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 The Folding Star (1994)

  "You probably want to know if he's got anything for you, don't You? Well, he has." "Who is this, please?" "My name's er—Casey; Matt's left me in charge of his things." "What, like Casey Hopper. That's really great." "Like . . . I don't think I know him." "Oh, you'd like him. Actually he's very popular." "I've got something very special for you. I think you know what it is, don't you?" "If it's what I hope . . . Is it from a certain young man?" I consulted a clipboard Matt had left. "It is. To be precise, it is from—Master David K—" "Shush, Casey, don't say it." I felt I'd entered a secret place. I wondered if my interlocutor, my customer, was naked. "Please be so kind as to describe it for me." I reached down at random for one of the items. "I hope you will want this, Dirk. Matt has gone to great trouble to get it." "Of course. Anything of. . . David's . . ." "Well, it's a white pair of briefs. Calvin Klein." "Such vanity," Dirk whispered. "Medium." "Mm, mm," Dirk affirmed. "Is it, is it enriched, autographed?" I twisted it round rather gingerly, and noticed the red name-tape of one P. R. Maris. "It has a firm primrose signature in the front panel. It seems he dresses left, by the way." "I knew it." "It will be quite expensive, though," I said, looking at the price Matt had underlined on the list. "It has the front marking, about the size of a franc, very rich, but also a clear . . . rearward indication." "Oh the wicked boy!" "Yes, a proud stripe." I could feel a flush coming down the line. "Such youthful haste and high spirits." I let the sagged item, with its legend of juvenile incontinence, drop to the floor. "Do you know, I saw him, the other day, coming out of the school gates as pretty as you please in his breeches and I thought, little do you know, my angel, that I'm wearing your shameful little soccer-shorts at this moment—so tight and small they were." "Quite so. Well, wait till you see these. Which you can do when you send six thousand-franc notes to the usual address." I heard him absorb the insult of the price, just for a moment humiliated by the extravagance of his need, then considering that only he and I need know of it. "I may have to ask you for other things, too," he said. "By all means; but I'm afraid I can't come down on this price." I swivelled round to where Patrick Dhondt's black swimming-trunks were spread, sleazily lustrous, on a plinth of empty boxes. "Many people are prepared to pay far more than that for the top items. For god's sake, Dirk, it's a hazardous business." "You look rather tired."

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It’s all pretending, that stuff.’ ‘Still, you didn’t stay long at Ronnie’s house the other day,’ he objected. ‘It was very good fun. We made this great scene and then at the end everyone joined in.’ ‘That was just what I was afraid of.’ ‘Even Lord Charlie had a feel.’ ‘Please!’ ‘Those boys Raymond and Derek were so tired,’ he had to go on. ‘Not Abdul, though. He could have kept at it all night.’ ‘They should be showing the film here,’ I suggested, and Aldo was full of giggly shock. I looked him over candidly. In his tight white jeans and red-and-white checked shirt he reminded one vaguely of an Italian restaurant. ‘Is that all you?’ I asked, my question loitering around his groin. He seemed not to get it, and chuckled vacantly rather than asking me to repeat or explain. I pressed past him, squeezing his heavy bulge as I did so—it seemed real enough—a situation which my brother-in-law Gavin’s expression, as he suddenly reached out to me over several people’s heads, seemed to suggest he found tolerably typical. ‘Gavin! Wonderful to see you.’ We shook hands warmly and he said, ‘Good to see you, my dear,’ in that agreeable, almost nostalgic way that straight men sometimes flirt with gays. ‘How are things?’ ‘Things are rather sort of emotional and peculiar … fortunately one is in good shape and can cope.’ ‘Sounds fascinating!’ He looked quickly aside to Aldo, wondering perhaps if he could be the source of this peculiarity, and I hastened to introduce them. ‘Gavin, this is Aldo, he’s in some of the pictures upstairs, he impersonates John the Baptist—Aldo, this is Gavin, who’s married to my sister.’ The two of them shook hands, and Gavin bumbled on about how in that case he must know Ronnie. What puzzled me was how Gavin himself knew Ronnie, and I asked him. ‘You know, some of us lot do have contacts with some of you lot.’ He waggled a finger. ‘You may like to think that you live in a world all of your own, but in fact you live considerably further away from Ronnie Staines than we do. We were together on the committee about the traffic and the one-way system, and a very useful committee member he was too.’ I stood in mock-penitence. ‘I won’t ask how you met him.’ I saw no reason not to say. ‘I met him in a rather less grownup and public-spirited way. Do you know an old boy called Charles Nantwich? He introduced me to him—at Wicks’s, I should add: all madly respectable.’ Gavin raised his eyebrows and nodded several times, then took a sip from his wine glass and allowed a faintly sinister pause to continue. ‘I’d no idea you knew Nantwich,’ he then said briskly. ‘I’ve only got to know him over the last few months.

