ ‘That’s good – I hoped she would.’ ‘Yeah . . .’ Zora slurped the cream into her mouth. ‘She’s seeing a lot of Carlene Kipps.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  This taught me to rely on myself alone. No detective could discover the clues Trapp had tuned to my mind and manner. I could not hope, of course, he would ever leave his correct name and address; but I did hope he might slip on the glaze of his own subtlety, by daring, say, to introduce a richer and more personal shot of color than was strictly necessary, or by revealing too much through a qualitative sum of quantitative parts which revealed too little. In one thing he succeeded: he succeeded in thoroughly enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game. With infinite skill, he swayed and staggered, and regained an impossible balance, always leaving me with the sportive hope—if I may use such a term in speaking of betrayal, fury, desolation, horror and hate—that he might give himself away next time. He never did—though coming damn close to it. We all admire the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk! I should know. The clues he left did not establish his identity but they reflected his personality, or at least a certain homogenous and striking personality; his genre, his type of humor—at its best at least—the tone of his brain, had affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. He was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy. He was an amateur of sex lore. He had a feminine handwriting. He would change his name but he could not disguise, no matter how he slanted them, his very peculiar t’s, w’s and l’s. Quelquepart Island was one of his favorite residences. He did not use a fountain pen which fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed undinist. One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx. His main trait was his passion for tantalization. Goodness, what a tease the poor fellow was! He challenged my scholarship. I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all; and I daresay I missed some elements in that cryptogrammic paper chase.