Shame

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 A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When he turned his face my way it was dark, indistinguishable; his back and shoulders were carving up strips of light, carving them this way and that as he twisted and bobbed. The water was dark, opaque, but it caught the sun’s gold light, the waves dragon scales writhing under a sainted knight’s halo. At last Kevin swam up beside me; his submerged body looked small, boneless. He said we should go down to the store and buy some Vaseline. “But we don’t really need it,” I said. “Let’s get it.” In the distance two gray-mauve clouds, like the huge rectangular sails of caravels, hung darkly, becalmed, immanent, behind mist. Kevin’s lips were blue and he was covered with goose bumps as he vaulted up onto the dock. His legs were smooth except for the first signs of hair above his ankles (the first place an old man’s legs go bald). He dried himself and put on a shirt. We took the outboard to the village. I went into the store with him, though I made him ask for the Vaseline. I was blushing and couldn’t raise my eyes. He pulled it off without a trace of guilt, even asked to see the medium-size jar before settling for the small one. Outside, a film of oil opalesced on the water under a great axle of red light rolling across the sky from azimuth to zenith. That little round jar of grease would be a clue for my father or his to find. Worse, it was the application of method to sex, the outward betrayal of what I wanted to consider love, the inward state. At last the sun went down and the lake seemed colder and bigger and the two of us seemed bereft. That night the two families, all of us, went out to dinner at a restaurant thirty miles away, a place where the overweight ate iceberg lettuce under a dressing of ketchup and mayonnaise, steaks under A.1. Sauce, feed corn under butter, ice cream under chocolate, where a man wearing a black toupee and a madras sports jacket bounced merrily up and down an electric organ while a frisky couple lunged and dipped before him in cloudy recollections of ancient dance steps. The waitress was at once buddy (“How we doing here?”) and temptress (“C’mon, go on”). She had meticulously carded bronze hair, an exuberant hankie exploding above a name tag (“Susie”), a patient smile and, hanging on a chain, lunettes that she wore only when writing an order or totaling the check. In one corner a colorful canopy hung over a round bar, just so the whole place could be called “The Big Top.” No one was sitting at the bar. On its tiered glass shelves, lit from below, stood rank after rank of liquor bottles, soldiers at attention and glowing with fiery spirits from within. Everything smelled of the kerosene heater and the pine-scented Airwick wafting out of the toilets.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Having glimpsed so many lives I now wanted to take stock of a single life, the one I knew best, my own. The strange contradiction was that I, who had grown up isolated in the Midwest of the 1950s and had felt I was a freak, unique in my perverted tastes, now in the liberated 1980s hoped to write about myself as a representative figure. I suppose the uniqueness, the freakiness of my adolescence, found an echo in my fierce desire as an adult to bear witness to my real feelings and actual convictions, even if they were politically suspect and uncomfortable for the reader. At the same time a new sense of gay community and solidarity made me want to render my experiences as somehow typical and representative. A Representative Freak—that’s the paradox that lies at the heart of this novel. I say a “novel” because I wanted the alibi of fiction to give me the permission to change things around in order to make them more typical. In real life I had had many, many sexual experiences by the time I was sixteen, but I knew that my sort of compulsive and precocious sexuality was so atypical that few readers would be able to identify with it. In real life I was an intermittently gifted student, who had already written two full-length novels by age eighteen, even if they were amateurish and unpublishable; I was also fairly popular with the other boys at school, despite my odd personality. In creating the narrator-protagonist of A Boy’s Own Story, however, I wanted to play down all this precociousness and even my intense friendships. I was also quite conscious of working my way through my own version of all those coming-out stories I’d heard over the years, and to show their predominant features. I wanted to describe the first time. I wanted to show the terrible guilt. I wanted to represent the urge to seek professional help, first from a minister and later from a shrink. I wanted to explore the quandary of a simultaneous longing to be straight and a longing to have sex with men. The most controversial part of the book was the ending (which I won’t give away), since it showed the main character in an unsympathetic light. Those closing pages, however, mirrored the most shameful moment in my own young life. Over the years the conclusion has been variously interpreted as the painful, disillusioning beginning of adulthood or as the self-hating action of a boy deformed by a repressive and destructive era. I can distinctly remember that throughout the long composition of A Boy’s Own Story I kept wondering whether I would have the courage to show this reprehensible moment.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] JOY, FLORENCE, since thou art so great that over sea and land thou beatest thy wings, and thy name through Hell expands itself! Among the thieves I found five such, thy citizens; whereat shame comes on me, and thou to great honour mountest not thereby. But if the truth is dreamed of near the morning, thou shalt feel ere long what Prato,1 not to speak of others, craves for thee. And if it were already come, it would not be too early; so were it! since indeed it must be: for it will weigh the heavier on me as I grow older. We departed thence; and, by the stairs which the curbstones had made for us to descend before, my Guide remounted and drew me up; and pursuing our solitary way among the jags and branches of the cliff, the foot without the hand sped not. I sorrowed then, and sorrow now again when I direct my memory to what I saw; and curb my genius more than I am wont, lest it run where Virtue guides it not; so that, if kindly star or something better have given to me the good, I may not grudge myself that gift. As many fireflies as the peasant who is resting on the hill—at the time that he who lights the world least hides his face from us,2 when the fly yields to the gnat—sees