Sadness

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 Escape (2007)

  “He slept with me all night and didn’t kiss me once, not even this morning. You walk through the door and he’s grabbing you and kissing you the minute he gets his hands on you.” Tammy was so distraught and her pain so real, but I didn’t know what to say. Tammy had humiliated Merril to his family and children. Her future was the price Merril would make her pay. I told Tammy I was sorry and wished there was more I could do. But we both knew there wasn’t. Tammy stopped talking to Merril, but did not give up on trying to win him back. She waited on him hand and foot and, once again, began following Barbara around. I think she thought if she could win Barbara back as an ally, she might urge Merril to have sex with her again. But nothing changed. Merril and Barbara knew she was now an example of what could happen to someone who challenged their authority. Tammy was refuse—another body added to the scrap heap along with Faunita and Ruth. Several years later, Tammy went to Merril and told him she could no longer live without physical affection. How could he expect her to live that way forever? Merril was reading while she talked. He turned to her when she was finished, took off his reading glasses, looked across his desk, and said, “I always knew you had a weak character!” Tammy stood up and walked out of Merril’s office. As far as I know, this was the last time this matter was ever discussed. Resound of Music My sister Linda had moved back into the FLDS community with her husband because they were broke. She was pregnant with her second baby and didn’t have a lot of options. Linda also missed her family terribly. Linda was having a hard time in her marriage, which made her precarious life even harder. My father said he would help her financially, but there were strings attached. Linda had to agree to leave her husband, since he had refused to swing to our side of the religious split. She also had to agree to be reassigned in marriage by the prophet to another man. Linda had no other cards to play, so she agreed. She was assigned to marry a man with three children. Linda was told that if she kept herself in harmony with her new husband, then her life would be perfect in every way and God would bless her with everything she needed.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Roo closes the bedroom door behind him. Jim hears excited talk: A rough voice: “Listen to me, Roo, I need twenty bucks right away. Now, dammit, I need it bad, and I'm in a hurry, Roo!” Roo's voice is deliberately controlled—but tinged with agitation, and fear: “No, no! I don't have any money. And I have someone with me,” he warns. “Dammit, Roo!” The voice gets rougher. “I said no!” “You wanna blow me? I got a few minutes; you wanna blow me for the twenty bucks?” “I told you, I'm with someone— …” “Roo—… Motherfucker— …” “All right. I'll give you a check. They'll cash it at that corner store.” “And give me some cigarettes, I'm outta cigarettes.” “All right, all right—just go away. Please!” A few seconds later: “Here.” The door slams. Flushed, Roo returns to Jim in the bedroom. “You're gorgeous,” Roo resumes, his breathing slightly uneven. He kneels before Jim. “Shut your eyes, don't look at me.” Jim closes his eyes. He feels Roo's suddenly toothless mouth on his cock. Jim didn't come. Roo came secretly, trying to disguise even his quickened breathing. Jim goes to the shower, the water harsh and cold on his body. Through, he stands wrapped in a towel; stands by the living room door looking at Roo's skinny form at the piano. Now Jim sees the photograph—a faded picture of an old white-haired woman—and the bronzed object—bronzed baby shoes tarnished with age. The tiny, shriveled, used form of Roo sits at the piano and sings—beautifully—an old romantic song. VOICE OVER: Hustlers, Clients, and Eminent Psychiatrists VOICE OVER: Hustlers, Clients, and Eminent Psychiatrists “M ALEHUSTLERS .… D RIFTERS , tough, street-smart. And smarter, but pretending, sometimes, to be dumb. Students and middle-class youngmen, though on the rough streets not as many as, briefly too, become callboys (the callboy faction being safer, more ‘conservative’—only muted revolution there). A precarious existence—you're new one day, old another. The clients remain, the sellers are pushed aside; a fresh wave of hustling outlaws flows regularly into the city. “The customers.… The myth says they're all middle-aged or older, probably married, shy. But that's not true. Those exist, yes, abundantly; there are, too—though far, far fewer—the attractive and the young who merely prefer to pay, especially among those who want to cling to the myth that masculine hustlers are ‘straight.’” I'm speaking about male streethustling to a group of eminent California psychiatrists and psychologists who meet irregularly. I sit at one end of the table and face about twenty men and women. Occasionally they will whisper briefly among each other.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My mother’s interest in plans and arrangements coexisted with the most peculiar notion of what those arrangements should consist of—and a wild caprice that could overturn everything she’d worked out so methodically. Naïve and proud at the time of her divorce, she wanted to conserve money but also maintain a good address. She decided the three of us should live in that expensive hotel in one furnished room with twin beds, my sister and I taking turns sleeping on the floor. For the first time in her life our mother had a job, one at which she worked long hours. At night she was going out on dates or haunting nightclubs downtown. Because she was seldom at home I ate most of my suppers alone in the hotel dining room; my sister ate at a different hour in order to avoid my company. Before her divorce my mother had never so much as written a check. Now our fortunes teetered and careened and ground to a halt. She bought a knee-length mink but economized on food, bought a flashy Lincoln convertible but refused to send my sister to the orthodontist, packed us off to expensive summer camps but on the bus, not the train. She drank heavily and played sentimental records in the evening on the few nights she stayed home; one winter the record of “Now Is the Hour” became so worn the spindle hole grew as big as a dime, but still the voice yearned on and on. Another winter the voice, wobbling sickeningly, sang “The Tennessee Waltz.” When Mother was discouraged a smell of physical self-hatred would come off her body; she groaned her way through her self-hatred as though it were a mountain of laundry she had to wash, a dirty, physical, humiliating task. Then something nice would happen. Someone would compliment her or a man would take an interest in her—and presto, she was not only equal to other people but superior to them. The terrible laundering would be forgotten. She’d sit up very straight in her chair and smile a sort of First Lady smile. I spent many gala nights, including my eighth, ninth and tenth birthdays, in nightclubs beside my mother. She’d split a simple pasta dish with me to save money and then order highball after highball as we’d look longingly toward the man at the bar. Had he noticed Mother? Would he send her a drink? Or would he be scared off by my presence?

