Surprise

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 Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  I waited, and she began again. “I’d befriended the homosexuals because I didn’t want to be unfaithful to Hugo anymore. I thought that with the homosexuals, I could find companionship without temptation. I hadn’t realized what a hothouse of enticements I would be entering. The talk was all about sex, and everyone fell so easily into each other’s beds, the women as well as the men.” Oh my god, how could I have missed it? Especially after she’d told me that she’d wanted to be part of Djuna Barnes’s lesbian clique! It just hadn’t occurred to me that Anaïs went with women because she was so feminine. That should have been the tipoff, though; she was one of those femme lesbians I’d heard about. Renate had to be one, too—all the paintings of her naked girlfriends! Probably Anaïs’s and Renate’s young husbands were shills. They were probably homosexual, too. I felt as if one of Renate’s artichoke hearts had gotten stuck in my throat. If Anaïs and Renate were lesbians, then they must think I was one, too, and that was why I’d been brought there! Or they believed I was one but hadn’t yet recognized it, so they wanted to help me. The secret was about me: that I was a lesbian, too. But how could I be when I liked sex with men? I didn’t even know if I could do it with women, especially women as old as Anaïs and Renate. Making my voice sound both accepting and neutral I asked, “Are you a lesbian?” “No!” She laughed her delightful jingle. “Oh.” I took a relieved breath but felt some disappointment on the exhale. Anaïs went on, “After I turned forty, I was having a midlife crisis like a man. I was in a sexual frenzy, especially for young, beautiful boys, hetero or not.” Her laugh cracked. “When I met Gore I’d already slept with enough homosexual young men to know it would be a disaster, but I couldn’t help myself. He was so brilliant and beautiful when he was young. Once, in a taxi, he grabbed me into a fierce kiss. I responded, inflamed with desire, and that frightened him. He told the driver to stop, jumped out of the cab, and fled to one of his boys.” “Ouch!” I said. “That wasn’t the worst of it.” Her face coiled with ire. “He used secret confidences we’d shared to parody me in his novels! And there was nothing I could do about it because I had to remain friends with him.” “Why?” “He was my only route to a real publisher.” I was confused. “I thought you had a publisher, Gemor Press.” “Those books were self-published. I handprinted all those books myself.” “What about the British Book Company?” “It was a vanity press in England.” Her sigh was more of a groan. “Hugo wasted so much of his capital on vanity publishing for me.” “Well, at least you handprinted some beautiful books.”

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  This meant, however, that there were many evenings when I sat in my room, knowing that I couldn’t work there, and not knowing what to do, or whom to see. On this particular evening I went down and knocked on the American’s door. There were two Frenchmen standing in the room, who immediately introduced themselves to me as policemen; which did not worry me. I had got used to policemen in Paris bobbing up at the most improbable times and places, asking to see one’s carte d’identité . These policemen, however, showed very little interest in my papers. They were looking for something else. I could not imagine what this would be and, since I knew I certainly didn’t have it, I scarcely followed the conversation they were having with my friend. I gathered that they were looking for some kind of gangster and since I wasn’t a gangster and knew that gangsterism was not, insofar as he had one, my friend’s style, I was sure that the two policemen would presently bow and say Merci, messieurs, and leave. For by this time, I remember very clearly, I was dying to have a drink and go to dinner. I did not have a drink or go to dinner for many days after this, and when I did my outraged stomach promptly heaved everything up again. For now one of the policemen began to exhibit the most vivid interest in me and asked, very politely, if he might see my room. To which we mounted, making, I remember, the most civilized small talk on the way and even continuing it for some moments after we were in the room in which there was certainly nothing to be seen but the familiar poverty and disorder of that precarious group of people of whatever age, race, country, calling, or intention which Paris recognizes as les étudiants and sometimes, more ironically and precisely, as les nonconformistes. Then he moved to my bed, and in a terrible flash, not quite an instant before he lifted the bedspread, I understood what he was looking for. We looked at the sheet, on which I read, for the first time, lettered in the most brilliant scarlet I have ever seen, the name of the hotel from which it had been stolen. It was the first time the word stolen entered my mind. I had certainly seen the hotel monogram the day I put the sheet on the bed. It had simply meant nothing to me. In New York I had seen hotel monograms on everything from silver to soap and towels. Taking things from New York hotels was practically a custom, though, I suddenly realized, I had never known anyone to take a sheet. Sadly, and without a word to me, the inspector took the sheet from the bed, folded it under his arm, and we started back downstairs.