down along the valley, there perchance where he gathers grapes and tills: with flames thus numerous the eighth chasm was all gleaming, as I perceived, so soon as I came to where the bottom showed itself. And as he,3 who was avenged by the bears, saw Elijah’s chariot at its departure, when the horses rose erect to heaven,— for he could not so follow it with his eyes as to see other than the flame alone, like a little cloud, ascending up: thus moved each of those flames along the gullet of the fosse, for none of them shows the theft, and every flame steals a sinner. I stood upon the bridge, having risen so to look, that if I had not caught a rock, I should have fallen down without being pushed. And the Guide, who saw me thus attent, said: “Within those fires are the spirits; each swathes himself with that which burns him.” “Master,” I replied, “from hearing thee I feel more certain; but had already discerned it to be so, and already wished to say to thee: who is in that fire, which comes so parted at the top, as if it rose from the pyre where Eteocles with his brother was placed?”4 He answered me: “Within it there Ulysses is tortured, and Diomed;5 and thus they run together in punishment, as erst in wrath; and in their flame they groan for the ambush of the horse, that made the door by which the noble seed of the Romans came forth;

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Much later my stepmother told me I’d caused my father weeks of sleepless despair and that at first he had chosen to believe I wasn’t really a homosexual at all, merely a poseur hoping to appear “interesting.” Dad never asked me later if I’d been cured. He was no doubt afraid to know the answer. Certainly he and I never discussed my problem. Indeed, horror of the subject led to a blackout on all talk about my private life. My father didn’t like other men; he had no close male friends and he behaved toward the men in his own family according to the dictates of duty rather than the impulses of his heart. He so often ascribed cunning to other men, a covert plotting, that he approached them as enemies to whom he must extend an ambiguous hand, one that when not offering a cold greeting could contract into a fist. I was one of the men he didn’t like. Or should I say he simply didn’t like my nature—the fact that I was drawn to art rather than business, to people rather than to things, to men rather than to women, to my mother rather than to him, books rather than sports, sentiments not responsibilities, love not money? And yet he always ended by lavishing his money on me, more than he spent on my sister, whom he really did adore in his obstinate, silent, astringent way. Difficult as my father might be and obsessed with him as I might have been, Dr. O’Reilly had decided my dad was merely a son of a bitch but not the true villain, not like Mom. It was she who had broken past the immunological barriers of my frail psyche and infected every last inch of my soul. It was she who’d ensnared me in silk fetters, she who’d shorn my strength and blinded me to the gross imposition of her will. Indeed, she’d so thoroughly invaded me that scarcely anything of my own remained to me. Dr. O’Reilly’s mission was to purge the invader and to fatten up my ego. Although he’d never met her he spoke of her with real venom. His blue eyes blazed with scorn. When I said I feared what would happen to her if I rejected her, he said, “That old cow? She’ll outlive us all,” as though he and I were a pair of young boys and she all the tenacious wickedness of the adult world. During World War II O’Reilly had served as an army doctor in Polynesia, where he had studied the childrearing methods of the natives. There no infant was ever punished, he said, and none ever cried. An infant’s deepest insecurity, he went on, was derived from its physical smallness and helplessness.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  obsequia. Hic utpote vivus quidem sed tum sopore mortuus, quod eodem mecum vocabulo nuncupatur, ad suum nomen ignarus exsurgit et in exanimis um- brae modum ultroneus gradiens, quamquam foribus cubiculi diligenter occlusis, per quoddam foramen pro- sectis naso prius ac mox auribus vicariam pro me lanie- nam sustentavit : utque fallaciae reliqua convenissent, ceram in modum prosectarum formatam aurium ei applicant examussim nasoque ipsius similem com- parant. Et nune assistit miser hic praemium non industriae, sed debilitationis consecutus. His dictis perterritus tentare fortunam aggredior : iniecta manu nasum prehendo, sequitur; aures pertracto, deruunt. Ac dum directis digitis et detortis nutibus praesen- tium denotor, dum risus ebullit, inter pedes circum- stantium frigido sudore defluens evado. Nec postea debilis ac sic ridiculus Lari me patrio reddere potui, sed capillis hinc inde laterum deiectis aurium vulnera celavi, nasi vero dedecus linteolo isto pressim aggluti- nato decenter obtexi." Cum primum Thelyphron hane fabulam posuit, compotores vino madidi rursum cachinnum integrant. Dumque bibere solita Risui postulant, sic ad me Byr- rhaena : * Solemnis " inquit * Dies a primis cunabulis huius urbis conditus crastinus advenit, quo die soli mortalium. sanctissimum. deum Risum hilaro atque gaudiali ritu propitiamus. Hunc tua praesentia nobis 96 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK II without spirit or life. After this they called me by my name, and did never cease till the cold members of my body began by little and little to revive to obey their magic arts: then he, being lively indeed, howbeit buried in sleep, because he and I were named by one name, rose up when they called, and walked as one without sense like some lifeless ghost : and they, though the door was fast closed, came in by a certain hole and cut off first his nose and then his ears, and so that butchery was done to him, which was appointed to be done to me. And that such their subtlety might not be perceived, they made him very exactly a like pair of ears of wax, and fitted it exactly upon him, and a nose like his they made. also, wherefore you may see that the poor wretch for his dihgence hath for lucre of a little money sustained loss of his members.’ * Which when he had said I was greatly astonished, and (minding to feel my face) put my hand to my nose, and my nose fell off, and put my hand to my ears, and my ears fell off. Whereat all the people pointed and nodded at me, and laughed me to scorn: but I (being stricken in a cold sweat) crept between their legs for shame and escaped away. So I, dis- figured and ridiculous, could never return home again, but covered the loss of mine ears with my long hair and glued this clout to my face to hide the shame of my nose."

