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 Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “One time,” Foster was saying, “I had to get in there. Had to brush my teeth. I had a date. I picked the bathroom lock with a coat hanger. He knew I was in there. Didn’t care. The whole time in the mirror, I could see his silhouette through the curtain. Oh, he was working it. Milling it. Talking to himself the whole damn time: ‘Getting close now. Getting close! Get ting close!' He was keeping me up on his progress. By the time I’d rinsed and spit, he was saying, ‘That was a nice one. That wasn’t too bad.’ Out on my date, I couldn’t think about any thing else.” “That’s awful,” I said. I knew I was out of the running. “That’s nothing,” said Hampton. “My brother’s cock is enormous. Got me by a good two inches, at least. I’m talking length and girth. Two years younger than me, walking around with the stuff of legend up under his Wranglers. From the time I got to where I knew how important your cock is, I knew what it was like to feel inferior because of my own. I un derstood how impressive his cock was before he did, and all I could do was envy the thrill he’d feel on finding out for him self. Lord, when he found out. He got laid more than I did. He did it with girls I wanted to do it with, and did it with some girls I even had done it with.” “Hard to believe there was a time in my life,” Foster said, “I thought the thing was only for pissing.” “I get to where I think the pissing mechanism’s only inci dental,” I said. “That just doesn’t seem like the main work it’s intended for, you know?” “Situation similar to yours,” Hampton said, indicating Foster with a nod. “Only worse. He was in the bathroom, I needed in. Only he didn’t have the door locked. I just walked on in. He was stark naked in front of the mirror with that monster in his hand. He wasn’t even hard. He just had it in his hand. He was flapping it, seeing how far up and down it’d swing. I got in there and he turned so he could show me. ‘That’s where it is,’ he told me. ‘That’s where it is, and all Hawkinsville knows it.’ It was like one of them snake han dlers over in Alabama. I just turned and ran.” That one gave us pause. Hampton stood back with a smug look of achievement. “That’ll be hard to beat,” I said at last. “That’s awful,” Foster agreed. “That’s nothing.” Birnauer, whose idea this had all been in the first place, sucked his Winston to the filter and threw it overboard. He threw it like he was throwing a dart, like he

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  “You know, it’s about time Gregg took on his own parish,” said the Pastor in the car. “I’m thinking of a really nice place I know near Moscow, Minnesota.” Pali was entertaining thoughts of becoming a Buddhist. He’d met some Tibetan monks at a doll store in Stillwater. Minnesota has the largest Tibetan population in the U.S., they’d told him. “Oh what shame I will bring to my family, if I return to Samoa without a degree in Lutheran divinity!” thought Pali to himself. “Better to hide myself in this place forever, become a prostitute or a computer programmer.” What other work had the seminary trained him for? Pastor Knarffssen noted Pali’s distraction and suggested they stop outside Minneapolis—St. Paul Airport to watch the jets take off. They sat silently together in the Pastor’s car, parked within the repair yard fence. The planes taxied one at a time up to a turning mark near their viewpoint. Rumbling, the aircraft raced onto the field. Watching, Pali decided he would finish out the years of study he had begun, marry a nice Samoan Lutheran, build himself a Swedish sauna near Apia. He leaned back to watch the planes through the sunroof. One by one, he felt them shudder into the air and vanish. CLAIRE TRISTRAM When the Student Is Ready |_| I I er first lover was big, roughly the size of her forearm. During their sex she lay still, slack-jawed and panting, focused solely on relaxing each muscle while he plowed her. If she didn’t succeed in relaxing enough, he left her bleeding and barely able to sit. Every time you’re naked I see something new to turn me off, he would tell her. She thought it was fun. What did she know? Long after this lover was gone from her life, she continued to fall in love with whatever man could fill her up most. And yet it seemed to her suddenly that all men were big dicks, that by having them they became them. So she gave them up, men and dicks both, to save herself. In this period of her life she wore black. Men and women both left her alone. She became invisible to all. She could walk into a room and not a single head would turn, male or female,