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

  When the judge saw me sitting at the defense table, he said to me harshly, “Hey, you shouldn’t be in here without counsel. Go back outside and wait in the hallway until your lawyer arrives.” I stood up and smiled broadly. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Your Honor, we haven’t met. My name is Bryan Stevenson, I am the lawyer on the case set for hearing this morning.” The judge laughed at his mistake, and the prosecutor joined in. I forced myself to laugh because I didn’t want my young client, a white child who had been prosecuted as an adult, to be disadvantaged by a conflict I had created with the judge before the hearing. But I was disheartened by the experience. Of course innocent mistakes occur, but the accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure. Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice. The fourth institution is mass incarceration. Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation of people of color, the disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug crimes in poor communities, the criminalization of new immigrants and undocumented people, the collateral consequences of voter disenfranchisement, and the barriers to re-entry can only be fully understood through the lens of our racial history. It was gratifying to be able, finally, to address some of these issues through our new project and to articulate the challenges created by racial history and structural poverty. The materials we developed were generating positive feedback, and I became hopeful that we might be able to push back against the suppression of this difficult history of racial injustice. — I was also encouraged by our new staff. We were now attracting young, gifted lawyers from all over the country who are extremely skilled. We started a program for college graduates to work at EJI as Justice Fellows. Having a bigger staff with very talented people made meeting the new challenges created by our much broader docket seem possible. A bigger staff, bigger cases, and a bigger docket also sometimes meant bigger problems. While exciting and very gratifying, the Supreme Court rulings on juveniles created all sorts of new challenges for us.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Otherwise; the precepts of Moses are easy to obey; Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not commit adultery. The very greatness of the crime is a check upon the desire of committing it; therefore the reward of observance is small, the sin of transgression great. But Christ’s precepts, Thou shalt not be angry, Thou shalt not lust, are hard to obey, and therefore in their reward they are great, in their transgression, ‘least.’ It is thus He speaks of these precepts of Christ, such as Thou shall not be angry, Thou shalt not lust, as ‘the least;’ and they who commit these lesser sins, are the least in the kingdom of God; that is, he who has been angry and not sinned grievously is secure from the punishment of eternal damnation; yet he does not attain that glory which they attain who fulfil even these least. AUGUSTINE. (ubi sup.) Or, the precepts of the Law are called ‘the least,’ as opposed to Christ’s precepts which are great. The least commandments are signified by the iota and the point. He, therefore, who breaks them, and teaches men so, that is, to do as he does, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. Hence we may perhaps conclude, that it is not true that there shall none be there except they be great. GLOSS. (ord.) By ‘break,’ is meant, the not doing what one understands rightly, or the not understanding what one has corrupted, or the destroying the perfectness of Christ’s additions. CHRYSOSTOM. Or, when you hear the words, least in the kingdom of heaven, imagine nothing less than the punishment of hell. For He oft uses the word ‘kingdom,’ not only of the joys of heaven, but of the time of the resurrection, and of the terrible coming of Christ. GREGORY. (Hom. in Ev. xii. 1.) Or, by the kingdom of heaven is to be understood the Church, in which that teacher who breaks a commandment is called least, because he whose life is despised, it remains that his preaching be also despised. HILARY. Or, He calls the passion, and the cross, the least, which if one shall not confess openly, but be ashamed of them, he shall be least, that is, last, and as it were no man; but to him that confesses it He promises the great glory of a heavenly calling. JEROME. This head is closely connected with the preceding. It is directed against the Pharisees, who, despising the commandments of God, set up traditions of their own, and means that their teaching the people would not avail themselves, if they destroyed the very least commandment in the Law. We may take it in another sense. The learning of the master if joined with sin however small, loses him the highest place, nor does it avail any to teach righteousness, if he destroys it in his life. Perfect bliss is for him who fulfils in deed what he teaches in word.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Adultery and fornication are forbidden for a number of reasons. First of all, because they destroy the soul: “He who is an adulterer has no sense, for the folly of his heart shall destroy his own soul” [Prov 6:32]. It says: “for the folly of his heart,” which is whenever the flesh dominates the spirit. Secondly, they deprive one of life; for one guilty of such should die according to the Law, as we read in Leviticus (20:10) and Deuteronomy (22:22). Sometimes the guilty one is not punished now bodily, which is to his disadvantage since punishment of the body may be borne with patience and is conducive to the remission of sins; but nevertheless he shall be punished in the future life. Thirdly, these sins consume his substance, just as happened to the prodigal son in that “he wasted his substance living riotiously” [Lk 15:13]. “Do not give your soul to harlots, lest you destroy your inheritance” [Sir 9:6]. Fourthly, they defile the offspring: “The children of adulterers shall not come to perfection, and the seed of the unlawful bed shall be rooted out. And if they live long they shall be nothing regarded, and their last old age shall be without honor” [Wis 3:16-17]. And again: “Otherwise your children should be unclean; but now they are holy” [1 Cor 7:14]. Thus, they are never honored in the Church, but if they are clerics their dishonor may go without shame. Fifthly, these sins take away one’s honor, and this especially is applicable to women: “Every woman who is a harlot shall be trodden upon as dung in the way” [Sir 9:10]. And of the husband it is said: “He gathers to himself shame and dishonor, and his reproach shall not be blotted out” [Prov 6:33]. St. Gregory says that sins of the flesh are more shameful and less blameful than those of the spirit, and the reason is because they are common to the beasts: “Man when he was in honor did not understand; and became like senseless beasts that perish” [Ps 48:21]. ARTICLE 9 THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT “YOU SHALL NOT STEAL.”The Lord specifically forbids injury to our neighbor in the Commandments. Thus, “You shall not kill” forbids us to injure our neighbor in his own person; “You shall not commit adultery” forbids injury to the person to whom one is bound in marriage; and now the Commandment, “You shall not steal,” forbids us to injure our neighbor in his goods. This Commandment forbids any worldly goods whatsoever to be taken away wrongfully. Theft is committed in a number of ways. First, by taking stealthily: “If the goodman of the house knew at what hour the thief would come” [Mt 24:43]. This is an act wholly blameworthy because it is a form of treachery. “Confusion... is upon the thief” [Sir 5:17].