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Ecce illico etiam ipsi magistratus cum suis insigni- bus domum nostram ingressi talibus me monitis delenire gestiunt: * Neque tuae dignitatis vel etiam prosapiae tuorum ignari sumus, Luci domine; nam et provinciam totam inclitae vestrae familiae nobilitas complectitur. Ac ne istud quod vehementer inge- mescis contumeliae causa perpessus es: omnem itaque de tuo pectore praesentem tristitudinem mitte, et angorem animi depelle, nam lusus iste quem publice gratissimo deo Risui per annua reverticula sollemniter celebramus, semper com- menti novitate florescit : iste deus et auctorem suum propitius ubique comitabitur amanter nec unquam patietur ut ex animo doleas, sed frontem tuam serena venustate laetabit assidue. At tibi civitas omnis pro ista gratia honores egregios obtulit ; nam et patronum scripsit et ut in aere stet imago tua decrevit." Ad haec dicta sermonis vicem refero : “Tibi quidem” inquam “ Splendidissima et unica Thessaliae eivitas, honorum talium parem gratiam memini. Verum statuas et imagines dignioribus mei- 12 que maioribus reservare suadeo." Sic pudenter 116 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK III took me by the hand and with civil violence led me away weeping and sobbing, whether I would or no; and so that I might not be seen, he brought me through many blind ways and lanes to his house, where he went about to comfort me, that was sad and yet fearful, with gentle entreaty of talk; but he could in no wise mitigate my impatience of the injury which I conceived within my mind. And behold, by and by the very magistrates and judges, with their ensigns, entered into the house and endeavoured to pacify me in this sort, saying: “O Lucius, we are advertised of your dignity, and know the dignity of your ancient lineage, for the nobility of your kin do possess the greatest part of all this province. And think not that you have suffered the thing wherefore you weep to any reproach of yours or ignominy; put away then all sorrow out of your heart and banish this anguish of mind: for this day, which we celebrate once a year in honour of the god Laughter, is always renowned with some solemn novel prank, and the god doth everywhere graciously accompany with the inventor and doer thereof, and he will not suffer that you should be sorrowful, but he will diligently make glad your countenance with serene beauty. And verily all the city, for the grace that is in you, hath rewarded you with great honours, and hath written you down their patron: and, further, that your statue or image shall be set up in copper fora per- petual remembrance.” To whom I answered: “ As for such benefits as I have received already of this famous city of Thessaly, I yield and render most entire thanks, but as touching the setting up of any statues or images, I would wish that they should be reserved for such as are more worthy and greater ; 117 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Carl had been smiling, now he stopped. He’d come from playing ball on Wellington’s big, free, college court (you just walked right in and acted liked you belonged there); midway through the game Levi had called him and said the party was tonight. Strange date to pick for a party, but then each to their own. The brother had sounded kind of funny, like he was pissed about something, but he was definitely real adamant about Carl coming down here. Sent him the address, like, three times. Carl could have gone back home to change first, but that would have been an epic round trip. He’d figured that on a hot night like this, no one would care. ‘Hope so. I’m here for the party.’ Howard watched him put both hands either side of his ball so that the slender, powerful contours of his arms were outlined in the security light. ‘Right . . . this is a private party.’ ‘Your man, Levi? I’m a friend of his.’ ‘I see . . . um, look, well, he’s . . .’ said Howard, turning and pretending to seek his son in the hallway. ‘He’s not about just now . . . But if you give me your name, I’ll tell him you stopped by . . .’ Howard jerked back as the boy bounced his ball once, hard on the doorstep. ‘Look,’ said Howard rudely, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but Levi shouldn’t really have been inviting his . . . friends – this is really quite a small affair – ’ ‘Right. For poet poets.’ ‘Excuse me?’  On Beauty ‘Shit, I don’t know why I even came here – forget it,’ said Carl. He was off immediately down the drive and out the gate, a proud, quick, bouncy walk. ‘Wait – ’ called Howard after him. He was gone.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Over the land which the Adige and the Po water, worth and courtesy were wont to be found, ere Frederick met opposition;8 now, safely may it be traversed by whomsoever had, through shame, ceased to hold converse with good men, or to draw near them. Truly three elders yet are there in whom the olden times rebuke the new, and it seems to them long ere God removes them to the better life: Corrado da Palazzo, and the good Gerard, and Guido da Castel, who is better named in French fashion the guileless Lombard.9 Say henceforth, that the Church of Rome, by confounding two powers in herself, falls into the mire, and fouls herself and her burden.” “O my Mark,” said I, “well thou reasonest, and now I perceive why Levi’s sons were exempt from inheriting;10 but what Gerard is that, who thou sayest is left behind for ensample of the extinct people, in reproof of the barbarous age?” “Either thy speech beguiles me, or it tempts me,” he answered me, “for thou, speaking to me in Tuscan, seemest to know naught of the good Gerard. By other surname I know him not, except I take it from his daughter Gaia, God be with you, for no further I come with you. See the light, that beams through the smoke, now waxing bright; the angel is there, and it behooves me to depart ere I am seen of him.” So turned he back and no more would hear me. 1. See John i. 29; though the reference here is rather to the prayer in the Mass—Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis, dona nobis pacem.2. The speaker is Marco Lombardo, of Venice, a learned and honourable courtier, noted for his liberality, who flourished in the latter half of the 13th century.measure time by calends = as though thou wert still alive. In the eternal regions human measurements of time do not apply.