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "So who are your main friends, your best friends now?" And my hand shuddered so that I had to return the cup to the saucer untasted. A faint smile suggested surprise at a perhaps harmless intrusion, registered the challenge of summing up so private a matter and of setting about it in another language. But then, he seemed to say, as he looked down and studied the dark swirls and blooms of the walnut table-top, he wanted challenges, he needed to excel, and I was right to test him so intimately within the businesslike confines of our hour. I knew with a stab of certainty and regret that he would not have answered candidly if he had thought of me as anything but a remote functionary, whom he was well enough bred to treat as an equal. I had receded in a moment from Praetorian guard to the shabby pedant-retainer of some remote and time-locked noble household. The first person he described, Arnold, had been a frighteningly clever contemporary of his at St Narcissus, who had passed his final exams a year early and was now at university in Leuven, taking about ten different courses simultaneously and aiming to graduate in half the usual time. He was unlikely to be the handsome little chap of Saturday morning, with his rugger-player's crop and bright but hardly intellectual air, and I interrupted after a minute or two's encomium of Arnold's tremendous brain, his fluency in six or seven languages, his almost negligent mastery of the organ and the cello, to insist on the importance of a physical description. "That's really what you should have given me first, you know. Conjure up the outer man, before getting into all this stuff about his mind." "Well, he is quite tall—" "Ah." "Did I say something wrong?" "No, no. Carry on. How tall is he? your height?" "He's a bit taller than me." Luc paused, as if he might have satisfied the requirements of the physical description clause, but I pressed him a little further—kind of clothes, glasses, slight speech impediment—to disguise my lack of interest. "And Arnold's your best friend, is he? you must miss having him around to tell you what's what." "What's what. Yes, that's correct. But we do write to each other and he writes very long letters telling me about what he has been reading and what music he is playing and so forth." "And what do you write about in your letters?" "I tell him what I thought of the books he told me to read, of course; and the music, but less, because he greatly loves organ music, and I hate it very much."

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  pants in the school basement, pushing their hardness against her cotton panties, eyes squeezed shut. But Eddie Fish is not a boy. Eddie is a man—twenty-eight years old—and Jennie knows these woods are about to become a part of her history. She is writing the story of her life, the story of her body on these damp suburban grounds with the man she has chosen precisely because he is a man. The blond hairs on his wrists glisten as he reaches around her and unhooks her bra. She is impressed by his skill at bra unhooking, the ease with which he pulls the straps off her arms and hangs it on a nearby branch, a white cotton 32B flag of surrender. She is impressed by his warm dry palms that brush against her nipples, and by his eyes, dark blue in the noon of this clear Indian summer day, staring straight at her. “Lisa Wallach,” he says, murmuring the name of his last girlfriend as he stares at Jennie’s breasts. She looks at him, flushed. “Sorry,” he laughs, “I can’t explain it. Your hair, your tits— you look just like her now—” She doesn’t know enough to be horrified. To slap Eddie Fish across his pale stubbled cheek, grab her bra off the branch and streak through the woods, away from him. Instead, she is flattered by the comparison to Lisa Wallach, who is a woman after all—at least twenty-six—and who is very beautiful in that frosted blond urban way. Lisa is a lawyer. She has an apartment in the city, and wears leather boots with stacked heels, long velvet skirts almost brushing the floor. “What am I doing here with you?” he murmurs as he un does the top button of her tennis shorts, bends down and un laces each sneaker, pulls off her Fred Perry socks, small green abandoned wreaths. He unzips her shorts and shimmies them down around her ankles, along with her panties. Parts of her have never felt the breeze before. Her ass, her crotch, each nip ple, seem to braid together into a rope twisting deep into her stomach, twining around itself, a noose that will remain for ever inside her. “Jailbait,” he says, kissing her belly button. Years from now, Eddie Fish will be a gynecologist in Scars dale. He will drive a Volvo, own an espresso maker, be the fa ther of two daughters of his own—two daughters he would kill if he ever found them in the woods with a man resembling his younger self.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  S INCE I am not a theologian in any way whatever, I prob ably ought to tell you what my credentials arc. I never expected to be standing in such a place, because I left the pulpit nvcnty-scvcn years ago. That says a good deal, I sup pose, about my relationship to the Christian Church. And in a curious way that is part of my credentials. I also address you in the name of my father, who was a Baptist minister, who gave his life to the Christian faith, with some very curious and stunning and painful results. I address you as one of those people who have always been outside it, even though one tried to work in it. I address you as one of the creatures, one of God's creatures, whom the Christian Church has most be trayed. And I want to make it clear to you that though I may have to say some rather difficult things here this afternoon, I want to make it understood that in the heart of the absolutely necessary accusation there is contained a plea. The plea was articulated