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Problems With Intimate Relationships Inside cults, members often have little chance to form a normal, satisfying intimate relationship with a partner. They may be forced into celibacy, paired with someone they would never have chosen on their own, or coerced into a life of sexual servitude. When they leave the group and begin to live in the real world, sooner or later they have to deal with the fact that, for years, their need for a satisfying relationship was never met. Yet the experience of having been taken advantage of, often for years, makes it hard for people to take the emotional risk of forming close relationships with others. Some people have denied their own sexuality for so long that they may have difficulty expressing it. In other cases, ex-members got into sexual relationships with trainers or leaders who manipulated them, with little regard for their feelings. That said, I have met a number of people who married in a cult, raised children, left the cult and managed to navigate their lives together. They are by far the exception. Most relationships break up after exiting the group. Sometimes one person stays in the group, which makes it very difficult when there are young children. Trust in yourself and learning to trust someone else, much less a group, is a really big deal for ex-cult members. Feeling your real feelings and learning how to express them in healthy ways is so important. Learning to respect yourself and your partner as a separate and individual human being is essential. How to problem solve and share power is another essential issue. Some Christian cults put women under the control of men, and it can be difficult to unlearn such subservience. In all of these cases, it’s best to seek therapy with a mental health professional who understands undue influence. Ways To Heal Yourself The most effective emotional support and information will usually come from former cult members who are further along in the healing process. But the actual healing is the responsibility of the former cult member. Finding and becoming part of a healthy group can be a big step forward. It took me a full year, after I left the Moonies, before I gingerly involved myself with a group of any kind—in this case, a peer counseling organization at college, in 1977. In 1986, I served for a year as the national coordinator of a loosely knit group of ex-cult members who wanted to help themselves and others. It wasn’t easy to coordinate a group of people who have all been burned by group involvement! But my experience taught me that such a thing is possible.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  RustyShe decided to go to the party at the last minute when Irene urged her to get out and enjoy herself. Seeing the worry on Miri’s face now, she began to regret her decision. Maybe it had been a mistake to keep the men in her life a secret. Not that there had been many. But she’d never brought a date home. Not one man in fifteen years. She hadn’t done a thing to get Miri used to the idea, to the possibility. In all these years, there had been just two serious boyfriends. One of them had been married. She certainly wasn’t going to introduce him to her family. She knew from the start he would never leave his wife and children. She knew she wasn’t his first affair. Yet she kept seeing him. For five years she saw him every week. If you asked her about him today she wouldn’t be able to explain it. Just that she’d been young and she’d enjoyed the attention, the thrill, the sex. The second man was decent and available. He’d proposed after a few months, with a diamond as big as her thumbnail. For a minute she thought she could learn to love him, could be happy with his promise of a big house in the suburbs, a maid to clean and cook, summer camp for Miri. But when it came time to introduce him to the family she couldn’t do it. They would see right through her. They would see the truth—she didn’t love him, wasn’t the least attracted to him and didn’t want to marry him, not even for an easier life. Sometimes she wondered about her first love, but not often. A girl gets in trouble, she marries the boy. They wind up hating each other, resenting each other and finally they get a divorce. By then it’s taken its toll on both of them and their children. No, she never wanted that, which is why she’d refused to allow her mother to call the Monskys and force Mike to marry her. Maybe she would fall in love again. If and when that happened she would introduce him to Miri. But until then, what was the point? MiriThe Osners’ living room glowed. The Hanukkah bush was gone, replaced by a fire in the fireplace, and, at the baby grand from Altenburgs on East Jersey Street, Dr. O sat on the upholstered bench, covered by a needlepoint canvas hand-stitched by Corinne. His fingers danced over the keys, never hesitating, the same fingers that worked magic in his patients’ mouths. The guests were singing around the piano, glasses of Scotch and rye and bourbon resting on coasters to avoid getting water marks on the polished ebony. If anyone was careless, Mrs. Barnes was there in a flash, slipping a coaster under a glass here, scooping a crumpled cocktail napkin into her pocket to be deposited in the trash in the kitchen, where Mrs.