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 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.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  As I entered it, I was almost knocked down by two men coming out. One of them touched my shoulder and drew me aside. He had a three days’ growth of beard on his cheeks, shiny wet canines, a rumpled raincoat of a fashionable cut that clung to his hips, and he was saying, “Don’t just rush by without saying hello.” Here he was at last, but now I knew for sure I wasn’t worthy—I was ugly with my sissy ways and the mole he’d find between my shoulder blades. “Do I know you?” I asked. I felt I did, as if we’d traveled for a month in a train compartment knee to knee night after night via the thirty installments of a serial but plotless though highly emotional dream. I smiled, embarrassed by the way I looked. “Sure you know me.” He laughed and his friend, I think, smiled. “No, honestly, what’s your name?” I told him. He repeated it, smile suppressed, as I’d seen men on the make condescend to women they were sizing up. “We just blew into town,” he said. “I hope you can make us feel at home.” He put an arm around my waist and I shrank back; the sidewalks were crowded with people staring at us curiously. His fingers fit neatly into the space between my pelvis and the lowest rib, a space that welcomed him, that had been cast from the mold of his hand. I kept thinking, these two guys want my money, but how they planned to get it remained vague. And I was alarmed they’d been able to tell at a glance that I was the very one who would respond to their advances so readily. I was so pleased the handsome stranger had chosen me; because he was from out of town he had higher, different standards. He thought I was like him, and perhaps I was, or soon would be. Now that a raffish man—younger and more handsome than I’d imagined, but also dirtier and more condescending—had materialized before me, I wasn’t at all sure what I should do: my reveries hadn’t been that detailed. Nor had I anticipated meeting someone so crosshatched with ambiguity, a dandy who hadn’t bathed, a penniless seducer, someone upon whose face passion and cruelty had cast a grille of shadows. I was alarmed; I ended up by keeping my address secret (midnight robbery) but agreeing to meet him at the pool in the amusement park the next day at noon (an appointment I didn’t keep, though I felt the hour come and go like a king in disguise turned away at the peasant’s door). The books in the bookstore shimmered before my eyes as I worked through a pile of them with their brightly colored paper jackets bearing photographs of pensive, well-coiffed women and middle-aged men in Irish knit sweaters with pipes and profiles.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She had never known how strong she was. Everyone had always told her she was a ‘big girl’ – was this why she was big? So she might drag grown men by their hoods and throw them to the floor? Zora’s brief physical elation was soon replaced by panic. Out here it was cold and wet. The knees of Carl’s jeans were soaked.  on beauty and being wrong What had she done? What had she done? Now Carl knelt before her, breathing heavily, looking up, enraged. Her heart justly broke. She saw she had nothing further to lose. ‘ Oh, man, oh, man . . . I can’t believe . . .’ he was whispering. Then he stood up and became loud: ‘What the FUCK do you think – ’ ‘Did you even read that piece?’ cried Zora, shaking madly. ‘I spent so long on that, I missed my dissertation deadline, I’ve been working constantly for you and – ’ But of course without the secret piece of the narrative in Zora’s head – the one that connected ‘writing pieces for Carl’ with ‘Carl kissing Victoria Kipps’ – no sense could be made of what she was saying. ‘What the hell are you talking about, man? What did you just do?’ Zora had shamed him in front of his girl, in front of a whole party. This was no longer the charming Carl Thomas of Wellington’s Black Music Library. This was the Carl who had sat out on the front porches of Roxbury apartments on steamy summer days. This was the Carl who could play the Dozens good as anybody. Zora had never been spoken to like this in her life. ‘I – I – I’ ‘Are you my girlfriend now?’ Zora began to weep wretchedly. ‘And what the fuck has your article got to do with . . . Am I meant to be grateful ?’ ‘All I was trying to do was help you. That was all I wanted to do. I just wanted to help .’ ‘Well,’ said Carl, putting his hands on his hips, reminding Zora, absurdly, of Kiki, ‘apparently you wanted to do a little more than help me. Apparently you expected some payback. Apparently I had to sleep with yo’ skank ass as well.’ ‘ Fuck you!’ ‘ That’s what it was all about,’ said Carl and whistled satirically, but the hurt was clear to read in his face, and this hurt grew deeper as he stumbled over further realizations, one after the other. ‘Man, oh, man . Is that why you helped me? I guess I can’t write at all – is  On Beauty that it? You were just making me look an idiot in that class. Sonnets! You been making a fool of me since the beginning. Is that it ? You pick me up off the streets and when I don’t do what you want, you turn on me? Damn!