by Jesus Christ himself, who said, "Insofar as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me." Now it would seem to me that the nature of the confron tation, the actual historical confrontation between the non white peoples of the world and the white peoples of the world, bcnvccn the Christian Church and those people outside the Christian Church who arc unable to conceive themselves as being equally the sons of God, the nature of that confronta tion is involved with the nature of the experience which a black person represents vis-a-vis the Cross of Christ, and vis a-vis that enormous structure which is called the Church. Be cause I was born in a Christian culture, I never considered myself to be totally a free human being. In my own mind, and in fact, I was told by Christians what I could do and what I could become and what my life was worth.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And it entered my mind, finally, by means of the rent made in my short boy-scout pants by a man who had lured me into a hallway, saying that he wanted to send me to the store. That was the very last time I agreed to run an errand for any stranger. Yet I was, in peculiar truth, a very lucky boy. Shortly after I turned 16, a Harlem racketeer, a man of about 3 8, fell in love with me, and I will be grateful to that man until the day I die. I showed him all my poetry, because I had no one else in Harlem to show it to, and even now, I sometimes wonder what on earth his fr iends could have been thinking, con fronted with stingy-brimmed, mustachioed, razor-toting Poppa and skinny, popeyed Me when he walked me (rarely) into various shady joints, I drinking ginger ale, he drinking brandy. I think I was supposed to be his nephew, some nonsense like that, though he was Spanish and Irish, with curly black hair. But I knew that he was showing me off and wanted his fr iends to be happy t< >r him-which, indeed, if the way they treated me can be taken as a barometer, they were. They seemed to FREAKS AND AMERICAN IDEAL OF MANHOOD 8I9 feel that this was his business-that he would be in trouble if it became their business. And though I loved him, too-in my way, a boy's way-I was mightily tormented, for I was still a child evangelist, which everybody knew, Lord . My soul looks back and wonders. For what this really means is that all of the American cate gories of male and female, straight or not, black or white, were shattered, thank heaven, very early in my life. Not without anguish, certainly; but once you have discerned the meaning of a label, it may seem to define you for others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself. This prepared me for my life downtown, where I quickly discovered that my existence was the punch line of a dirty joke. The condition that is now called gay was then called queer. The operative word was faggot and, later, pussy, but those epithets really had nothing to do with the question of sexual preference: You were being told simply that you had no balls. I certainly had no desire to harm anyone, nor did I under stand how anyone could look at me and suppose me physically capable of causing any harm.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Now, though, it seemed to hold out the invitation to something shameful—self-pity, and, worse, the exposure of my narrow, treadmill circuit of memories and longings. There was too my catastrophic change of station. I had fallen, and though my fall was brought about by a conspiracy, by a calculated spasm of malevolence, its effect on me at first was like that of some terrible physical accident, after which no ordinary thoughtless action could be the same again. The fall had its beginning in that very fast, dazed and escorted plunge from the dock after the sentence had been given, down and down the stone stairs from the courtroom to the cells. I had the illusion—so active is the faculty of metaphor at moments of crisis—of being flung, chained, into water: of a need to hold my breath. In a sense I kept on holding it for half a year. Chaps did keep journals there—little Joe his childlike weekly jottings for his wife eventually to see, ‘Barmy’ Barnes his notebooks of visions and apocalypses—but they were licensed by their childishness and barminess; whereas I had been violently removed from my rightful lettered habitat, and as an invisible and inner protest refused to write a syllable. Now that I am home again I may write a few pages, merely to attest to what happened—and perhaps to feel my way towards recovery, to patch up my for ever damaged understanding with the world. One thing I notice already is that since leaving prison I have had long and logical dreams of being back in it, just as when I was in it I dreamt insistently and raptly of happy days long before and also of a day—now, as it might be—when I had been released, and various longed-for things would happen, or promise to happen. Dreams had a powerful and sapping hold on me there. I am the sort of sleeper who has always dreamt richly, so perhaps I should have been prepared for the futile mornings, sewing mail-bags, filling infinite time with that cruel simulacrum of work, but whelmed under in the world of last night’s voyagings, their mood of ripeness and reciprocation. These—and other waking wishes—had such supremacy over the prison’s abstract, cretinous routines that to tell the story of those months with any truthfulness would be to talk of dreams. When, after evening Association—at some infantile early hour—we were sent to our cells, I gained a kind of confidence from the certainty that another world was waiting, a certainty, if you like, of uncertainty, the only part of my life whose goings-on were subject to nobody’s control. The prisoner dreams of freedom: to dream is to be free. Perhaps the strangest dream I had was one which recalled the evening of my arrest. The frequency with which it recurred could of course be explained by the frequency with which I anyway dwelt on those few crucial minutes.