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In my astonishment I forgot to whisper, and we both froze and turned anxiously back to the bed. But fortunately Jacob slept on. “Sorry”—I spoke as softly as I could—“but you must admit that this is a bit of a turnaround. I mean, I would have thought it was the last thing . . .” “Yes, I know.” She smiled ruefully and made a helpless gesture. “I know it must sound perfectly mad. Herbert and I, of all people! Can’t you imagine what our friends are going to say? I know it seems illogical, inconsistent. But I’ve often thought that Jacob ought to have some kind of religion. All that ritual, for example— he’d simply love that. And religion is supposed to give some kind of comfort, isn’t it?” She looked up at me tentatively . “Well . . .” I trailed off, unwilling to go down that road, tonight of all nights. I couldn’t resist a little sarcasm. “You wouldn’t feel like coming along yourself, I suppose? You haven’t seen the light? And perhaps Herbert would like to join us?” “Oh, heavens no!” We both laughed, as noiselessly as possible, at the absurdity of the suggestion. “But seriously,” Jenifer continued, “the Blackfriars Mass sounds ideal, because presumably no one would mind if he made some kind of fuss. And he’d get to meet lots of new people at your coffee morning afterwards. I really think that it would do him good.” She sounded as though religion were like an iron tonic: a regular dose each week would automatically induce peace of soul. “He would probably enjoy it,” I conceded somewhat reluctantly. The very idea of Jacob or any Hart in a church was so astounding that it was difficult to imagine. “But”—again I could hear the irony in my voice—“I take it he’ll just be going along for the show. You won’t want me to give him instruction or anything like that?” “Oh Lord, no—he doesn’t have to understand it!” Jenifer exclaimed, slightly scandalized. I stared at her hard: this really was a bit of a cheek. And yet, I reflected, how many Catholics truly understood the labyrinthine complexity of their doctrinal system? “I don’t want him getting any of those ghastly ideas you all have— God, heaven and hell, or anything of that sort,” Jenifer went on, oblivious to any offense that her words might give. “Of course, all those beliefs are nonsense anyway. Ludicrous, in fact! He doesn’t need to know any of that !” “He’ll probably have to know something, though, to help him into the experience,” I said, trying to see how the Mass might look to a complete outsider. “It would all be a sort of fantasy to him, of course, on a par with Guy Fawkes or Goldilocks. But he might grasp the point of some of the stories. Nothing heavy, just—I don’t know—Jesus loves me and is my friend. ” “Well, I suppose that wouldn’t do any harm,” Jenifer said doubtfully.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  There, speaking in tongues resulted in universally understandable language. “Filled with the Holy Spirit,” the followers of Jesus spoke, and people “from every nation,” who spoke many different languages, all understood what they were saying: Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?…In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” (Acts 2:7, 11) Everybody understood what was being said, even though they did not know the language in which it was said. This emphasis on universally intelligible language reverses the story of the Tower of Babel, in which the people of the earth were scattered into different nations and languages (Gen. 11). The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost was the beginning of the undoing of Babel. But in Corinth, speaking in tongues was an unintelligible form of ecstatic speech. It involved an ecstatic state of consciousness during which unintelligible sounds came forth. It was a “private” language, not a universal language as in Acts. Paul’s response was twofold. On the one hand, there should be no hierarchy of persons based on spiritual gifts. Specific gifts—and glossolalia in particular—did not mean that some people were spiritually superior to others. Rather, there are varieties of spiritual gifts and they all come from the same Spirit: Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (12:4–7) The “varieties of gifts” included some that were ecstatic and some that were not: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, and the interpretation of tongues (12:8–10). All, he emphasizes again, “are activated by one and the same Spirit” (12:11). Paul then moves from “Spirit of Christ” language to “body of Christ” language. Just as all the parts of a body are necessary and meant to serve each other, so it is within the body of Christ: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (12:12). All the parts of the body matter. No part of the body should lord it over another part (12:14–26). In Christ, people are equal—everybody matters. Yet, on the other hand, there is a hierarchy of the gifts themselves, even though not a hierarchy of persons based on those gifts. The gift of prophecy is more important than speaking in tongues (14:2–25). This does not dismiss glossolalia; it is one of the gifts and, far from dismissing it, Paul says, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you” (14:18).