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I mention the constant music because, to my mind at least, it served as an invisible link between my father and me. He never discussed music beyond saying that the German Requiem was “damn nice” or that the violin and cello concerto was “one hell of a piece,” and even these judgments he made with a trace of embarrassment; for him, music was emotion, and he did not believe in discussing feelings. His real love was the late Brahms, the piano Intermezzi and especially the two clarinet sonatas. These pieces, as unpredictable as thought and as human as conversation, filled the house night after night. Here, while marveling at a blocked father’s grunted assessment of his favorite masterpiece as “nice,” the author himself pushes on, calling that same composer’s work, “unpredictable as thought and as human as conversation.” What could better describe the ravishments, the surprise turns of late Brahms? Damn nice phrase, that. And yet, for the speaking child, the withheld human conversation can only be deduced via the music seeking to simulate it. Art stands in here as a lonely substitute for some familial, personal eloquence that really should have preceded it, right? Left alone to itself, Art becomes an onanistic moral agent. Its lessons must be misapplied by however bright a child. He inevitably concocts a world self-serving and amoral, since it is a realm cut off from any deep emotive consequence to others. And so, the father—who explains how men should use only the verb “like,” never “love”—is assassinated by the author’s phrase. It is a figure so apt, sad, opulent, Brahmsian. And yet this very summation seeks to show his “straight” emotionally retarded father how it might be done. This very book is a strange invitation to Dad for A Dad’s Own Story. Which produces only silence. And this attempt to tell it all anyway—as an artful ventriloquist might—by the “thrown” voice of a boy soprano. II White has written fond dimensional biographies of those fellow gay rule-breakers: Proust and Genet. He shows us a Proust impervious to expected store-bought pleasures, susceptible only to surprises, shocks of joy and unforeseen betrayal that overtake him with the force of martyrdom. White also identifies with Genet, the congenital thief whose criminality begat a fictional formalism of such surpassing symmetry, such tuberose-scented beauty, it can elevate any jail cell to an altar. Edmund White’s own prose benefits from the examples of these willingly incarcerated French uncles: sealed in a cork-lined study or a cold stone cellblock, they must each make a great deal of seemingly little. How to find the heroic solace in one’s own self-admitted self-administered condemnation?

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It’s harder to argue with apathy. Davis texts Grace throughout the week: You seen Big Davis? Tell him he was right about Marshfield being awful Remind him the pond needs to be restocked Tell him about this new rabbit trap Tell him they be shooting out here Tell him something for me Sometimes Grace wants to weep at how pitiful it is. The Tell him something for me is the worst of it. She could read the text message in its entirety. It’s not the words. It’s not the what . Enid knows about the text messages. She has made her feelings known. Which is why he does not call her. Not because of the gay thing—Enid is ambivalent on the point of sexuality. What room would she have to judge, her own life having exploded so spectacularly? No. It’s something else. Judgment. Davis feels judged , he says. Sometimes she act like I’m trying to murder somebody. Just to be asking about Big Davis. She act like she don’t care I don’t exist anymore , is what Davis said the last time they spoke about it. “She’s projecting,” Grace had said. Because years ago, when they were small, Enid had shown up at this house with Grace and Davis squeezed tight to her like a shield bearer wading into a sea of pikemen. Grace’s father had gotten himself stabbed outside a bar in Charlottesville—no surprise, considering, was what the church ladies said. It had never been a secret how Big Davis felt about white people, and here Enid was. The church ladies had words for that, too. Begging. Cut off from her own kind, like she hadn’t known what would happen. Grace wonders if Enid sees in this needling some imitation of how it had been years before, when they were younger, and pushed like little pawns across a chessboard. Sees, perhaps, some reflection of the deceased Junior. “He should be a man,” Enid says. “He’s a man. Big Davis is a man,” Grace replies. “That’s the problem.” “Men and trouble, like water and a grease fire.” “We ain’t,” Big Davis replies as the door bangs shut behind him. Sweat and the scent of earth trail out ahead of him. He bends down and kisses the top of Grace’s forehead. She rubs his back, feels the damp of him through his shirt. His whiskers bristle against her cheek. He’s purple-black with stark white hair, deep blue eyes. “You are,” Enid says. “Big Davis.” “Enid,” he says, taking from the plate almost all of the orange segments. She squints at him. Grace feels a flutter of relief. Leans back in her chair and lets it hold her up. The strain of maintaining her posture has left her feeling a little winded. “I sure thank you for taking Grace in for the appointment today.” “Well, I took her fishing. I took her to school. I took her for ice cream. To the movies.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  She lived. Her hand was even sewn back on, though the incident (jealous lover with an ax) had broken her mind. Afterward the girl didn’t go back to her job and feared even leaving the building. My stepmother thought the loss of blood had somehow left her feeble-minded. In the hospital parking lot my father fussed over the blood on his suit and on the Cadillac upholstery, though I wondered if his pettiness wasn’t merely a way of silencing Blanche, who kept kissing his whole hand in gratitude. Or perhaps he’d found a way of reintroducing the ordinary into a night that had dipped disturbingly below the normal temperature of tedium he worked so hard to maintain. Years later, when Charles died, my father was the only white man to attend the funeral. He wasn’t welcome, but he went anyway and sat in the front row. After Charles’s death my father became more scattered and apprehensive. He would sit up all night with a stopwatch, counting his pulse. That had been another city—Blanche’s two rooms, scrupulously clean in contrast to the squalor of the halls, her parrot squawking under the tea towel draped over the cage, the chromo of a sad Jesus pointing to his exposed, juicy heart as though he were a free-clinic patient with a troubling symptom, the filched wedding photo of my father and stepmother in a nest of crepe-paper flowers, the bloody sheet torn into strips that had been wildly clawed off and hurled onto the flowered congoleum