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later. We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools—like peace and quiet at home—to succeed. Even the best and brightest will likely go to college close to home, if they survive the war zone in their own home. “I don’t care if you got into Notre Dame,” we say. “You can get a fine, cheap education at the community college.” The irony is that for poor people like us, an education at Notre Dame is both cheaper and finer. We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach. We talk to our children about responsibility, but we never walk the walk. It’s like this: For years I’d dreamed of owning a German shepherd puppy. Somehow Mom found me one. But he was our fourth dog, and I had no clue how to train him. Within a few years, all of them had vanished—given to the police department or to a family friend. After saying goodbye to the fourth dog, our hearts harden. We learn not to grow too attached. Our eating and exercise habits seem designed to send us to an early grave, and it’s working: In certain parts of Kentucky, local life expectancy is sixty-seven, a full decade and a half below what it is in nearby Virginia. A recent study found that unique among all ethnic groups in the United States, the life expectancy of working-class white folks is going down. We eat Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for breakfast, Taco Bell for lunch, and McDonald’s for dinner. We rarely cook, even though it’s cheaper and better for the body and soul. Exercise is confined to the games we play as children. We see people jog on the streets only if we leave our homes for the military or for college in some distant place. Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  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 through my mouth so the smell won’t drive me crazy. I never used to notice such smells before, but day in and day out putting wax between their legs, I can’t help it, my nose has be come very nosey.

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

  When I woke up this morning, they kept coming to me, ‘Can we get you some breakfast?’ At midday they came to me, ‘Can we get you some lunch?’ All day long, ‘What can we do to help you?’ 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.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  everything, or how else would they all get rich-rich husbands? My poor mother—it’s so shameful—doesn’t even wear panties. And she sits with her legs wide open. All the old women are like that. They’re so shameless, they don’t even want to wear anything down there. Without panties, how can a modern girl control her monthly mess? When my mother was young and she got her monthly bleeding, she just sat in one corner and spread this mud between her legs until it mixed with the blood and became hard, a lid made of clay to close her upside-down, bleeding “pot.” When she stood up, the hard clay cut into her skin like a knife. For five days she was like that, sitting in one corner with a pile of mud, playing with herself like a mad girl. After the five days, when she tried to break the mud, the hair from down there would be stuck in it and she would pull the hair right off. How she would scream! My god, you would think it was the end of the world. Why such a big fuss over a few hairs? That’s the difference, I tell my mother, between her and the big ladies. If she knew what was good for her, she would have pulled all the hair out. The ladies definitely want all their hair out. They make me check again and again for even one single hair that I missed. It’s not so easy, you know, unless I shine a torch on it, and any way, who says I want to look down there? In the beauty salon they told us, if you’re plucking a lady’s eyebrows, don’t look into her eyes; if you’re threading her upper lip, don’t look into her mouth; so if I’m waxing the thing, I don’t look inside there! Of course, it’s my job to get all the hair out, but I can’t help it, sometimes the hair just won’t come out. I try once or twice, but these fussy ladies are never satisfied. For half an hour I have to feel around bit by bit for any leftover hair, and then even if I find it, how can I wax just one hair? So I have to try to pull it out with my fingers, but even that is impossible because by then the skin has become all sensitive and slippery and sliding.