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Some of the original benches were still bolted to the unpainted wood walls, and you could see the dark, worn spots where prospectors and miners and their wives and children had sat waiting for the train, their behinds polishing the wood. Since we didn’t have money for furniture, we improvised. A bunch of huge wooden spools, the kind that hold industrial cable, had been dumped on the side of the tracks not far from our house, so we rolled them home and turned them into tables. “What kind of fools would go waste money on store-bought tables when they can have these for free?” Dad said as he pounded the tops of the spools to show us how sturdy they were. For chairs, we used some smaller spools and a few crates. Instead of beds, we kids each slept in a big cardboard box, like the ones refrigerators get delivered in. A little while after we’d moved into the depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn’t do it. We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure. • • • Shortly after we moved into the depot, Mom decided that what we really needed was a piano. Dad found a cheap upright when a saloon in the next town over went out of business, and he borrowed a neighbor’s pickup to bring it home. We slid it off the pickup down a ramp, but it was too heavy to carry. To get it into the depot, Dad devised a system of ropes and pulleys that he attached to the piano in the front yard and ran through the house and out the back door, where they were tied to the pickup. The plan was for Mom to ease the truck forward, pulling the piano into the house while Dad and we kids guided it up a ramp of planks and through the front door. “Ready!” Dad hollered when we were all in our positions. “Okeydoke!” Mom shouted. But instead of easing forward, Mom, who had never quite gotten the hang of driving, hit the gas pedal hard, and the truck shot ahead. The piano jerked out of our hands, sending us lurching forward, and bounced into the house, splintering the door frame. Dad screamed at Mom to slow down, but she kept going and dragged the screeching, chord-banging piano across the depot floor and right through the rear door, splintering its frame, too, then out into the backyard, where it came to rest next to a thorny bush. Dad came running through the house. “What the Sam Hill were you doing?” he yelled at Mom. “I told you to go slow!” “I was only doing twenty-five!” Mom said. “You get mad at me when I go that slow on the highway.” She looked behind her and saw the piano sitting in the backyard. “Oopsie-daisy,” she said.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Victor’s house had a bathroom with a bluish light which was clear enough without being violent. A mirror took up the entire wall above the bath, and the deep, hazy image it reflected softened the atmosphere still further. I saw my body in it, and was amazed to see that it was smaller, slimmer than it had felt a few moments earlier.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  He slipped his feet into his Nikes and walked over to the hall mirror. He was lean from running, but his severe eyes and close-cropped, conservative beard played tricks on his eyes. Most of the time he liked the beard, thought it made him look roguish and rebellious, but tonight when he looked into the scratched antique glass, **his father’s stern visage stared back at him.**

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “I had grown up in art schools. Nude modelling was not a big deal, even though I was actually very bashful, which one wouldn’t expect in this industry. I went looking for nude modelling and the agent asked me if I would consider being in an adult movie. I guess he probably called it a porno movie. I was horrified and insulted and I stormed out. But my boyfriend at the time, who was a musician, said, ‘Well gee, interesting. I think I’ll try it.’ He got a lead role in a very high-end Anthony Spinelli film called Cry for Cindy. “I went and watched what it was like and I was really surprised by the level of professionalism and the respect shown on the set. It wasn’t some little sleazy home job. It was a pretty decent shoot at the time when they used to spend money on them. So I was impressed. I was very much for free love and experimental sexuality and I thought, ‘Well you know this isn’t so bad. I don’t think sex is dirty or bad. The money is great. Why not? I’m going to try it.’ And that’s what I did.”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Japan, which has outlawed the depiction of pubic hair, even on news photos of corpses, is awash with nudity and live sex shows. As Nicholas Bornoff points out, looking up skirts is both a real and metaphorical preoccupation in a country with no elbow room, no leisure time, no privacy, intense segregation of the sexes, and a history replete with sex, violence, and extraordinary inventiveness. Understanding the nuances and motives of Japanese sexual behavior is a daunting task even for a seasoned westerner, and for many Japanese. The apparent contradictions are, I suspect, more like layers than anything else, fitting quite neatly together if one only understands the code. And contradiction is certainly part of the code. Japan interests me to the extent that it is different from everything I know, alarms me with its sudden similarities. Japanese men, who disdain women in ways impossible for a western woman to tolerate, revere female genitalia, femaleness itself, with a reverential passion that most American men would find embarrassing at best. Japanese men are fixated on mother images, passive women, whores, and virgins. They have little, if any, public embarrassment about things sexual. Their historical erotica is perhaps the most beautiful of all time; part of their current erotica, the manga comics, has a hero called Rape Man. These visitors around me are, if anything, getting less of a show here than they can find at home. Live sex shows in Japan sometimes include sex or an attempt at sex between an audience member and the actress. But one of the central events is often a kind of communal gynecology. The women allow the men to examine their genitals briefly, carefully, with magnifying glasses, flashlights, sometimes dildos, and sometimes their latex-covered fingers. Yet whether it is the foreignness of the place, the plethora of large white women, the absence of alcohol, or a combination of these things, they seem subdued and nervous. They huddle, the way Jeannie and I do, and maybe for the same reasons. Later, we waited in the crowd for the next shower show to end. Men everywhere, men all around us; along the balconies, stony-faced men in booths, men in chairs against the wall, and lined up by the steps down to the tables. As we sidled our way down the steps, the men parted for us, stepped aside, stopped talking. I felt less audience than performer for a moment; I felt more like a participant in this hitherto unknown group act.