floor. In my naïveté I imagined that all poor people, black and white, liked each other and that here, through Fountain Square, I would feel my way back to the street, that smell of burning honey, that blood as red as mine and that steady, colorless flare in the glass chimney … These hillbillies on the square with their drawling and spitting, their thin arms and big raw hands, nails ragged, tattoos a fresher blue than their eyes set in long sallow faces, each eye a pale blue ringed by nearly invisible lashes—I wove these men freely into the cloth of the powerful poor, a long bolt lost in the dark that I was now pulling through a line of light. I opened a book and pretended to read under the weak streetlamps, though my attention wandered away from sight to sound. “Freddy, bring back a beer!” someone shouted. Some other men laughed. No one I knew kept his nickname beyond twelve, at least not with his contemporaries, but I could hear these guys calling each other Freddy and Bobby, and I found that heartening, as though they wanted to stay, if only among themselves, as chummy as a gang of boys. While they worked to become as brutal as soon enough they would be, I tried to find them softer than they’d ever been.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Ten months later, it’s my turn to talk. Dad listens, snuggling with me on the couch. I’ve just been laid off, the economy’s so bad I can’t find another job, and my savings won’t last long. My little cat’s sick; she’s got cancer and it’s too far gone to operate. Bob’s been real cranky, we’ve been fighting a lot, and we don’t hardly ever have sex anymore. I’m just glad I have a brawny Dad like Draden to hold me tonight. “I’m done,” I say, tipping the fifth of Jack to my lips. “Sorry you had to hear all that. You know we hillbillies can’t tell a tale of woe any way other than real long.” Dad stands, then pulls me to my feet. He takes the bottle from me, puts it on the table. He crooks a finger under the slave collar I always wear at his place. “I told you I’d take care of you, Donnie,” he says. “Come on.” He leads me down the hall to the playroom. Soon I’m stripped and face up against the St. Andrews cross. Dad locks my wrists and ankles in leather cuffs, so I’m standing spread-eagle. He ball-gags and blindfolds me. He starts slow with a light paddling, the wood warming up my asscheeks. The flogger’s next, heavy strands of leather caressing my shoulders and back. Gradually the blows get more severe. Now it feels like someone’s punching me. I gasp and drool, arch my back and beg for more. “Single-tail now,” Dad says. The whip’s hissing through the air, sharp stinging across my shoulder blades, fire-welts cutting into my back. I pant and shake. Dad moves the action to my ass. The paddle’s no longer a warming glow. The stiff wooden whacks come harder and faster. I bite down on the ball and choke back my cries. I want him to stop now; god, how it hurts, worse than ever before, but I’m his boy and he calls me his little warrior and I want to take it all, want to be brave for him, and now, god, the single-tail again, slicing my shoulders, “You’re bleeding, boy. Want me to stop?” I shake my head, shout out “No!” and oh, fuck, at last, beneath my blindfold I can feel tears trickling, and fuck, oh, fuck, I’m so angry, scared and sad; how it hurts, bound here, bound down in this body; at last something snaps inside me, and the tears are gushing, and I’m sobbing and slobbering, spit’s running down my chin, and I’m shaking and jerking, the chains that hold me down are rattling, and I’m crying and I can’t stop.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  When we were above the last cloister of Malebolge, so that its lay-brethren could appear to our view, lamentations pierced me, manifold, which had their arrows barbed with pity; whereat I covered my ears with my hands. Such pain as there would be, if the diseases in the hospitals of Valdichiana, between July and September, and of Maremma and Sardinia, 4 were all together in one ditch: such was there here; and such stench issued thence, as is wont to issue from putrid limbs. We descended on the last bank of the long cliff, again to the left hand; and then my sight was more vivid, down towards the depth in which the ministress of the Great Sire, infallible Justice, punishes the falsifiers that she here registers. I do not think it was a greater sorrow to see the people in Ægina all infirm; when the air was so malignant, that every animal, even to the little worm, dropt down; and afterwards, as Poets hold for sure, the ancient peoples were restored from seed of ants: 5 than it was to see, through that dim valley, the spirits languishing in diverse heaps. This upon the belly, and that upon the shoulders of the other lay; and some were crawling on along the dismal path. Step by step we went, without speech, looking at and listening to the sick who could not raise their bodies. I saw two sit leaning on each other, as pan is leant on pan to warm, from head to foot spotted with scabs; and never did I see currycomb plied by stableboy for whom his master waits, nor by one who stays unwillingly awake, as each of these plied thick the clawing of his nails upon himself, for the great fury of their itch which has no other succour. And so the nails drew down the scurf, as does a knife the scales from bream or other fish that has them larger. “O thou!” began my Guide to one of them, “who with thy fingers dismailest thyself, and sometimes makest pincers of them; tell us if there be any Latian among these who are here within; so may thy nails eternally suffice thee for that work.” “Latians are we, whom thou seest so disfigured here, both of us,” replied the one weeping; “but who art thou that hast inquired of us?” And the Guide said: “I am one, who with this living man descend from steep to steep, and mean to show him Hell.” Then the mutual propping broke, and each turned trembling towards me, with others that by echo heard him.