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Five of the English and French candidates were breakfasting in the downstairs hall. They turned their heads as one and stared. I greeted them rather too heartily—especially Reuben Finkel, a redheaded, mustachioed English candidate with a terrible Cockney accent. Leering like Humbert Humbert, he had surprised me and Adrian numerous times at swimming pools and cafés; I often thought he was following us with binoculars. “Hello, Reuben,” I said. Adrian joined in the greetings, but Bennett said nothing. He walked on ahead as if in a trance. Adrian followed him. It momentarily occurred to me that perhaps something more had happened between the two men during the night, but I quickly put it out of my mind. Why? — Adrian offered to drive us back to our hotel. Bennett stiffly refused. But then when we were unable to get a taxi, Bennett finally gave in—without even the courtesy of a word or a nod in Adrian’s direction. Adrian shrugged and took the wheel. I doubled myself up in the midget-sized backseat. This time Bennett directed and we did not get lost. But throughout the whole ride, there was a terrible silence between us, except for the directions Bennett offered. I wanted to talk. We had been through something important together and there was no use pretending it hadn’t happened. This might be the beginning of some kind of understanding between us, but instead Bennett was hell-bent on denying it. Adrian wasn’t much help either. All their talk about analysis and self-analysis was pure bullshit. Confronted with a real incident in their own lives, they couldn’t even discuss it. It was fine to be an analytic voyeur and dissect someone else’s homosexual longings, someone else’s Oedipal triangle, someone else’s adultery, but face to face with their own, they were speechless. They both faced straight ahead like Siamese twins joined at a crucial but invisible spot on the side of the neck. Blood brothers. And I the sister who had loused them up. The woman who had brought about their fall. Pandora and her evil box. NINEPandora’s Box or My Two Mothers A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing. —Anne Sexton Of course it all began with my mother. My mother: Judith Stoloff White, also known as Jude. Not obscure. But hard to get down on paper. My love for her and my hate for her are so bafflingly intertwined that I can hardly see her. I never know who is who. She is me and I am she and we are all together. The umbilical cord which connects us has never been cut so it has sickened and rotted and turned black. The very intensity of our need has made us denounce each other. We want to eat each other up. We want to strangle each other with love. We want to run screaming from each other in panic before either of these things can happen.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘I do . . . I . . . you’re so very . . . beautiful,’ whispered Howard, rising up on his heels a little and kissing the only bit of her that was really accessible to him, the small of her back. With a strong hand she pushed him back on to his knees. ‘Put it in me,’ she said. OK, then. Howard took hold of his cock and began the breach. He had imagined it would be hard to top the moaning that had already occurred, but, as he entered Victoria, she managed it, and Howard, who was not used to so much congratulation so early on in the procedure, feared he might have hurt her and now hesitated as to whether to push deeper. ‘Fuck me deeper!’ said Victoria. And so Howard pressed deeper three times, offering about half of his ample eight and a half inches, that happy accident of nature which, Kiki once suggested, was the true, primal reason why Howard was not still working as a butcher on the Dalston High Street. But with his fourth push the nerves and the tight-ness and the wine overpowered him, and he came in a small, shivery way that gave him no great pleasure. He fell forward on to Victoria and waited morosely for those familiar sounds of feminine disappointment. ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ said Victoria and convulsed dramatically. ‘Oh, I love it when you fuck me!’ Howard slid himself out and lay next to her on the bed. Victoria,  On Beauty now completely composed again, rolled over and kissed him maternally on the forehead. ‘That was delicious.’ ‘Mmm,’ said Howard. ‘I’m on the pill, so.’ Howard grimaced. He had not even asked. ‘Do you want me to blow you? I’d love to taste your cock.’ Howard sat up and made a grab for his trousers. ‘No, that’s all right, I . . . Jesus Christ.’ He looked at his watch, as if lateness were the problem here. ‘We have to get downstairs . . . I don’t know what just happened. This is insane. You’re my student. You slept with Jerome .’ Victoria sat up in bed and touched his face. ‘Look, I hate to be cheesy, but it’s true: Jerome’s lovely, but he’s a boy , Howard. I need a man right now.’ ‘Vee – please,’ said Howard, grabbing her hand by the wrist and passing her the shirt she had been wearing. ‘We need to go downstairs.’ ‘All right, all right – keep your hair on.’