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (The poetry I was raised on!) Somewhere in the song, “The Ile de France with all the gulls around it…” is dreamily mentioned. Little did I know that the gulls would be diving after my bloody Kotex. And little did I know that by the time I got to sail on it, the Ile de France would be much the worse for wear and would rock and roll like an old tub, making nearly all the passengers seasick. The stewards were losing their minds. The dining room was practically empty at every sitting and the room-service bells kept ringing. I see my pudgy thirteen-year-old self clutching my clutch bag full of Kotex on the dipping and weaving decks and bleeding my way all the way home to Manhattan. Ladies and Gentlemen, my menarche. A year and a half later, I was starving myself to death and my periods had stopped dead in their tracks. The cause? Fear of being a woman, as Dr. Schrift put it. Well, why not? OK. I was afraid of being a woman. Not afraid of the blood (I really looked forward to that—at least until I got yelled at for it), but afraid of all the nonsense that went along with it. Like being told that if I had babies, I’d never be an artist, like my mother’s bitterness, like my grandmother’s boring concentration on eating and excreting, like being asked by some dough-faced boy if I planned to be a secretary. A secretary! I was determined never to learn to type. (And I never have. In college Brian typed my papers. Later I pecked with two fingers or paid to have things typed. Oh, it has greatly inconvenienced me and it has cost me ridiculous sums of money—but what are money and inconvenience where principle is concerned? The principle of the thing was: I was not and never would be a typist. Even for myself, no matter how much that would have eased my life.) So, if menstruating meant you had to type, I would stop menstruating! And stop typing! Or both! And I wouldn’t have babies! I would cut off my nose to spite my face. I would literally throw out the baby with the bath water. And that, of course, was another reason I was in Paris. I had cut myself off from everything—family, friends, husband—just to prove I was free. Free as a misfired satellite in outer space. Free as a hijacker parachuting down into Death Valley. I swiped the remains of the roll of toilet paper, stuffed it into my bag, and started back toward my room. But which floor was it on anyway? My mind was blank. All the doors seemed identical. I ran up two flights and blindly headed for the corner door. I flung it open. A fat middle-aged man sat naked on a chair cutting his toenails. He looked up in mild surprise.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Once in a while, one of her elegant friends would drop by for lunch, and suddenly the house was electrified by the energy of those women—their excitement, their approval, their laughter, their thrilling small talk, an art as refined (and now as rare) as marquetry. My father would beam at these guests and pat their hands and pour them thimblefuls of brandy after their doll-size luncheons. Then they’d limp away in a broken-down car, millionairesses in old cardigans covered with cat hairs, their wonderful vibrant voices their only badge of breeding. My father was courtly but dim. I was even dimmer. I read so much in the house (on the bed in my room, on the couch in the living room, on the shaded bench at the foot of the dock) that I hadn’t gotten a tan. At least my clothes were right (my sister had seen to that), but I felt all dressed up with no place to go. Unlike my idols I couldn’t play tennis or baseball or swim freestyle. My sports were volleyball and Ping-Pong, my only stroke the sidestroke. I was a sissy. My hands were always in the air. In eighth grade I had appeared in the class pageant. We all wore togas and marched solemnly in to a record of Schubert’s Unfinished . My sister couldn’t wait to tell me I had been the only boy who’d sat not cross-legged on the gym floor but resting on one hand and hip like the White Rock girl. A popular quiz for masculinity in those days asked three questions, all of which I flunked: (1) Look at your nails (a girl extends her fingers, a boy cups his in his upturned palm); (2) Look up (a girl lifts just her eyes, a boy throws back his whole head); (3) Light a match (a girl strikes away from her body, a boy toward—or perhaps the reverse, I can’t recall). But there were less esoteric signs as well. A man crosses his legs by resting an ankle on his knee; a sissy drapes one leg over the other. A man never gushes; men are either silent or loud. I didn’t know how to swear: I always said the final g in fucking and I didn’t know where in the sentence to place the damn or hell . My father was just a bit of a sissy. He crossed his legs the wrong way. He was too fussy about his nails (he had an elaborate manicuring kit). He liked classical music. He was not an easygoing guy.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi considered this proposition for a moment. ‘Well . . . even if he does get married I don’t even get why marrying’s so like the bad thing all of a sudden . . . At least he got some chance of gettin’ some ass if he’s actually married . . .’ Levi released a deep, vigorous laugh that in turn flexed that extraordinary stomach, creasing it like a shirt rather than real flesh. ‘You know he ain’t got no chance in hell right now.’ ‘Levi, that’s . . .’ began Howard, but up floated a mental picture of Jerome, the uneven afro and soft, vulnerable face, the women’s hips and the jeans always slightly too high in the waist, the tiny gold cross that hung at his throat – the innocence, basically. ‘What? I say somethin’ that ain’t true? You know it’s true, man – you smiling yourself !’ ‘Not marriage per se ,’ said Howard crossly. ‘It’s more complicated. The girl’s father is . . . not what we need in this family, put it that way.’ ‘Yeah, well . . .’ said Levi, turning over his father’s tie so the front was at the front. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with shit.’ ‘We just don’t want Jerome to make a pig’s ear of – ’ ‘ We? ’ said Levi, with an expertly raised eyebrow – genetically speaking a direct gift from his mother. ‘Look – do you need some money or something?’ asked Howard. He dug into his pocket and retrieved two crushed twenty-dollar bills, screwed up like balls of tissue. After all these years he was still unable to take the dirty green feel of American money very seriously. He stuffed them in Levi’s own low-slung jeans pocket. ‘ ’Preciate that, Paw,’ drawled Levi, in imitation of his mother’s Southern roots. ‘I don’t know what kind of hourly wage they pay you at that place . . .’ grumbled Howard. Levi sighed woefully. ‘It’s flimsy, man . . . Real flimsy.’  On Beauty ‘If you’d only let me go down there, speak to someone and – ’ ‘No!’ Howard assumed his son was embarrassed by him. Shame seemed to be the male inheritance of the Belsey line. How excruciating Howard had found his own father at the same age! He had wished for someone other than a butcher, for someone who used his brain at work rather than knives and scales – someone more like the man Howard was today. But you shift and the children shift also. Would Levi prefer a butcher? ‘I mean,’ said Levi, artlessly modifying his first reaction, ‘I can handle it myself, don’t worry about it.’ ‘I see. Did Mother leave any message or – ?’ ‘Message? I ain’t even seen her. I got no idea where she is – she left early .’ ‘Right. What about you? Message for your brother maybe?’

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  At what point had I started pretending Bennett was somebody else? Somewhere around the end of the third year of our marriage. And why? Nobody had been able to tell me that. q: “Dear Dr. Reuben: Why does the fucking always become like processed cheese?” a: “You seem to have a food fetish, or what is known in psychoanalytic parlance as an oral fixation. Have you ever considered seeking professional help?” I shut my eyes tightly and pretended that Bennett was Adrian. I transformed B into A. We came—first me, then Bennett—and lay there sweating on the awful hotel bed. Bennett smiled. I was miserable. What a fraud I was! Real adultery couldn’t be worse than these nightly deceptions. To fuck one man and think of another and keep the deception a secret—it was far, far worse than fucking another man within your husband’s sight. It was as bad as any betrayal I could think of. “Only a fantasy,” Bennett would probably say. “A fantasy is only a fantasy, and everyone has fantasies. Only psychopaths actually act out all their fantasies; normal people don’t.” But I have more respect for fantasy than that. You are what you dream. You are what you daydream. Masters and Johnson’s charts and numbers and flashing lights and plastic pricks tell us everything about sex and nothing about it. Because sex is all in the head. Pulse rates and secretions have nothing to do with it. That’s why all the best-selling sex manuals are such gyps. They teach people how to fuck with their pelvises, not with their heads. What did it matter that technically I was “faithful” to Bennett? What did it matter that I hadn’t screwed another guy since I met him? I was unfaithful to him at least ten times a week in my thoughts—and at least five of those times I was unfaithful to him while he and I were screwing. Maybe Bennett was pretending I was someone else, too. But so what? That was his problem. And doubtless 99 percent of the people in the world were fucking phantoms. They probably were. That didn’t comfort me at all. I despised my own deceitfulness and I despised myself. I was already an adulteress, and was only holding off the actual consummation out of cowardice. That made me an adulteress and a coward (cowardess?). At least if I fucked Adrian I’d only be an adulteress (adult?). THREEKnock, Knock

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Then, sobering for a second, the priest added in a low, casual voice, “But you see, my son, homosexuality isn’t just a conflict that needs to be resolved” —his voice picked up these words as though they were nasty bits of refuse—“homosexuality is also a sin.” I think he had no notion how little an effect the word sin had on me. He might just as well have said, “Homosexuality is bad juju.” “But I feel very drawn to other men,” I said. Although something defiant in me forced these words out, I felt myself becoming a freak the moment I spoke. My hair went bleach-blond, my wrist went limp, my rep tie became a lace jabot: I was the simpering queen at the grand piano playing concert versions of last year’s pop tunes for his mother and her bridge club. There was no way to defend what I was. All I could fight for was my right to choose my exile, my destruction. “Just because you feel something is no reason to act on it,” the priest said. “Americans hold up their feelings as though they were … dispensations.” He drained off the brandy. “For instance, I’ve taken a vow of chastity and I abide by it.” “What do you do for relief?” He smiled at my impertinence. “Do I masturbate, is that what you’re asking? I don’t. Occasionally there’s a nocturnal emission.” He touched his lips with his fingertips. I wondered if the women of his parish who volunteered their services as housekeepers to the priest treasured those stiffened linen relics of sanctity. The pastoral chat was not turning out. Father Burke was miffed. He was most irritated with the Scotts, who’d misrepresented to him my readiness to leap up into the lap of Mother Church. The priest consulted his pocket watch, then worked a toothpick behind a screening hand, a nicety that seemed to me nearly as repulsive as nocturnal emissions. My stubbornness caused the Scotts to cool considerably. When I dropped in on Rachel the Monday after Thanksgiving, she scarcely looked up from her Imitation of Christ . At last she sighed impatiently, set it aside and said, “I don’t think you should spend quite so much time here. It’s not healthy for you. You should run and play with the other boys. Besides, I’m doing a lot of reading in The Golden Bough for my next poem and I can’t just chew the fat with you for hours and hours and hours.” Tears sprang to my eyes and I hurried away. Recently a new part-time teacher had been added to the staff, a Mr. Beattie, who had been hired to instruct three afternoons a week those students interested in jazz. Beattie himself was a jazz drummer and had even toured with a band; he still held regular jam sessions somewhere downtown on weekends. Chuck told me Beattie was a “character,” his highest accolade.