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I never found out. He didn’t mention the poem to me. He didn’t invite me to go churching with him the next Sunday, nor did I seek him out. We both attended our fatuous chaplain’s service. “Dearly beloved,” the chaplain said, his eyebrows bouncing roguishly, “let us pray,” and then, since he had no style for seriousness, he became horribly boring. He bowed his head and spoke in a monotone so dull it repelled attention. A rich person’s smell of wet wool and perfume pressed down on us. The dismal leaking of the hushed organ trickled out around us. Sunlight came and went behind a rose window coarsely stenciled in lead, harshly colored with aniline shades, an industrial rose. After that, whenever I’d pass Mr. Pouchet in the hall, he’d smile and say hi, softening his rejection as much as possible: faintest watermark that had to be held to the light to be seen at all. I decided I had to go to a psychiatrist. In the back of my mind I had kept hoping I’d somehow outgrow this interest in men, an interest I had nonetheless continued to indulge. But now I was becoming frightened. I was being pushed out of the tribe. I had a dream in which I was a waiter in an elegant restaurant where I served happy, elegant couples. That was upstairs. Downstairs the filthy kitchen was staffed by bald, grizzled men, convicts, really, mute, bestial with grief. They wore blood-stained aprons and gleamed with sweat. I was one of them and, although I could rise to circulate among the happy diners, I always had to descend back down to the hopeless workers, each suspicious of the others. And then the police van arrived and the help, all of us, were dragged out into the night street ablaze with revolving red lights. We were hauled off to prison, where we’d remain forever. As I was being herded into the van I could feel on my back the eyes of the diners looking down from the windows upstairs. Now they knew I wasn’t one of them but one of the convicts. I woke with tears in my eyes so salty they burned the canthus. Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing—shirt, tie, jacket—felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles. My shoes posed above their reflections on the glossy floor, and they looked to me like imperfect molds cast from the original, perfect sadness; I mean they were big, solid things, crude actually, and yet the frayed end of a lace, the rim around the opening that bulged here and there, the unevenly worn heels—they all spoke of use, my use, they were sensitive records of dailiness, nothing sadder.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Milton puts his forehead to the white grain of the door. Nolan’s on his phone in the yard. His father twists a white towel around the inside of a glass bowl, though it must certainly be dry by now. The opening music of Wheel of Fortune enters the living room, and the glow from the television illuminates the side of his mother’s face. Her pale brown eyes are on him, too. He thinks for a moment that they’re going to stop him. It’s his birthday. Let me have this one thing, he thinks. This one thing. Before it’s all gone. His eyes sting a little. “Have fun.” “Thanks, Pop,” Milton says, and he gently taps the door with his fist. His mother smiles at him and turns to the television. His father goes back through the kitchen doorway. Milton shuts the door behind him, lets it click firmly, and steps out into the cold. • • • IT’S THE VERY BEGINNING of November, and the early-evening sky is the color of crushed lilacs. A thick forest of pine trees encircles their subdivision, and beyond that, in the distance, is the shadow of the mountain, one of those low hills at the cusp of Appalachia in northern Alabama. Standing in his driveway, Milton cranes his neck back and stares out over the top of his house and the next and the next, all the way into the city that has been built into this mountain, its lights like a string of pearls. Wood smoke crests on the air. He’s trying to fix the image of the mountain in his mind, because soon he’ll be halfway across the country, shoved down into a valley. After winter break, Milton’s parents are sending him to what they are calling an “enrichment program.” For the entire spring, he’s going to be on a small farm in Idaho, trying to make something of himself. No phone. No internet. Nothing but the hard slopes of the hills and what he imagines to be the vast plain of the sky, studded with stars, streaked with clouds. They have been disappointed with the shape his life has taken, and this is their last attempt, they say, their last big effort. Milton doesn’t know what they want from him. He’s seventeen today, and he feels that he should have more control over his life than he has. Nolan’s got it easy by comparison—his parents give him whatever he wants. Last week, on Glad Hill, he and Nolan got popped buying the pot they smoked earlier. Tate and Abe had said that this was it, this was the end of high cotton, and Nolan had shrugged. Nothing came of it, of course. No charge materialized, because it turned out that the cop who’d busted him had beaten a domestic charge the year before, thanks to Nolan’s dad. The thing that bugs Milton about it is not that Nolan gets off all the time.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “You weren’t supposed to.” My index finger flexed involuntarily against his cheek, caressing the light stubble of his invisible beard. His hair smelled clean and masculine. The length of his body rested against me, setting my groin afire. Abruptly, I released him and stepped away before any damage was done. “That’s the way I did it,” I said again. “Awesome!” He rubbed his throat where my arm had been. “No, it was horrible. It’s an incredible high until you realize the thing lying at your feet had been a living, breathing man. Then the excitement leaches away fast.” “So you didn’t like the killing part, huh?” “No sane man likes it, Markey. And I certainly never did except—” I bit down on my tongue. “Except when?” “Except when I was killing the animals who slaughtered my…friend. And I wasn’t too sane at the time.” I drew a shaky breath. “Well, I’m turning in.” “Yeah, me, too. It’s been a full day with my first buck and all. And…well, being with you. You know, hearing