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  There was to be no holiday, of course, for the second year running, and I felt ashamed by this further evidence of the decline of the Manners family. The previous Christmas I had secured a distracted agreement that Dawn could come to Kinchin Cove with us and looked forward to it blindly in the teeth of all the warning signs. My mother rather liked Dawn, who helped with the washing-up, shared in her gentle mockery of my sixth-form posiness, and had a reliable second-row-forward straightness about him; she couldn't make out why we were such inseparable friends, and there was something sweet about her frequently exaggerating his good points, as if these must explain it: "Ralph's got bottom," she said to me one Sunday morning over pastry-dough and apple-peel. But by the early summer, brittle and hollow-eyed with her own anxieties, she had forgotten her promise. I made a scene about it, half-aware how I was disgracing myself, arguing really I suppose against something else. I told Dawn it was off and took him some photographs of the cottage from an earlier summer, the beach and rocks just below, the shallow river that ran out over the sand, the loafing figures of Charlie and his genuinely unsuitable friend Gary Quine, who got wrecked in the Wreckers, called my parents by their Christian names and gave me, when I was twelve, my first awed lesson in the use of a rubber johnny. Dawn wasn't much bothered about the place I loved and wanted to bring him to as a new brother, who could teach me to dive. He slipped an arm round my neck, gave me a long hard-working kiss and said why didn't we go off together, camping—we could go to France. He'd already opted out of his own family's trip to Spain. I knew with a sudden grave certainty far bleaker than that of my father's death that I would never go to Kinchin Cove again. We went to look at tents, quite unaware of their cost and complexity and scaling our plans down from "The Sultan" through "The Marquess" and "The Cavalier" until we ended up with a titchy dun-coloured thing called "The Pilgrim". "I think you'll be rather on top of each other in this one," said the sales assistant.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  continued to sleep naked, to spite them. Steven would wait for a perfect moment of unwillingness, when I was asleep or pissed off—the jockeys would vanish and he’d crawl on top, force my legs apart and bang into me so hard my guts sloshed upward squishing my lungs BREATH as he climaxed he yelled out, “WHAT IS HAPPENING ... TO ME!!!!” Then he rolled over and we never talked about it. Once I inadver tently came too. “That was great!” I exclaimed to his back. Steven turned around, his face skewed with disgust. “You treat me like I’m your stud.” Heterosexuality continues to this day to surprise me, the things men present to you as normal I wondered what was wrong with me that Steven didn’t want to fuf me if a demon bites you teeth marks appear on inaccessible parts of your body, wounds you couldn’t possibly have inflicted yourself white- coated attendants rush in and strap your wrists to the bed, across your chart the shrink scrawls HYSTERIA on my back, legs open . . . body-heat bearing down on me, a bellowing boiling cloud, steam tunneled into my cunt scorching clit and lungs, I spread wider what heaven this brimstone and moaned, “Steven your thrusts are out of this world.” No answer. Then I remem bered Steven sat worl^and I’m alone in the bed or should be a body I couldn’t see was fucking the shit out of me the thickness of touch demon fingers palpated my breasts, indentations dap pling across my chest like magic sparse bristles on bac!{, lines of energy rippling along calves and forearms, hairless armpits, no gen itals, demon noses are long as dic^s blow dryers hidden beneath their nostrils crystallize the moisture in your cunt so that a nose rammed up there chafes and shreds the parched flesh OUCH! When a demon fucks you with its dildo-nose it comes with a big ACHOO snot for semen there isn’t time for birth control not a minute still it took me a full six months to become pregnant.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I can kiss you and make love to you. We can make babies and I can tell you about the war. We can make lots of babies. He was very drunk, drunker than he had ever been. The whole place was spinning and it became very hard to hear anything but a great rushing sound that roared in his ears like a terrific storm. “You got to get out of here,” they were telling him. “You got to get in the car and go home.” They slowly lifted the body into the small car. He was laughing now, laughing and singing Irish songs. “Hurry up now,” he could hear them saying. “Hurry up now and we’ll get you back home.” They all seemed to look like funny cartoon characters moving the numb limbs of his lower part into the front seat of the car. “That’s right, that’s good now,” they were saying. Some girl was laughing in the back seat and the driver told her to shut up. “Are you okay, is everything all right?” said his friend. “He’s really drunk, really smashed,” said the girl. “We got to get him home right away.” “How are his legs? Are his legs okay?” The rubber urine bag. He moved his hand slowly down his leg to the rubber urine bag. It was as hard as a rock and his pants were soaked and it was all slowly soaking into the seat. “He’s pissed all over the fucking seat,” said the girl. “What should we