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Somewhere I was storing up merit, accumulating the credit I’d need to buy, one day, the salvation I longed for. Until then (and it was a reckoning that could be forestalled indefinitely, that I preferred putting off) I’d live in that happiest of all conditions: the long but seemingly prosperous courtship. It was a series of tests, ever more arduous, even perverse. For instance, I was required to deny my love in order to prove it. “You know,” Tom said one day, “you can stay over any time you like. Harold”—the minister’s son, my old partner at Squirrel—“warned me you’d jump me in my sleep. You gotta forgive me. It’s just I don’t go in for that weird stuff.” I swallowed painfully and whispered, “Nor—” I cleared my throat and said too primly, “Nor do I.” The medical smell, that Lysol smell of homosexuality, was staining the air again as the rubber-wheeled metal cart of drugs and disinfectants rolled silently by. I longed to open the window, to go away for an hour and come back to a room free of that odor, the smell of shame. I never doubted that homosexuality was a sickness; in fact, I took it as a measure of how unsparingly objective I was that I could contemplate this very sickness. But in some other part of my mind I couldn’t believe that the Lysol smell must bathe me, too, that its smell of stale coal fumes must penetrate my love for Tom. Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man … I’d heard that boys passed through a stage of homosexuality, that this stage was normal, nearly universal—then that must be what was happening to me. A stage. A prolonged stage. Soon enough this stage would revolve, and after Tom’s bedroom vanished, on would trundle white organdy, blue ribbons, a smiling girl opening her arms … But that would come later. As for now, I could continue to look as long as I liked into Tom’s eyes the color of faded lapis beneath brows so blond they were visible only at the roots just to each side of his nose—a faint smudge turning gold as it thinned and sped out toward the temples. He was a ratty boy. He hated to shave and would let his peach fuzz go for a week or even two at a time; it grew in in clumps, full on the chin, sparse along the jaw, patchy beside the deep wicks of his mouth. His chamois-cloth shirts were all missing buttons.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When she lowered her hand she was still grinning. “Don’ you know nothin’? You kids sho ’nuff green . Round-the-world means I start at yo’ mouth and kiss you all round, top to bottom, round the world, with a long wait on your south pole! ” Another hiss behind her hand. I felt sorry for her. I thought she might really need my ten dollars. After all this was Saturday night, and yet she didn’t have any customers. Somehow I equated her fatness, her blackness, her unpopularity with my own outcast status. She’d show me sympathy, which would magically awaken my virility. In her adoring eyes I’d become a slender-hipped young prince under a gold crown of hair, skin as smooth as petals under a light green tunic. I’d protect her. I’d earn money and buy her freedom. We’d be outcasts together as a mixed couple, she a Negro whore and I her little protector. But no matter, for if this fantasy kept me a pariah by exchanging homosexuality for miscegenation, it also gave me a sacrifice to make and a companion to cherish. I would educate and protect her. I would nurse her back to decency after her years of debauchery. We went downstairs into a cellar room curtained off from the furnace by a flannel blanket suspended from a clothesline. Her night table was a wooden crate. Her mattress had no sheets on it and was resting on the floor. She pulled her slip over her head and said, “Get your clothes off. I don’ have all night.” She didn’t even watch me as I undressed. As I pulled my underpants off I worried she’d laugh when she saw my fear-shriveled penis, but her indifference to me was complete. I creaked awkwardly as I lowered myself onto the bed beside her. Her fingers started blindly grubbing for my penis, which she found and yanked. Then she sighed, heaved herself up onto an elbow, finally lowered herself and plopped my penis in her mouth. Nothing happened. I could scarcely feel anything. “I don’ have all night,” she said again as she unthreaded a hair from between her teeth and looked at it suspiciously. “Sorry,” I said. It dawned on me that neither of us was enjoying this and that she was as eager as I for it to be over. “For some reason I’m not in the mood tonight,” I said. “Let’s just talk a minute and then go upstairs. And if any of the fellows should ask—” “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “Ah’ll say you was great, a real stud. And in the future, my man, drink gin. Gin make you hard. It do. It make a man hard.” The following summer I spent with my father at his cottage—the summer of my exciting, frustrating idyll with Kevin. When I returned to school the next September I was switched to a new room in a new dormitory next door to the housemaster’s suite. Mr. and Mrs.