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

  This evening, ‘What do you want for your meal, how can we help you?’ ‘Do you need stamps for your letters?’ ‘Do you want water?’ ‘Do you want coffee?’ ‘Can we get you the phone?’ ‘How can we help you?’ ” Herbert sighed and looked away. “It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.” He looked at me, and his face twisted in confusion. I gave Herbert one last long hug, but I was thinking about what he’d said. I thought of all the evidence that the court had never reviewed about his childhood. I was thinking about all of the trauma and difficulty that had followed him home from Vietnam. I couldn’t help but ask myself, Where were these people when he really needed them? Where were all of these helpful people when Herbert was three and his mother died? Where were they when he was seven and trying to recover from physical abuse? Where were they when he was a young teen struggling with drugs and alcohol? Where were they when he returned from Vietnam traumatized and disabled? I saw the cassette tape recorder that had been set up in the hallway and watched an officer bring over a tape. The sad strains of “The Old Rugged Cross” began to play as they pulled Herbert away from me. — There was a shamefulness about the experience of Herbert’s execution I couldn’t shake. Everyone I saw at the prison seemed surrounded by a cloud of regret and remorse. The prison officials had pumped themselves up to carry out the execution with determination and resolve, but even they revealed extreme discomfort and some measure of shame. Maybe I was imagining it but it seemed that everyone recognized what was taking place was wrong. Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different. I couldn’t stop thinking about it on the trip home. I thought about Herbert, about how desperately he wanted the American flag he earned through his military service in Vietnam. I thought about his family and about the victim’s family and the tragedy the crime created for them. I thought about the visitation officer, the Department of Corrections officials, the men who were paid to shave Herbert’s body so that he could be killed more efficiently. I thought about the officers who had strapped him into the chair. I kept thinking that no one could actually believe this was a good thing to do or even a necessary thing to do. The next day there were articles in the press about the execution.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Likewise a triple punishment is ascribed to them on the part of the soul. First, by reason of the confusion they experienced at the rebellion of the flesh against the spirit; hence it is written (Gn. 3:7): “The eyes of them both were opened; and . . . they perceived themselves to be naked.” Secondly, by the reproach for their sin, indicated by the words (Gn. 3:22), “Behold Adam is become as one of Us.” Thirdly, by the reminder of their coming death, when it was said to him (Gn. 3:19): “Dust thou art and into dust thou shalt return.” To this also pertains that God made them garments of skin, as a sign of their mortality. Reply to Objection 1: In the state of innocence child-bearing would have been painless: for Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiv, 26): “Just as, in giving birth, the mother would then be relieved not by groans of pain, but by the instigations of maturity, so in bearing and conceiving the union of both sexes would be one not of lustful desire but of deliberate action” [*Cf. [3634]FP, Q[98], A[2]]. The subjection of the woman to her husband is to be understood as inflicted in punishment of the woman, not as to his headship (since even before sin the man was the “head” and governor “of the woman”), but as to her having now to obey her husband’s will even against her own. If man had not sinned, the earth would have brought forth thorns and thistles to be the food of animals, but not to punish man, because their growth would bring no labor or punishment for the tiller of the soil, as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. iii, 18). Alcuin [*Interrog. et Resp. in Gen. lxxix], however, holds that, before sin, the earth brought forth no thorns and thistles, whatever: but the former opinion is the better. Reply to Objection 2: The multiplying of her conceptions was appointed as a punishment to the woman, not on account of the begetting of children, for this would have been the same even before sin, but on account of the numerous sufferings to which the woman is subject, through carrying her offspring after conception. Hence it is expressly stated: “I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy conceptions.”