• 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)

  someone else who has been rude, pushing you roughly with their shoulder – why the shame? It was more than shame, though, it was also the physical capitulation – at twenty Howard might have sworn back at him or offered him out; at thirty, even at forty; but not at fifty-six, not now. Fearing an escalation ( What you looking at? ) Howard dug into his pocket and found the requisite three pounds for the nearby photo-booth. He bent his knees and parted the miniature orange curtain as if entering a tiny harem. He sat on the stool, a fist on each knee and his head low. When he looked up, he found himself reflected in the sheet of dirty perspex, his face enclosed by a big red circle. The first flash went off without any planning on Howard’s part: he had dropped his gloves and, upon looking down to find them, was then forced to spring back up as he heard the machine begin, his head just that moment raised, his hair obscuring his right eye. He looked cowed, beaten down. For the second flash he lifted his chin and tried to challenge the camera as that boy might – the result was something yet more insecure. There followed a completely unreal smile that Howard would never smile in the course of a normal day. Then the consequences of the unreal smile – sad, frank, abashed, almost confessional, as men often appear in their final years. Howard gave up. He stayed where he was, waiting to hear the boy leave the phone-box and walk away. Then he retrieved his gloves from the floor and left his own small box. Outside the bare trees lined up along the high road, lopped branches thrust into the air. Howard stepped forward to lean against one of these, careful to avoid the dirty patch around the trunk. From here he could keep an eye on both ends of the street and the mouth of the station. A few minutes later he looked up and saw the man he assumed he was waiting for, rounding the corner of the next street. To Howard’s eye, which fancied itself attuned to these things, he looked African. He had that ochre highlight in his skin, most visible where the skin was in tension with bone – at the cheekbones and across the forehead. He wore leather gloves, a long grey topcoat and a dark blue cashmere scarf tied smartly. His glasses were thin-rimmed and gold. His shoes were an item of interest:  kipps and belsey very grubby trainers of the flat, cheap kind Howard felt sure Levi would never wear. As he came closer to the station, he slowed down and began to cast his eyes around the small gathering of people waiting for other people. Howard had thought himself as instantly recognizable as this Michael Kipps, but it was he who had to come forward and hold his hand out.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She put her hand to the door handle. 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. Three – and this was the detail that had initially arrested Howard’s attention: a few feet from the door, sitting up tall in her chair, holding a notepad, apparently alert and interested, one Kiki Belsey.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  But I, considering the great mischiefe of this wicked queane, devised with my selfe how I might reveale the matter to my Master, and by kicking away the cover of the binne (where like a Snaile the young-man was couched) to make her whoredome apparent and knowne. At length I was ayded by the providence of God, for there was an old man to whom the custody of us was committed, that drave me poore Asse, and the other Horses the same time to the water to drinke; then had I good occasion ministred, to revenge the injury of my master, for as I passed by, I perceived the fingers of the young-man upon the side of the binne, and lifting up my heeles, I spurned off the flesh with the force of my hoofes, whereby he was compelled to cry out, and to throw downe the binne on the ground, and so the whoredome of the Bakers wife was knowne and revealed. The Baker seeing this was not a little moved at the dishonesty of his wife, but hee tooke the young-man trembling for feare by the hand, and with cold and courteous words spake in this sort: Feare not my Sonne, nor thinke that I am so barbarous or cruell a person, that I would stiffle thee up with the smoke of Sulphur as our neighbour accustometh, nor I will not punish thee according to the rigour of the law of Julia, which commandeth the Adulterers should be put to death: No no, I will not execute my cruelty against so faire and comely a young man as you be, but we will devide our pleasure betweene us, by lying all three in one bed, to the end there may be no debate nor dissention betweene us, but that either of us may be contented, for I have alwayes lived with my wife in such tranquillity, that according to the saying of the wisemen, whatsoever I say, she holdeth for law, and indeed equity will not suffer, but that the husband should beare more authority then the wife: with these and like words he led the young-man to his Chamber, and closed his wife in another Chamber. On the next morrow, he called two of the most sturdiest Servants of his house, who held up the young man, while he scourged his buttockes welfavouredly with rods like a child. When he had well beaten him, he said: Art not thou ashamed, thou that art so tender and delicate a child, to desire the violation of honest marriages, and to defame thy selfe with wicked living, whereby thou hast gotten the name of an Adulterer? After he had spoken these and like words, he whipped him againe, and chased him out of his house. The young-man who was the comeliest of all the adulterers, ran away, and did nothing else that night save onely bewaile his striped and painted buttockes.