about your experiences.” “For me, too. It was good to see what kind of a man the kid next door grew up to be.” “A disappointment probably.” “Why would you say that? You’re a handsome, healthy young man and a good person as far as I can see.” “Maybe. Sometimes I wonder.” “Anything you need to talk out?” That slight hesitation and shake of the head again. “No. I’m okay.” Deciding to let him off the hook, I stripped to my skivvies and slipped into a sleeping bag laid out in the back of my SUV. Markey’s white jockeys made his flesh seem even darker as he crawled into his own fart bag beside me. We said our good nights and a silence grew, broken only by the call of night creatures and the squawk of a loon somewhere at the far end of the lake. “Daniel, is it true they drownproof you in BUD/S? How do they do that?” “They tie your ass up and dump you in the water. The first thing you learn is not to panic. When you get over being afraid, you learn to bob your way to the surface and to the shore.” “Kinda like a real seal, huh?” “Yep, just not as graceful.” He let the silence go on longer this time. “Daniel, I…I missed you, man. Thought about you a lot. Your mom used to let me read your letters.” “I missed you, too, kid.” “No you didn’t. You were out there doing all kinds of exciting things. You didn’t think about the pesky little kid back home.” “You’d be surprised. Mom kept me up on your life. I even have some pictures she sent.” “You do? Which pictures?” “Photos of you in your football uniform, your graduation, things like that.” “Awesome. I thought you’d forgot all about me.” “No way, kid. You were my little brother, you know.” “And you were my…” The voice died away.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  And as one who is weary of running lets his comrades go by, and walks until the panting of his chest be eased; so Forese let the holy flock pass by, and came on behind with me, saying: “When shall it be that I see thee again?” “I know not,” answered I him, “how long I may live, yet my return will not be so soon but that I be not before with my desire at the bank: for the place where I was put to live, is day by day more stripped of good, and seems doomed to woeful ruin.” “Now go,” said he, “for him 10 who is most in fault I see dragged at the tail of a beast, towards the vale where sin is never cleansed. Faster goes the beast at every step, increasing ever till it dashes him, and leaves his body hideously disfigured. Yon wheels (and he lifted his eyes up to the heavens) have not long to revolve ere that shall be clear to thee which my words may no further declare. Now remain thou behind, for time is precious in this realm, so that I lose too much coming with thee thus at equal pace.” As a horseman sometimes comes forth at a gallop from a troop that is riding, and goes to win the honour of the first encounter, so parted he from us with greater strides; and I was left by the way with the two who were such great marshals of the world.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  They’re going to call him AJ. I’ll bet she tries for a girl next year.” “Send her my regards. And to your parents, too. They were very kind after the accident.” The accident. As if they’d fallen down the stairs. “I saw it, you know. I was helping Mr. Durkee after school when the airplane…when it came right at us. We thought it was coming through the window of the classroom.” “I didn’t know that.” “And after, I was there, when the fires and the explosion…” She felt dizzy. She needed to put her head down. She dropped the books she was holding and, as she fell forward, he caught her. Held her in his arms. “It must have been terrible to see that.” “Yes.” But no one she loved died. She reminded herself to breathe. Breathe deeply, like when the doctor inserted the speculum. When she recovered she said, “I’m late for class.” She collected her books and started off down the hall. He caught up to her. “Listen…in case you need someone to talk to, here’s my number.” He passed her a piece of paper. She looked at it and nodded. MiriHenry found Miri, limp and exhausted, on the steps outside their house. She had no idea how long she’d been there, only that she was cried out, her chest so heavy she thought she might never get up. Some boy she didn’t know had come by on a bike and dumped her books on the front lawn but she made no move to get them. When Henry pulled up and got out of the car she fell into his arms. “I know…I know…” He held her. But he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. “Come on,” he said, “get in.” He opened the car door for her and she got inside. “Where are we going?” she asked, as he started up the car and pulled away. “How about down the shore? How does that sound?” She loved the shore and he knew it. He drove for an hour and a half, stopping once at a phone booth to call Irene to tell her where they were, and not to wait for them for supper. When they got to Bradley Beach they took off their shoes and socks, leaving them under the boardwalk, while they walked along the shore, letting the waves drizzle out across their bare feet. Rusty called the smell of the sea, the salty air “the ultimate cure for whatever ails you,” but Miri didn’t think it could wash away her sadness today, even if she jumped in fully dressed. “You want to talk about it?” Henry asked. “I hate secrets,” Miri said. “I don’t blame you.” “Did you know?” she asked. “About Rusty and Dr. O?” Miri nodded. “No one knew.” “Until I found them, you mean.” “I think they wanted to be found—not by you, not the way it happened, but they wanted it known.