do?” “Get him home. Drop him off.” They got him to the house and lifted him out into his chair and there was the front seat of the car all soaked. It was very late and the young girl almost seemed in a panic. The two boys pushed him up the wooden ramp his father had built with his own hands. He had put it all together just before he came home from the hospital. His old man had worked long and hard on the ramp to make it just right for his son who had just come home from the war. It was a piece of art, just like the special room with the shower. Every piece had been cut to fit and there were two long smooth handrails. The whole thing was painted red like the house. The old man had worked hard on the ramp, like he had worked hard in the food store for twenty-five years, like he worked hard at everything he ever did in his life. His mother screamed when he came in. She was still screaming hysterically when the old man bent down and lifted him up onto the little bed. He laid the body gently down and began to hook up the plastic tube. Then he took the piss-soaked pants off and undid the rocklike rubber piss bag from his boy’s leg. “I’m fucked up, I’m fucked up,” the boy was saying.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  451 Dickens was self-schooled while he earned his own living. He supported himself as clerk and reporter before he was out of his teens. In his spare time, he read at the British Museum. While Jane Austen took years to perfect her books before they were published, Dickens launched his fame with a book published in serial installments as he wrote it— The Pickwick Papers. Each installment was priced at a shilling. By publishing each of his novels in cheap serial form before it appeared as a whole, Dickens sustained his popularity. While Jane Austen wrote about genteel society in rural England, Dickens wrote chie fl y about life in London and the hardships of children raised in poverty, as he had been. London was the product of the Industrial Revolution and the capital of the nascent British Empire. Dickens made his readers see the cruel disparity between the lives of the rich and those of the poor in London. Great Expectations is a work of fi ctional autobiography published at a time when other new novels challenged Dickens’s powers of invention and composition. Like Wordsworth’s Prelude, Dickens’s novel draws on memories of the author’s childhood. But Great Expectations is a work of fi ction. Shortly before it appeared, new work by other novelists, such as Emily Bronte and George Eliot, challenged Dickens to test the powers of his art in new ways. Unlike Pride and Prejudice, with its omniscient narration, Great Expectations has a fi rst-person narrator. Unlike the hero of Dickens’s own David Copper fi eld, Pip tells a story of how he has monumentally deceived himself. First of all, Great Expectations is a story of Pip’s quest for identity. Not knowing who he is, Pip is made to feel wicked, monstrous, and bestial. Mr. Hubble says that boys are “naterally wicious.” Estella calls him “a little coarse monster.” Pumblechook compares him to a pig, and Estella feeds him like a dog. While those identities are fanciful, Pip feels trapped in his identity as a common laboring boy—and thus forever denied any hope of winning Estella. Estella herself calls him “a common labouring boy.” He’s horrifi ed to think that she might see his grimy fi gure through the window of the blacksmith shop.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I felt this event should make me too a figure of some consequence, and Graves hung back afterwards to get an autograph; but even so there was something risible about my father's fame. He had appeared on one or two uncool telly programmes, supporting a talentless "star" through various sickly ballads; and his record of seasonal music reached No 3 in the album charts in the lead-up to Christmas '71. For a moment there was talk of his having his own show, and our house was in the grip of misery for a fortnight. But the screen-tests didn't go well, he was too shy and serious; he came home hopping with shame and relief. I fantasised about his having a success that transformed our rather careful lives, but I loved him best for what he loved best, the patience-shredding hours by the piano, my mother stoutly accompanying, as he worked and worked on a song or a recitative. None of this meant much to my schoolfriends stuck in Mudd and Slade. After the Matthew Passion one of them gave a strangulated parody of my father's performance, not from malice but it brought tears to my eyes. A doubt had been entered, that could never wholly be expelled, that he was a figure of fun. Of course he didn't always have the alien rectitude of the concert platform. He loved getting out of his frac. At home he was a quiet ironist, closer with my brother Charlie than with me, though I was the one who inherited his habit of sitting and gazing into the middle distance. A tiny bedroom had become his office and often you would pass the door and see him leaning at the window, watching the wind over the common. hundreds of hours I sat pretending to read, but sharing music with him, anything recorded by Beecham, whilst he read the score or peered into infinity through the blank above the picture-rail. When I first brought Graves home he won my father's heart by his morbidly detailed knowledge of Delius, but then risked losing it by conducting when a record was on. I had to take him for a walk to the trig-point to explain my father's conviction that if Sir Thomas had already conducted it there was no need for anyone else to.