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I felt my penis and scrotum contract, inchworm above a buckeye, but I was counting on the whore’s discretion—the guys need never know of my failure. “Girls, get your lazy black asses in here so these men can look you over.” One of the women, who’d fallen asleep in front of the television, had to be prodded awake. As she waddled past us on tiny, high-heeled slippers, the soles engulfed by her fleshy feet, she rubbed her eyes, protruded her lower lip and made a fretting sound. So massive and quivering were her breasts and hips under the slip that the garment seemed to be the body of a vaudeville horse which at least two people were inhabiting. At the same time her physical grandeur did nothing to diminish the impression she gave of being a little girl, an impression heightened by the sass with which she planted a fist in her hip and asked nastily, “Seen enough?” We nodded. She said defiantly, “ Good . I goan back to mah TV shows.” The other black woman, the one who’d been knitting, kept her glasses on and the embryonic maroon sweater in her hand as she sleepwalked past, counting stitches, never looking up. Hers was also an ample, indoor body of seraglio proportions but her face seemed older, thinner—in fact, she was a dead ringer for our white dietician at school, if a ringer is a racehorse entered under a false name and posing as another, less successful one. (Horse, dog, inchworm—nature takes her revenge on stories from which she’s been excluded by smuggling herself into them under the guise of imagery.) “Well?” the white woman said. “Is that it?” Chuck asked. She smiled a not especially pleasant smile and said, “There’s always me,” with an edge to the always to suggest how long she’d been in harness, how weary of the road she’d become. “I’ll take you,” Chuck said. His voice didn’t crack, he didn’t soften the blow of his words with a giggle, nor did he drop his eyes. He knew exactly what he wanted. “Yeah, me too,” each of us said in turn on a descending scale of confidence ending with my whisper. “Then come on,” she said, walking away from us and unzipping her dress in a single gesture. She paused at her bedroom door and glanced back. The dress had somehow evaporated into just a wisp of teal-blue smoke in her hand as she tossed it aside. There she stood, door open and behind her a shaded floor lamp dangling fringe; her naked body looked pale as a night moth and as powdery. Her pubic hair had been shaved into a black rectangle. Her legs were ropy.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X I VAs Dante converses with Sapia, revealing the wondrous conditions of his own pilgrimage and the mysterious presence of his guide, he is overheard by two spirits who are leaning for support one against another at his right. Nearest to him is Guido del Duca of Bertinoro, who is the chief speaker, the other being Rinieri da Calboli of Forlì. They speak chiefly to each other, but draw Dante into their conversation, questioning him as to his origin; and when he indicates by a circumlocution that his birthplace lies upon the Arno, Rinieri asks Guido why Dante conceals the name under dark hints as though it were a shameful thing; whereon Guido approves of Dante’s shrinking from expressly naming this accursed ditch which rises in the midst of brutishness, and as it swirls through deeper pools, finds ever fiercer or more degraded neighbours, till it reaches the crowning infamy of Pisa. There follows a prediction of the woes which Rinieri’s relative Fulcieri shall wreak on Florence in 1303. Deeply stirred by their discourse, Dante questions the spirits as to their own past, and Guido accompanies his answer by a lamentation over the degeneracy of the Romandiola from which they both spring; and implores Dante to pass upon his way and leave him to weep undisturbed. Assured that they are pursuing the right way, since the generosity of these once envious souls would else have notified them of their mistake, the two Poets pursue their way as the warning voices against envy, anticipated by Virgil, ring in their ears; to which Virgil adds his sad reflections on the things which human choice relinquishes and the things it grasps. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] “WHO IS THIS that circles our mount ere death have given him flight, and opens and shuts his eyes at his will?”1 “I know not who he may be, but I know that he is not alone; do thou question him who are nearer to him, and gently greet him that he may speak.” Thus two spirits, one leaning against the other, were discoursing of me there on the right hand; then held up their faces to speak to me; and one said: “O soul, that fixed yet in thy body dost journey towards heaven, for charity console us, and tell us whence thou comest, and who thou art; for thou dost make us marvel so greatly at thy grace, as needs must a thing that never was.” And I: “Through the midst of Tuscany there spreads a stream which rises in Falterona and a course of a hundred miles satiates it not.2 From its banks I bring this body; to tell you who I may be were to speak in vain, for my name as yet sounds not for much.” “If I penetrate truly thy meaning with my understanding,” then answered me he who first spake, “thou art talking of the Arno.