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Gee, you sure let me have it!” “Too much for you, young fellow?” my father asked, chuckling. He winked at me. The children of visitors (and sometimes their fathers) were usually called “young fellow,” since Dad could never remember their names. Old Boy, who had been squinting into the wind, his head stuck out beyond and around the windshield, was now prancing happily across the cushions to receive a pat from his master. Kevin, sitting just behind my father, said, “Those fishermen were mad as hell. I’d’ve been, too, if some guy in a big fat-ass powerboat scared off my fish.” My father winced, then grumbled something about how they had no business … He was hurt. I was appalled by Kevin’s frankness. At such moments, tears would come to my eyes in impotent compassion for Daddy: this invalid despot, this man who bullied everyone but suffered the consequences with such a tender, uneducated heart! Tears would also well up when I had to correct my father on a matter of fact. Usually I’d avoid the bother and smugly watch him compound his mistakes. But if he asked my opinion point-blank, a euphoria of sadness would overtake me, panicky wings would beat at the corners of the shrinking room and, as quietly and as levelly as possible, I’d supply the correct name or date. For I was a lot more knowledgeable than he about the things that could come up in conversation even in those days, the 1950s. But knowledge wasn’t power. He was the one with the power, the money, the right to read the paper through dinner as my stepmother and I watched him in silence; he was the one with the thirty tailor-made suits, the twenty gleaming pairs of shoes and the starched white dress shirts, the ties from Countess Mara and the two Cadillacs that waited for him in the garage, dripping oil on the concrete in the shape of a black Saturn and its gray blur of moons. It was his power that stupefied me and made me regard my knowledge as nothing more than hired cleverness he might choose to show off at a dinner party (“Ask this young fellow, he reads, he’ll know”). Then why did his occasional faltering bring tears to my eyes? Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing? Perhaps, despite my timidity, I was in a struggle against him. Did I want to hurt him because he didn’t love me?

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She did not see how it related to Thad’s stealing Sigrid’s money. She did not see how it had anything to do with her, either. It seemed like the sort of thing that people did at parties. A game, a guessing game of the self. “So if I’m Anne of Cleves, what does that mean?” “It means you’re practical about your limitations, and you do the best you can.” “And who are you?” Marta asked. Sigrid smiled and lay back down. She closed her eyes. “I’m Catherine of Aragon.” “And what does that mean?” Marta asked. She put her hand on Sigrid’s stomach, came close to her on the bed. Sigrid turned to look at her and shook her head. “It means I’m mad as hell.” They did get the place that summer. It was a small cabin near a river—more a shack than a cabin, really, but Marta did not mind it. The air was fresh and clear, the clearest she’d breathed in a long time. The world had a deep, saturated hue, and the tops of the trees were so green that they were almost black. They fished but didn’t catch anything. They waded into the edge of the river, where it was still and cool, up to their ankles, and they splashed one another. Sigrid cut her foot on a sharp rock, and Marta bandaged it and drove her into town, where a local doctor, who had hair growing out of his ears, stitched it up for twenty dollars. At night, it was colder than Marta had thought summer could get. There were deer in the yard. There were birds in the trees. The sky was so vast that Marta felt small when she walked from the porch to the edge of the road. They drank lemonade on the swing, and Sigrid braided Marta’s hair for her, weaving in blue wildflowers. It was the most beautiful place. The most beautiful time. On their last night, they lay outside on a flannel blanket and watched the slow progression of the stars, the smooth carapace of the sky like glass. “I never want to leave here,” Sigrid said. “You’ll have to take it up with the owners,” Marta said, but she knew what Sigrid meant. She wrapped her arms around her, and they shed their clothes and held each other tight as they touched each other. They didn’t get off. They tried and tried, stroking and touching each other’s bodies every way they knew, but as the pressure inside them rose, it dissipated just as quickly, so that by the end of it they were frustrated and hot and damp. They couldn’t get traction on their desire. Every time it seemed that as they were cresting into the oblivion of orgasm, sadness drenched them. Sadness at leaving. Sadness at going back to their lives.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  26 Tali puella sermone deterrita, manuque eius ex- osculata, “ Parce" inquit “Mi parens, et durissimo casui meo, pietatis humanae memor, subsiste paululum; nec enim, ut reor, aevo longiore maturatae tibi in ista sancta canitie miseratio prorsus exaruit. Specta deni- que scaenam meae calamitatis: speciosus adulescens inter suos principales, quem filium publicum omnis sibi civitas cooptavit, meus alioquin consobrinus, tan- tulo triennio maior in aetate, qui mecum primis ab annis nutritus et adultus individuo contubernio do- musculae, immo vero cubiculi torique sanctae caritatis affectione mutuo mihi pigneratus, votisque nuptiali- bus pacto iugali pridem destinatus, consensu paren- tum tabulis etiam maritus nuncupatus, ad nuptias officio frequenti cognatorum et affinium Stipatus tem- plis et aedibus publicis victimas immolabat : domus tota lauris obsita, taedis lucida constrepebat hyme- naeum. Tunc me gremio suo mater infelix tolerans mundo nuptiali decenter ornabat, mellitisque saviis crebriter ingestis iam spem futuram liberorum votis anxiis propagabat, cum irruptionis subitae gladiatorum impetus ad belli faciem saeviens, nudis et infestis mucronibus coruscans ; non caedi, non rapinae manus afferunt, sed denso conglobatoque euneo cubiculum nostrum inuadunt protinus: nec ullo de familiaribus nostris repugnante ac ne tantillum quidem resistente, miseram, exanimem saevo pavore, trepidam ! de 1 Oudendorp’s suggestion for the MS9’ trepido, 182 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IV * What, think you," quoth she, “To deceive our young men of the price of your ransom? No, no; therefore cease your crying, for the thieves do little esteem your tears, and if you will still weep, I will surely burn you alive."