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  " I nodded, and then shrugged to say I didn't really need to know. "Well, there are two answers to that question. The short-term answer is that she had lost her husband less than a year before, she didn't want to carry on working on a farm, she had been . . . rather unwell herself. When Marcel's mother died, she wrote to me. We met, and came to our present arrangement." He pushed back his chair and turned it so as to look out at the chilly suspension of the fog. "There is a long-term answer too, if you want to hear it." If I did, it was only as a distraction, or for the sake of talk, or to avoid thinking fruitlessly about another question which so far had no kind of answer at all. "If you want to tell me." "I can tell you today. I wouldn't want to if she was actually here." He raised the palm of his hand towards me in a gesture of deference and restraint. "It goes back to the war again." "Well, I would be interested in that." I recalled how Lilli had stiffened and left the room when I had finally asked about Paul's war-time visits to Orst. "I feel very ashamed at how little I know about it; I've never quite taken it in." In Belgium I had barely heard the epoch mentioned, unless under the pressure of questioning, or when Helene had given me her vaguely sensational impressions of Orst's death. "Well, you know something about the Occupation. It's honestly not at all easy for me to convey what it was like, although I grew up in it: there were years of it, it just went on and on. It was very frightening, and humiliating, and drab, with rations, and that awful hunger you have as a growing boy. But it could be exciting too, at times, if you were young and had a lively imagination. The town was full of soldiers, the Germans and of course our own Nazi militia, it was military rule—which had perhaps a certain glamour: no one ever says that, of course, it sounds frivolous in the larger context of what was going on, but my schoolfriends and I had thrilling times deceiving the soldiers, who were often very stupid and very bored themselves. We took a lot of dares, and became great heroes in our own eyes. Probably we were stupid ourselves, I know sometimes we were. My father had a constant phrase, 'It isn't a game, it isn't a game!'" "What did your father do?" "He was an outfitter, in that splendid English word. He supplied all the schools, jerseys and jackets and corduroy short trousers. And he was quite right, of course; all the time we boys had other people's lives in our hands, particularly later on."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Or perhaps it was just my own sense of dislocation, out of breath after running between one world and another, a smoky bar with a juke-box and the silent elegance of an unknown house. I had the sitting-room to myself, and wandered round it cautiously, as if I might damage something in the vague disequilibrium of drink. The panelling was painted white, as a backdrop to half a dozen Orst pastels, which glowed like oratory windows from frames three times their size: I frowned through the protecting glass at a prayerful face, the shot cerise of the afterglow. I was trying to remember the housekeeper's name, from what Marcel had told me that morning: she had been his nanny and as good as a mother to him since his real mother's bizarre death. Now I was in the house I thought of that bee-sting again, like the wicked intervention on which a fairy-tale turns, and of the survivors as existing under its long shadow. Echevin was a late father, a handsome man in his sixties, pleasantly bald, and without the moustache I for some reason expected him to wear, so that his face had a sensitive, surprised look of some charm. His eyes were large, with oaky flecks in their pale blue pupils. He had on the grey suiting of a business man, but with unusual tucks and vents, which seemed to hint at his role in the arts. The housekeeper came back with a jug of punch (Mrs Vivier, Mrs Vivier) and he offered me a glass with a little murmur, as if he hadn't yet decided if we were going to be friends. I was hot and on edge and gabbled about Rubens and the charm of old brick in my most ingratiating manner, to which his answers, in rapid, unselfconscious English, were polite but brief. I told myself he didn't need to hear all this, but I was shy of bringing the interview round to the question of Marcel; in the end all he said was that the boy had never known the brief glad hours of childhood, or some such phrase, perhaps a quotation. Paternal love, watchful and removed, as I had known it and lost it myself, showed through for a moment. He saw he didn't need to tell me my behaviour had been ill judged and over-severe—I made an unsolicited promise to be kind to Marcel, and over supper beamed at him and joked in a way he seemed to find quite sinister after my earlier toughness. I didn't know if it was quite tactful to say to Echevin: "Marcel tells me he's not an admirer of Orst's work." It might have been a matter of contention between them. "No," he replied crisply.