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  seat belt stretched over the arc of her stomach, a chamomile tea steaming in her travel mug. But then there is the girl on the other side. So wonderful. Her legs and skin. The way, the skill with which she touched. The idea of her is so enticing it pushes him past control. Allen lets go and lets the shame rush in and fill the emptiness, so that even his hollow legs feel solid and full. Immediately there is plotting. Already the deceit grows. What to do with his boxer briefs? And to ride the bus to Par- sippany this way, to face Claire, soiled. She could drop him at the gym. The gym before dinner, that is the plan. But his erec tion endures. Allen is neither so old that it should disappear in an instant nor so young that it should remain, and in such a pronounced and steadfast state. Then again, he thinks, why should it fade when that angel of a girl is so near and there are four more tokens and he has already crossed the threshold and made his way inside? The erection builds strength and, Allen fears, may never go away. He cannot walk out in this state. And he admits to himself that if he didn’t ever have to leave, if it meant irretrievably losing the outside world, he would sacrifice it all if only that siren would stand up from her chair, take his hands, and guide them over her body once more. But he won’t allow himself such an indulgence. He will put in the token, but he will not touch. He will look at his shoes and the scuff mark that damned him. This is how he will occupy himself, without a whit more enjoyment. He will use up what he paid for, but the penance begins right now. GINU KAMANI Waxing the Thing hen I first came to Bombay to work in a beauty salon, I didn’t understand anything. They told me to wax, so I waxed: legs, arms, underarms, stomachs, foreheads, fingers, toes. It’s like a game for me. I cover the skin of the ladies with hot wax, then quickly-quickly take it all off with a cloth, al most before they notice that it’s there. It reminds me of my vil lage school, where I used to draw on the wall with chalk, then quickly wipe it off before the teacher found out. For me it’s all very strange, what goes on with these rich-rich city ladies, but I mind my own business. I’m just a simple village girl. Every thing about the city is strange to me, so what’s one thing more? There I was, minding my own business, when one day this Mrs. Yusuf, whose legs I was waxing in the private room, asked me if I would come to her house to wax her thing. I was so stupid, I asked her to her face, “What is this thing?”

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I mean, I know everybody’s derivative in a way, but you know what I mean. It makes me feel like a piece of shit. Am I being awful?” “Well...sort of,” said Stephanie, who thought Yolanda’s work was clearly better than Sandra’s. “But I understand how you feel.” She told Sandra how annoyed she was when the name of a writer she didn’t think much of began appearing in bold print in gossip columns everywhere. “When I saw that picture of him in Vanity Fair at the Palladium with China Smith, I almost threw up,” she said. They talked about how shallow and fake it all was, and once again Stephanie told the story of the twenty-three-year-old clerk who had driven her to despair with stories of his impending publication in Esquire and his subsequent book contract, until she found out that he was certifiably nuts and on lithium, and couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. Stephanie hung up feeling vaguely humiliated. She thought of her job at Christine’s, almost so she could feel worse, but felt strangely comforted instead. This made no sense to her, but she accepted the comfort. She wished that she could tell Sandra about her real job, but she didn’t dare. Perhaps Sandra wouldn’t be shocked, but she would think it was self-destructive and insulting to women. Well, maybe it was. She never got any writing done while she was hooking. Somehow the idea of coming home after a day at Christine’s and sitting down to write was impossible; her thoughts were clotted by the clamoring, demanding ghosts of the men she’d seen that day. She needed to make herself a nourishing meal and sit still and take care of herself, as her mother used to say. Working at Christine’s was a time for making money and resting her brain, she told herself. Writing would come later. She pictured herself in the future, so successful that she could talk about being a hooker without anyone minding. “I didn’t do much writing then,” she’d say to her circle of successful friends as they stood around smiling and holding their drinks. “I spent most of my time just trying to re-form my personality.” And they’d all laugh at this adorable admission of her female vulnerability. The only person she’d ever told was her friend from college, Babette. Babette, who was trying to be an actress, had a whole gaggle of friends from the restaurant where she worked who wore a lot of leather and went en masse to some S&M bar in the West Village on weekends. It didn’t seem as though prostitution would faze Babette, but when Stephanie told her about her first experience three years earlier, she’d said, “Oh, Stephie! How could you do that to yourself? How could you?” Stephanie explained again and again that she didn’t think it was damaging her self-respect, but Babette would not be mollified.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It was where they had staged their lengthy, horribly detailed conferences about their sexual relationships. “The nightmare of the two thousand and one dates,” Franklin called it—or maybe she’d invented the nightmare part, she couldn’t remember. The tunnel deepened as they entered a thickly populated realm of old friends, acquaintances, scandals and memories that appeared like frail, large-eyed animals that paused to look at them, then blinked and ran away. Connie stopped a moment as Franklin talked and put her head up to survey the outside world; the dark café was crowded with young people in big jackets and neat, mincing shoes. A grotesquely beautiful girl in pink leather seemed to be staring at them. Did they look like pathetic aging hipsters? Was her hair wrong? Was their conversation too loud? Franklin was talking very loudly about a nasty exchange he’d had with another critic at some club. She winced, then