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Nothing could hurry my father or Old Boy along. We stopped at every bush and every overflowing garbage can behind every silent, darkened cottage. We went all the way down to the deserted village: the store, the post office, the boat works. A speedboat, its bottom leprous and in need of sanding and painting, was turned upside down on trestles. A chain rattled against the flagpole in front of the post office. A woman wearing a nurse’s white cap drove past, the only car we’d seen. We retraced our steps. As daybreak came closer, the birds began to twitter and the leaves on birches fluttered in the rising breeze. Down the sloped shore the lake slowly took on shape, then color. Behind a door an unseen dog yapped at us, and Old Boy became frantic with curiosity. “What is it? Tell me. You can tell me. What is it, Old Boy?” As the sun, like life returning to a body, stole over the world, the beam from my father’s flashlight grew less and less distinct until it had been absorbed in the clarity of something that was new yet again. SIX The more isolated I became, the more incapable I thought I was of resisting my homosexual fate. I blamed my sister and my mother—my sister for eroding my confidence (as though homosexuality were a form of shyness) and my mother for babying me (homosexuality as prolonged infancy). At the same time I recognized that my mother was my best and truest friend, that she alone fretted over my health, listened to my term papers, waited up for my return, attempted to understand my enthusiasms. In my immense world-weariness I decided to become a Buddhist. My mother had for years encouraged my sister and me to find a church of our own, one that answered our real needs. True to type, my sister in her burrowing if vexed drive toward normality had become a Presbyterian. The local church had the most affable, crew-cut minister (former football coach) and the most prestigious congregation (semi-believers in a heaven of jocks, a hell of brains and a purgatory of friendless stay-at-homes). I interpreted my mother’s mandate in a different way. I spent day after day at the library reading through Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East as one might try on clothes—but isn’t Hinduism just a bit busy? Confucianism? Too sensible, no flair. But Buddhism appealed to me. Not in its later, elaborated northern form, the Mahayana with its infinite regress of paradises, its countless bodhisattvas (those compassionate midwives), its efficacious prayers and praying effigies given over to the pornography of worship, squirming nude maidens representing the anima straddling the erect lingam of the meditating animus. No, what I liked was the earlier Hinayana, those austere instructions that lead to an extinction of desire (in Sanskrit, nirvana means “to extinguish,” as one might blow out a candle flame).

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  353)]. Dolores: derived from the Latin, dolor: sorrow, pain (see Delectatio morosa ... dolors). Traditionally an allusion to the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, and the Seven Sorrows concerning the life of Jesus. H.H. observes a church, “Mission Dolores,” and takes advantage of the ready-made pun; “good title for book” (p. 158). Less spiritual are the sorrows detailed in “Dolores” (1866), by Algernon Swinburne (1837– 1909), English poet (see also Keys, p. 28). “Our Lady of Pain” is its constant refrain, and her father is Priap, whom H.H. mentions several times (see Priap). The name Dolores is in two ways “closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book,” as John Ray says. When in the Afterword Nabokov defines the “nerves of the novel,” he concludes with “the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycæides sublivens Nabokov)”. Diana Butler, in “Lolita Lepidoptera,” op. cit., p. 62, notes that this important capture was made at Telluride, Colorado (see here), and that in his paper on it, Nabokov identifies Telluride as a “cul- de-sac ... at the end of two converging roads, one from Placerville, the other from Dolores” (The Lepidopterists’ News, VI, 1952). Dolores is in fact everywhere in that region: river, town, and county are so named. When H.H. finally confronts Quilty, he asks, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?.” “Dolly” is an appropriate diminutive (“you / took a dull doll to pieces / and threw its head away,” writes H.H. of Quilty). For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr.. On shipboard in Ada, Van Veen sees a film of Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Dolores the dancing girl turns out to be Ada (pp. 488–490). Ada later gives Van “a sidelong ‘Dolores’ glance” (p. 513). in point of fact: the childhood “trauma” which H.H. will soon offer as the psychological explanation of his condition (see p. 13). H.H.’s first chapter is so extraordinarily short in order to mock the traditional novel’s expository opening. How reassuring, by comparison, are the initial paragraphs of those conventional novels—so anachronistic to Nabokov—which prepare the reader for the story about to unfold by supplying him with the complete psychological, social, and moral pre-histories of the characters. Anticipating such needs, H.H. poses the reader’s questions (“Did she have a precursor?”; “Oh when?”), and parodies more than that kind of reader dependence on such exposition. It may seem surprising in a supposedly “confessional” novel that this should be the narrator’s initial concern; but it is by way of a challenge to play, like the good-humored cry of “Avanti” with which Luzhin greets Turati in The Defense, before they begin their great match game.