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I knew with a stab of certainty and regret that he would not have answered candidly if he had thought of me as anything but a remote functionary, whom he was well enough bred to treat as an equal. I had receded in a moment from Praetorian guard to the shabby pedant-retainer of some remote and time-locked noble household. The first person he described, Arnold, had been a frighteningly clever contemporary of his at St Narcissus, who had passed his final exams a year early and was now at university in Leuven, taking about ten different courses simultaneously and aiming to graduate in half the usual time. He was unlikely to be the handsome little chap of Saturday morning, with his rugger-player's crop and bright but hardly intellectual air, and I interrupted after a minute or two's encomium of Arnold's tremendous brain, his fluency in six or seven languages, his almost negligent mastery of the organ and the cello, to insist on the importance of a physical description. "That's really what you should have given me first, you know. Conjure up the outer man, before getting into all this stuff about his mind." "Well, he is quite tall—" "Ah." "Did I say something wrong?" "No, no. Carry on. How tall is he? your height?" "He's a bit taller than me." Luc paused, as if he might have satisfied the requirements of the physical description clause, but I pressed him a little further—kind of clothes, glasses, slight speech impediment—to disguise my lack of interest. "And Arnold's your best friend, is he? you must miss having him around to tell you what's what." "What's what. Yes, that's correct. But we do write to each other and he writes very long letters telling me about what he has been reading and what music he is playing and so forth." "And what do you write about in your letters?" "I tell him what I thought of the books he told me to read, of course; and the music, but less, because he greatly loves organ music, and I hate it very much." "Quite right." Luc gave a grin, the first of our friendship, his eyes almost closed, the long upper lip baring his gums, his moist incisors. And then he seemed to notice how I stared at his mouth, the grin went dead, he flushed and looked away denyingly. Or was it mere self-consciousness at having acted for a second or two so unselfconsciously? Without losing sight of the inquiry into his pals, I digressed briefly into music, and what he had been listening to.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I looked down. "I've missed him a lot actually." "I hear he likes pretty kinky sex." I said, "Yup", and Edie said, "Is this the person you've been working for?" "No, no," I said, with the warm mendacity of tone I knew she would understand—in fact she had named it the Manners Disclaimer years before. "You wouldn't want to work for Matt," Gerard explained to Edie: "he does very shady dealing, and is often in the jug." We laughed, and he added, with a spoiler's relish, "As Edward will tell you, Matt isn't even his real name. He's really called Wim Vermeulen." After a moment of narrow-eyed scepticism, I nodded and sighed in confirmation. "He changed it recently when he came out of prison. Apparently he thought he looked like Matt Dillon." "I think he looks just like him," I said. Later on Edie and I slumped together on the banquette in the corner and half-watched some stubbly frenching going on across the room. "Is this Matt really a crook, as your musical friend says? It does seem rather odd if he's changed his name." "Gerard's just madly jealous of us," I said as I realised the symmetry of the thing. "actually he is a crook, yes. And I'd more or less come to the conclusion that he'd been inside. though I confess the Vermeulen thing is a surprise. I thought he was someone else he knew; letters come for him. I'd even started getting a wee bit jealous." "Do be careful." "It's nothing serious, what I do isn't. He has a lot of business with computers which as you can imagine I have nothing to do with. And then this other stuff. . . it's rather shaming really. He's a sort of fetish merchant. Well, he sells porn videos, very cheaply, by mail—he buys them and copies them, which I suppose is illegal. And he also sells people's clothes, which must be illegal too, and is much more profitable." "Why's that illegal?" "He steals them first. There are guys out there—in here, for all I know—who are prepared to spend a fortune on, say, a sixth-former's Y-fronts or a really sweaty kind of yucky jock-strap." "I hope you didn't spend a fortune on your one blue sock." "No, no, I helped myself to that. The thing about Matt's items is that they're a con. Actually he does sometimes genuinely work to a commission; but as a rule he just passes things off as, say, the young postman's rather heavily soiled smalls, or the lycra shorts of the national schools squash champion, who just happens to come from our very own St Narcissus. He goes to the Town Baths when they are in for their swimming-lessons and helps himself to a handful of the dirtier pieces." Edie had the open-minded expression of someone on holiday good-naturedly learning the rules of a foreign national game.