took shelter in his apparently inexhaustible confidence and burrowed again. Then other factors raised their heads. “You know, I had dinner with Alice and Roger last week,” he said, tearing a bite out of his little sponge cake. Constance halted in her burrowing. “I thought you didn’t see them anymore.” “What? Why?” “What about that big fight you had with Roger?” “What big fight?” “The one about the article you did on him in Art in America .” “Oh, that . It was just a spat. I see him all the time. You wouldn’t believe their new loft. It’s perfect.” This person, thought Connie, does not have one deep feeling about anything. She felt like a crabbed, bitter woman in a brittle curl over her coffee. “You should give Alice a call—she’d love to hear from you.” “Alice was the one who stopped calling me, in case you don’t remember.” “Connie, Alice loves you. She really does.” “Horseshit, Franklin. She stabbed me in the back.” “God, you girls are unbelievable. Girls are unbelievable.” They moved on, but from that point, Constance sat uneasily in her chair, no longer feeling like a woman entering a potentially successful phase in her career, happy in love and socially secure. She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn’t so bad. But it had been. She cringed as they walked to the cash register, convinced that everyone was watching them and rolling their eyes. “I’m giving a party the day after tomorrow,” said Franklin as they walked out. “It’s Emily’s birthday. You’ve got to come. And bring your amour.” “Roger and Alice will be there.” “Oh, come on!” “All right, I’ll probably come.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I was very moved by his poetic description and marveled once again at his transformation. “What kind of husband would you say you are?” “Certainly not a perfect husband. We have our ups and downs. I have a temper that can flare. When it does, I’m stubborn and mean. I have a terrible habit of getting caught up with work and forgetting to call. Look, you know what I have to go on. I keep saying to myself, ‘Do it better, do it right, don’t mess up.’ I try. I try every day.” He smiled. “She’s a generous woman and she makes allowances for dumbness.” “What would you like to change if you could?” I realized that this blunt question might throw him off balance but decided to take the chance. Larry looked out the window for a full minute without speaking. Turning to face me, he gave an answer that I will long treasure, one that captures the continuing emotional constriction and fear that so many of these young men feel but have a very hard time talking about. They are ashamed and lack the words. He said: “I have a difficult time showing love to my wife, even telling her that I love her. She complains that I don’t show her enough affection. I’m aware of that. And I try to change it. But I can’t because of my parents’ marriage and divorce. I feel almost cursed. Sometimes when Grace comes to meet me here at the office, I want to jump up and hug her—but I can’t.” Of course, women have complained since time immemorial that their men have trouble expressing tender loving feelings. Obviously this problem is not confined to children of divorce. But it’s fair to say that the men in divorced families are conscious of this difficulty long before any woman brings it to their attention. They’ve known for years that they have inexpressible feelings and that their anxiety stops them from reaching out. They have rehearsed in their minds a hundred times the things they wanted to say to their parents. And then they couldn’t do it. I would venture to say that many of the men raised in divorced families were conscious of their inhibitions and badly disappointed in themselves when they failed to break out of them. Some said they mastered the ploy of silent withdrawal because they had to protect themselves from becoming their mother’s confidant as young adolescents. Used to a life of pulling away and hiding feelings, they could not break the habit even within a loving marriage. Residues of ViolenceWALKING BACK TO Larry’s office after lunch, I asked a question that had been bothering me since the interview began. “Larry, how gone are the memories of your dad’s violence?”

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  bags.” To which Michele replied, “Sleeping bags cost money.” Remembering that she had all the money, and knowing I’d look like an even bigger lightweight if I asked for it back— suppose she said, “No!” Suppose she said, “Fucl^you!” Then what?—I heard myself mumbling, Marlon Brando—style, “Don’t worry about it. One thing I know how to do is steal.” And without another word, I headed back to the mall. Be fore I left, I thought I caught a flicker of respect in her eyes. It gave me hope. (And a partial erection.) I was back in ten minutes with a pair of lightweight goose downs, army green and waterproof. When I handed hers over, I could tell she was impressed. With any luck, I wouldn’t have to knock off a gas station to make her forget my cowardice. I could probably kill a man with my bare hands and it wouldn’t matter now. Too-chicken- to-licl^. It might as well have been tattooed on my forehead. What do you do when you’re branded and you know you’re a man? Michele’s eyes grew huge under her Beatles cap. At some point, she’d dumped the rose-petal grannies, and I didn’t miss them. She squeezed the sleeping bag, then smiled. “You . . . you stole these?” “No big thing.” I shrugged, and pretty much stood still while she hugged me. I didn’t want to look too eager. Didn’t want her to know what I felt. Most of all, I didn’t want her to accidentally touch my ass. The credit card was in my back pocket. The last thing I needed was her finding out I charged the bags to my mother. DANI SHAPIRO Bed of Leaves l^ater, she will remember the leaves. The way they scratch and crumble against her back. The way her panties are smudged with dirt and she will have to ball them up and stuff them into her knapsack where her mother won’t find them. Years later, as a woman, there will be a moment at the end of each summer when the scent of fresh-mowed grass will fill her lungs through an open car window, and she will close her eyes and her tongue will go soft, her inner thighs moist like the pale insides of a half-baked cake. Eddie Fish is unbuttoning her shirt. There have been boys before this moment, boys who have stuck their fingers be tween her blouse and jeans, tugging the fabric loose, pushing their hands up around her bra and cupping her breasts. There have been boys—two, to be exact—who have unzipped her