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  My Egyptian’s conversational interests, however, went beyond noses. He looked down at a copy of Time Magazine which had lain open (and unread) on my lap during the storm, pointed to a picture of (then) UN Ambassador Goldberg, and said historically: “He’s Jewish.” That was all he said, but his tone and look implied that that was all he had to say. I looked at him very hard (over my Polish nose), and for two cents I would have said, “Me too,” but nobody offered me two cents. Just then our Italian pilot announced the descent into Beirut Airport. I was still shaking from that little interchange when I spotted a hugely pregnant Randy behind the glass barricade in the airport. I’d expected the worst going through customs, but there was no trouble at all. My brother-in-law, Pierre, seemed to be best friends with all the airport personnel and I was whisked through like a VIP. It was 1965 and things were not as spastic in the Middle East as they became after the Six Day War. As long as you didn’t come via Israel, you could travel in Lebanon as if it were Miami Beach—which, in fact, it somewhat resembles, down to the abundance of yentas. Randy and Pierre drove me from the airport in the hearse-black, air-conditioned Cadillac which they’d shipped over from the States. On the road to Beirut, we passed a refugee camp where people were living in packing boxes and lots of dirty children were walking around half-naked sucking their fingers. Randy immediately made some high-handed comment about what an eyesore it was. “An eyesore? Is that all?” I asked. “Oh, don’t be such a goddamned liberal do-gooder,” she snapped. “Who do you think you are—Eleanor Roosevelt?” “Thanks for the compliment.” “I just get sick and tired of everyone bleeding about the poor Palestinians. Why don’t you worry about us instead?” “I do,” I said.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Much later my stepmother told me I’d caused my father weeks of sleepless despair and that at first he had chosen to believe I wasn’t really a homosexual at all, merely a poseur hoping to appear “interesting.” Dad never asked me later if I’d been cured. He was no doubt afraid to know the answer. Certainly he and I never discussed my problem. Indeed, horror of the subject led to a blackout on all talk about my private life. My father didn’t like other men; he had no close male friends and he behaved toward the men in his own family according to the dictates of duty rather than the impulses of his heart. He so often ascribed cunning to other men, a covert plotting, that he approached them as enemies to whom he must extend an ambiguous hand, one that when not offering a cold greeting could contract into a fist. I was one of the men he didn’t like. Or should I say he simply didn’t like my nature—the fact that I was drawn to art rather than business, to people rather than to things, to men rather than to women, to my mother rather than to him, books rather than sports, sentiments not responsibilities, love not money? And yet he always ended by lavishing his money on me, more than he spent on my sister, whom he really did adore in his obstinate, silent, astringent way. Difficult as my father might be and obsessed with him as I might have been, Dr. O’Reilly had decided my dad was merely a son of a bitch but not the true villain, not like Mom. It was she who had broken past the immunological barriers of my frail psyche and infected every last inch of my soul. It was she who’d ensnared me in silk fetters, she who’d shorn my strength and blinded me to the gross imposition of her will. Indeed, she’d so thoroughly invaded me that scarcely anything of my own remained to me. Dr. O’Reilly’s mission was to purge the invader and to fatten up my ego. Although he’d never met her he spoke of her with real venom. His blue eyes blazed with scorn. When I said I feared what would happen to her if I rejected her, he said, “That old cow? She’ll outlive us all,” as though he and I were a pair of young boys and she all the tenacious wickedness of the adult world. During World War II O’Reilly had served as an army doctor in Polynesia, where he had studied the childrearing methods of the natives. There no infant was ever punished, he said, and none ever cried. An infant’s deepest insecurity, he went on, was derived from its physical smallness and helplessness.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It was selfish, he knew, but before she left Howard was desperate to secure from her the promise that this disaster should stay between them only. He stood up and put his hands on the desk but said nothing. ‘Oh, and I know,’ she said, scrunching her eyes closed, ‘that you’re not interested in anything I have to say, because I’m just a fucking idiot girl or whatever . . . but as someone who’s relatively objective . . . basically, you just need to deal with the fact that you’re not the only person in this world. In my opinion. I have my own shit to deal with. But you need to deal with that.’ She opened her eyes, turned and left, another noisy exit. Howard stayed where he was, gripping his coat by its collar. At no point during the past month’s debacle had he harboured any genuinely romantic feelings for Victoria, nor did he feel any now, but he did realize, at this late stage, that he actually liked her. There was something courageous there, flinty and proud. It seemed to Howard to be the first time she had spoken to him truthfully, or at least in a manner that he experienced as true. Now Howard put his coat on, shaking as he did so. He came to the door, but then waited a minute, not wanting to risk bumping into her outside. He felt  on beauty and being wrong peculiar: panicked, ashamed, relieved. Relieved! Was it so awful to feel that he had escaped? Must she not feel it too? Alongside the physical tremors and psychological shock of having been party to such a scene (and how strange it is to be spoken to that way by someone who, in truth, you barely know), was there not, on the other side of the explosion, the satisfaction of survival? Like a street confrontation, where you are physically threatened and dare to stand up to the threat and are then left alone. You walk away quivering with fear and joy at the reprieve, relief that things did not become worse. In such a mood of equivocal elation, Howard walked out of the department. He strolled past Liddy at the front desk, through the hall, past the drinks machines and the internet station, past the double doors of Keller Libr – Howard took a step back and pressed his cheek against the glass of one of the doors. Two significant details – no, actually three. One: Monty Kipps at a podium, speaking. Two: the Keller Library packed with people, more people than any Wellington audience Howard had ever managed to amass.