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  As a little boy I’d thought of our house (the old Tudor one, not this new Norman castle) as the place God had meant us to own, but now I knew in a vague way that its seclusion and ease had been artificial and that it had strenuously excluded the city at the same time we depended on the city for food, money, comfort, help, even pleasure. The black maids were the representatives of the city I’d grown up among. I’d never wanted anything from them—nothing except their love. To win it, or at least to ward off their silent, sighing resentment, I’d learned how to make my own bed and cook my own breakfast. But nothing I could do seemed to make up to them for the terrible loss they’d endured. In my father’s office I worked an Addressograph machine (then something of a novelty) with Alice, a woman of forty who, like a restless sleeper tangled in sheets, tossed about all day in her fantasies. She was a chubby but pert woman who wore pearls to cover the pale line across her neck, the scar from some sort of surgical intervention. It was a very thin line, but she could never trust her disguise and ran to the mirror in the ladies’ room six or seven times a day to reevaluate the effect. The rest of her energy went into elaborating her fantasies. There was a man on the bus every morning who always stationed himself opposite her and arrogantly undressed her with his dark eyes. Upstairs from her apartment another man lurked, growling with desire, his ear pressed to the floor as he listened through an inverted glass for the glissando of a silk slip she might be stepping out of. “Should I put another lock on my door?” she’d ask. Later she’d ask with wide-eyed sweetness, “Should I invite him down for a cup of coffee?” I advised her not to; he might be dangerous. The voraciousness of her need for men made me act younger than usual; around her I took refuge in being a boy, not a man. Her speculations would cause her to sigh, drink water and return to the mirror. My stepmother said she considered this woman to be a “ninny.” My family and their friends almost never characterized people we actually knew, certainly not dismissively. I felt a gleeful shame in thinking of my colleague as a “ninny”—sometimes I’d laugh out loud when the word popped into my head. I found it both exciting and alarming to feel superior to a grown-up.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  He had got nowhere with the vital points: what he would say, how he would say it and to whom. The matter was too deeply clouded and perverted for him by the excruciating memory of the following two sentences: Even given the extreme poverty of the arguments offered, the whole would of course be a great deal more compelling if Belsey knew to which painting I was referring. In his letter he directs his attack at the Self-Portrait of  that hangs in Munich. Unfortunately for him, I make it more than clear in my article that the painting under discussion is the Self-Portrait with Lace Collar of the same year, which hangs in The Hague. These were Monty Kipps’s sentences. Three months on they clanged, they stung, and sometimes they even seemed to have an actual weight – the thought of them made Howard’s shoulders roll forward and down as if someone had snuck up behind and laden  kipps and belsey him with a backpack filled with stones. Howard got off the train at Baker Street and crossed the platform to the northbound Jubilee line, where the compensation of a waiting train greeted him. And of course, the thing was that in both of these self-portraits Rembrandt wears a white collar, for Christ’s sake; both faces emerge from murky, paranoid shadows with a timorous adolescent look about them – but no matter. Howard had failed to note the differing head position described in Monty’s article. He had been going through an extremely difficult time personally and had let his guard down. Monty saw his chance and took it. Howard would have done the same. To enact with one sudden tug (like a boy removing his friend’s shorts in front of the opposing team) a complete exposure, a cataclysmic embarrassment – this is one of the purest academic pleasures. One doesn’t have to deserve it; one has only to leave oneself open to it. But what a way to go! For fifteen years these two men had been moving in similar circles; passing through the same universities, contributing to the same journals, sometimes sharing a stage – but never an opinion – during panel discussions.