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was a dingy, patched-up little place on the edge of town, close to where Matt lived; I passed it every day and never saw a sign of life. Only the most insatiable antiquary could ever have dreamt of going there by choice. I could have impressed him, even gently squashed him with my knowledge, which wasn't even monk-knowledge, just a part of the accusing streetscape of the morning after. But my mouth was as dry as cloth and my features had a rubbery stiffness, as if I had been terribly wounded by an old friend and didn't know what to say. Luc glanced sideways at me, but thought perhaps I was merely angry, and that he was in for a difficult hour. I was on the brink of tears just to be walking beside him in the real world, the two of us in' our black jeans and smart today with light sports-jackets, though his was costly and Scottish whilst mine was American and second-hand. "So whatever did happen to your glasses?" Luc asked with new informality as we sat down in our regular places at the dining-room table. I fingered the cracked bridge and the side-hinges stiffly fixed with tape. I wanted to tell him how when he had finally gone into the house and left nothing but the silvered oblong on the grass where his towel had been spread I had stood up and wandered desolately over the half-seen floor, treading on the spectacles that I had discarded to make love to him and inflicting the damage he could now see. "I fell off my bicycle," I said absurdly: "or more accurately I was knocked off." "I hope you weren't hurt, Edward," he said with eager sympathy, almost more eager than sympathetic, but he was only seventeen and what did he know? "Everybody rides bicycles and I think they can be very dangerous." I shrugged to show that I was fine. "I didn't know you had a bicycle," he said. "It wasn't actually my bicycle," I admitted. "It was a friend's." I could see myself being pressed further and further into deceit rather as a lying quick answer to a barber's question, incuriously followed by a further question, can lead in minutes to a crazy-house of invention and non-sequitur. "I won't be riding it again," I emphasised. "It was a complete write-off." "A write-off. Yes. Anyway, I think of you as a walker," he said. (So he thought of me.) "I have often seen you walking along this street, when I am working in the evening, and it reminds me to work even harder."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Shameful; for he was heathen as well as black and would never have discovered the healing blood of Christ had not we braved the jungles to bring him these glad tidings. Shameful; for, since our role as missionary had not been wholly disinterested, it was necessary to recall the shame from which we had deliv ered him in order more easily to escape our own. As he ac cepted the alabaster Christ and the bloody crass-in the bearing of which he would find his redemption, as, indeed, to our outraged astonishment, he sometimes did-he must, hencef orth, accept that image we then gave him of hi mself : having no other and standing, moreover, in danger of death should he fail to accept the dazzling light thus brought into such darkness. It is this quite simple dilemma that must be borne in mind if we wish to comprehend his psychology. However we shift the light which beats so fiercely on his head, or prove, by victorious social analysis, how his lot has changed, how we have both improved, our uneasiness refuses to be exorcized. And nowhere is this more apparent than in our literature on the subject-"pr oblem" literature when written by whites, "protest" literature when written by Ne groes-and nothing is more striking than the tremendous dis parity of tone between the two creations. Kingsblood Royal bears, for example, almost no kinship to If He Hollers Let Him Go, though the same reviewers praised them both for what were, at bottom, very much the same reasons. These reasons may be suggested, far too briefly but not at all unjustly, by NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON observing that the presupposition is in both novels exactly the same: black is a terrible color with which to be born into the world. �ow the most powerful and celeb rated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America is un questionably Richard Wright's Native Son. The feeling which pre\·ailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very ex istence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy; and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud deco ration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before- which was true. Nor could it be written today.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I think you've got an admirer there," I said, shamed and somehow treacherous. At which Luc frowned. And then the bastard was back: "Oh, I found the Fratry, by the way." He smiled as if this really was their own private success. "Absolutely fascinating!" And Luc now not knowing how to react, whilst his admirer, my hateful and forward rival, gave a little wave and darted off. "When is it we meet again?" I boomed out wretchedly. But somehow Luc failed to hear. He strode away from his empty locker with all his clothes in his arms, entered one of the four changing-cubicles preserved, I had imagined, for the clinically insecure or for those who perhaps for some religious reason . . . and bolted the half-door. Ten seconds later, like the rape of Danae, there was a scattering of coins from an upturned pocket and a smothered "Fuck". A few centimes came spinning towards me across the damp tiled floor. Chapter 19 On standard speed the wipers made an indolent, halting trawl of the windscreen, but on full speed they flicked from side to side so fast you felt the mechanism was about to snap. Marcel told me about the wipers on a friend's father's BMW, apparently adjustable to anything from lento to prestissimo at the touch of a finger, and with varying degrees of intermission. He was interested in cars, but only so far at the level of fixtures; he played determinedly with the cigarette-lighter and had quickly assessed the austere alternatives of the heating-system. We travelled in a roar of boosted warmth, peering out under misted arcs at the flowing stampede of cloud. The idea that Luc and Sibylle were somewhere ahead of us and would wait to be found lost all sense in the midday darkness, streaked with cars' lights, in the drowned anonymity of the road. Oh, I wanted to get to him first, to find out what story he was telling, to do a deal with him—but if he had been at the station early he could be hundreds of miles away by now. His mother thought not; she said it was another of his moody crises, which could be drastic in effect but were local in physical range. I gripped the wheel, ignobly anxious for myself but also with a larger, dimmer wish that he shouldn't fuck up his young life. Marcel was restless, eager, whisked away from his lessons on a quest for his beautiful and scandalous senior. He was pink-faced at the privilege of it and chattered solemnly until my nervous silence, my curt demands for help with road-signs and turnings, affected him too, rather as a parent's misery seeps into a child and subdues it. I heard the drag of his breathing amid the heater's bluster, and then the breathy squawk of his inhaler. When I remembered I gave him a little side smile and saw him sigh with sudden reassurance.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Their daughters, however, are at risk for remaining trapped in relationships that echo the violent marriage. Tragically, toxic elements in the marriage endure after the breakup. Larry’s father did not hesitate to make abundantly clear to his little daughter his views about the inferiority of women. He insulted her openly on visits, calling her “little bitch” and “stupid.” There’s almost no way a little girl hearing this can escape internalizing the view that she’s an inferior being. Moreover, the violent father is often a seductive and charming man who doesn’t hesitate to court his sons and daughters in the hope of enlisting their support. This combination of power and helplessness is very appealing to a child. It has strong erotic overtones. The child internalizes the image of a man who is overpowering, needy, and appealing. She buys into and internalizes a view of herself as an inferior being who needs a strong man to hang on to because, as several of these sad young women said to me, “Without a man I am nothing.” As she matures, this image is built into her expectations of men and her relationships with men. The man is supposed to hurt her and she is to remain the helpless victim. Her job is to rescue him. When he fails to respond, it is her fault. Unfortunately, the mother’s transformation from victim to independent woman often comes too slowly and too late to be built into the psyche of her daughters. It may be years before the child is able to see her mother as a person worth emulating, with the strength to stand up for herself. The view of the mother as weak and helpless is a lasting and powerful one. Little girls do not for many years see their mother’s courage in breaking free. Only as adults did the young women in this study begin to understand the wisdom of their mother’s decision. Most of the women raised in violent families in this study were able to break out of the pattern by their early thirties—but only with great difficulty and only with individual or group therapy. Some who escaped violent relationships ended up in lasting unhappy marriages or remained caught in demeaning long-term relationships without marriage. (I’ll talk more about this group in Chapter 14 when we examine early, impulsive marriages.) Anja was helped by the encouragement of her mother and her brother plus several years of psychotherapy. She was eventually able to find a man who loved her and was not abusive. But when I saw her at age thirty, she was extremely worried about the future. Her self-confidence was still poor. Although she had graduated from college, her career plans were shaky. Compared to Larry, she was floundering.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Cricket. “Michele, I really like you ... I mean, I’ve always, like, loved you, it’s just that. . .” “Forget it,” she said, her face hardening. She pulled up her pants and launched herself off the station wagon in a single movement, as though she’d been bouncing off cars and asphalt her entire life. “Forget it, Bobby. It’s nothing.” “Really?” This was so hugely untrue, so clearly not nothing, I hated myself for needing to hear it. I held my hand out to help, but Michele ignored it and dusted herself off. “You don’t,” she said with a brittle laugh, “you don’t think I was serious, do you? You don’t think I’m some kind of exhibi tionist. ” “Gee, I don’t know,” I said. I just knew I wanted to rip my tongue out at the sound of “gee.” This was worse than Jiminy Cricket. My voicebox had been hijacked by Wally Cleaver. Be cause I never said “gee.” Never before and never since. I was not a “gee”-type person. But I couldn’t tell Michele that. What was the point? To Michele, from here on in, I’d be the geek who said “gee” and didn’t have the balls to lick her pussy in broad daylight. With one move—or lack of one—I’d killed something horri bly important. Whatever else happened, I knew I’d spend the rest of whatever time I had left walking upright, trying to re deem myself. When Michele slouched off toward the highway, I resolved to be a bad-ass. A rebel. A daredevil. Keith Richards with Jew- hair. Whatever it took to de-lame myself, that’s what I’d do. With no plan to speak of, I announced, “We need sleeping bags.” To which Michele replied, “Sleeping bags cost money.” Remembering that she had all the money, and knowing I’d

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Sometimes she looked back over her shoulder in affected surprise, sometimes she reclined on a sofa in short black stockings, or with the black feathers of a fan clustered between her legs. She was a handsome girl, young, unembarrassed; she looked cynical but dependable. I was very slow to realise that this was the second Jane, the laundry-woman who was the actress's reincarnation. There was a general likeness, though in monochrome the overwhelming feature, the torch of her hair, could have been any middling colour. She was pale and strong-jawed and big without being fat. She could certainly have been a relation of Jane, a younger sister, with a sirmlar humour and nerve. I tried to forget she was a prostitute, and had presumably been paid for these sessions in the studio, but the impression of detachment and compliance couldn't be dispelled. She met the camera's stare very levelly: she still had life and self-esteem, but her bright eyes, in the middle range of the sepia, had nothing of Jane's disconcerting power, the impression she gave of seeing through time and experimenting with dangerous drugs. The new girl could never have been the Kundry of "Jadis Herodias, quoi encore?" In one picture she stood with her arms full of the dusky bundle of her hair, though at first glance I mistook it for a cat. There was another small envelope among the photographs, on which the word "Private" had provocatively been written. I opened it circumspectly, the old gum still duily tacky, and slid out yet another set of photos, that made me wince and hesitate. I knew for a moment or two what "Private" meant—desires expressed without the filter of art, glum shaming needs . . . I made my interest scientific, dimly thinking what a prig I was when it came to women and the indignities men demanded of them. It figured that the downside of Orst's mysticism should be something coarse and exacting. The young Jane—I didn't know what to call her—had a wary look now: she was a professional, she would have upped the fee, but she was not an actress like her predecessor. There was a sense, that was perhaps the cruel erotic pivot of the pictures, that though she was a working woman she was a good Catholic too, who believed in eternal fire and wondered, as she took the lash or pissed herself for Orst's camera, if that might land her there. There were only half a dozen of them. In the first, she stood with one foot on a table, one on a chair, looking back over her shoulder (he seemed to like that startled supplicating glance), two fingers spreading her cunt from behind. There was a glistening detail to it that was far beyond the things I had puzzled out long ago from Charlie's under-mattress stash of Escorts and Parades.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The syllable hurled behind me today expresses, abm·e al l , wonder: I am a stranger here. But I am not a stranger in America and the same syllable riding on the Amer ican air expresses the war my presence has occasioned in the American soul. for this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a mar ketplace and seeing black men ti:>r the first time. The shock this spectacle afforded is suggested, surely, by the promptness with which they decided that these black men were not really men but cattle. It is true that the necessity on the part of the settlers of the New World of reconciling their moral assump tions with the fact-and the necessity-of slavery enhanced immensely the charm of this idea, and it is also true that this idea ex presses, with a truly American blunt ness, the attitude which to varying extents all masters have had toward all slaves. Rut between all former slaves and slave-owners and the drama which begins for Americans over three hundred years ago at Jamestown, there are at least two differences to be observe d. The American Negro slave could not suppose, for one thi ng, as slaves in past epochs had supposed and often done, that he would ever be able to wrest the power from his master's hands. This was a supposition which the modern era, which was to bring about such vast changes in the aims and di mensions of power, put to death; it only begins, in unprec edent ed fashion, and with dreadful implications, to be resur rected today. But even had this supposition persisted with undimin ished force, the American Negro slave could not have used it to lend his condition dignity, for the reason that this su pposition rests on another: that the slave in exile yet remains related to his past, has some means-if only in memory-of revering and sustaining the f(>rms of his former lif e, is able, in short, to maintain his identity. This was not the case with the American Negro slave. He is unique among the black men of the world in that his past was taken from him, almost literally, at one blow. One won ders what on earth the first slave found to say to the first dark STRAN GER IN THE VI LLAG E 125 child he bore . I am told that there are Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, but any American Negro wishing to go back so far will find his journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for his ancestor.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  so stupid, I asked her to her face, “What is this thing?” Now, she was already lying there with her sari pulled up to her stomach, and her legs bent at the knees, and I was trying not to look at her big white panties that she was shamelessly showing me through her wide-open legs, when suddenly she stuck one finger inside of her panties and pulled the material down and showed me all her hair there. I felt so ashamed! All this time, I didn’t know that the ladies wax down there. This Mrs. Yusuf said, very sweetly, that only young girls like me are pure enough in the heart to wax it down there. Naturally she wanted me to go to her house to do this delicate job. In a salon, anyone can walk into the private room, even when the curtain is pulled. Some of the other waxing girls told me that they don’t do such type of work. Why shouldn’t I? If they want to pay better than at the salon and, on top of that, pay for my taxi here and there, then what do I care. So I did the work for Mrs. Yusuf, and she told her friends, and before I knew it I had more work waxing things than arms and legs and all. All the ladies like me better because I’m not married. They tell me that marriage will make me rough, like a man, and then I won’t be able to do the delicate job. All our Indians, you know, are so rough and hairy. The shameless Indian men are always scratching themselves be tween the legs because of the Bombay heat, but the ladies don’t have to, because their skin down there is cool and clean. And definitely the smell is also a little less. I never knew how many kinds of smells could come out of these city ladies’ things! Even though they wash night and day and remove every single hair from their bodies, I tell you, some of them smell down there like an armpit. I tell them to put a little baby powder, or maybe even some eau de cologne on the day that I’m coming, otherwise I have to breathe