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  I had not expected such prompt acceptance. Fortunately I had made all the necessary arrangements even before writing the letter. If my offer was accepted, I had decided to break up the Johannesburg home. Polak was to have a smaller house, and my wife was to go and settle at Phoenix. I had her full consent to this decision. I do not remember her having ever stood in my way in matters like this. As soon, therefore, as I got the reply from the Governor, I gave the landlord the usual month’s notice of vacating the house, sent some of the things to Phoenix and left some with Polak. I went to Durban and appealed for men. A big contingent was not necessary. We were a party of twenty-four, of whom, besides me, four were Gujaratis. The rest were ex-indentured men from South India, excepting one who was a free Pathan. In order to give me a status and to facilitate work, as also in accordance with the existing convention, the Chief Medical Officer appointed me to the temporary rank of Sergeant Major and three men selected by me to the rank of sergeants and one to that of corporal. We also received our uniforms from the Government. Our Corps was on active service for nearly six weeks. On reaching the scene of the ‘rebellion’, I saw that there was nothing there to justify the name of ‘rebellion’. There was no resistance that one could see. The reason why the disturbance had been magnified into a rebellion was that a Zulu chief had advised non- payment of a new tax imposed on his people, and had assagaied a sergeant who had gone to collect the tax. At any rate my heart was with the Zulus, and I was delighted, on reaching headquarters, to hear that our main work was to be the nursing of the wounded Zulus. The Medical Officer in charge welcomed us. He said the white people were not willing nurses for the wounded Zulus, that their wounds were festering, and that he was at his wits’ end. He hailed our arrival as a godsend for those innocent people, and he equipped us with bandages, disinfectants, etc., and took us to the improvised hospital. The Zulus were delighted to see us. The white soldiers used to peep through the railing that separated us from them and tried to dissuade us from attending to the wounds. And as we would not heed them, they became enraged and poured unspeakable abuse on the Zulus.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  The location residents were removed by special train to Klipspruit Farm near Johannesburg, where they were supplied with provisions by the Municipality at public expense. This city under canvas looked like a military camp. The people who were unaccustomed to this camp life were distressed and astonished over the arrangements; but they did not have to put up with any particular inconvenience. I used to cycle out to them daily. Within twenty-four hours of their stay they forgot all their misery and began to live merrily. Whenever I went there I found them enjoying themselves with song and mirth. Three weeks’ stay in the open air evidently improved their health. So far as I recollect, the location was put to the flames on the very next day after its evacuation. The Municipality showed not the slightest inclination to save anything from the conflagration. About this very time, and for the same reason, the Municipality burnt down all its timber in the market, and sustained a loss of some ten thousand pounds. The reason for this drastic step was the discovery of some dead rats in the market. The Municipality had to incur heavy expenditure, but it successfully arrested the further progress of the plague, and the city once more breathed freely. 97THE MAGIC SPELL OF A BOOKThe black plague enhanced my influence with the poor Indians, and increased my business and my responsibility. Some of the new contacts with Europeans became so close that they added considerably to my moral obligations. I made the acquaintance of Mr.Polak in the vegetarian resturant, just as I had made that of Mr.West. One evening a young man dining at a table a little way off sent me his card expressing a desire to see me. i invited him to come to my table, which he did. ‘I am sub-editor of the The Critic,’ he said ‘When I read your letter to the press about the plague. I felt a strong desire to see you. I am glad to have this opportunity.’ Mr. Polak’s candour drew me to him. The same evening we got to know each other. We seemed to hold closely similar views on the essential things of life. He liked simple life. He had a wonderful faculty of translating into practice anything that appealed to his intellect. Some of the changes that he had made in his life were as prompt as they were radical.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Within seconds he has worked his way down my body and it is no small surprise when he whispers up to me, "You have a really nice pussy." A sound bursts out of me that I pray is more laugh than cackle, prompting him to ask what's funny. For starters, I hadn't known this was a word men actually used outside of lewd conversations with their friends. Second, I can't believe he thinks this line will work on me – am I supposed to believe that one so-called middle-aged "pussy" looks qualitatively different from another? But the well-mannered girl in me rushes to apologize, "No, it's not funny, I'm sorry, it's so nice, thank you, it just surprised me as no one has ever told me that before." "Really?" he asks. "Come on. No one? I don't believe that." "I swear," I insist. "Don't they all kind of look the same? I mean, more or less?" "No, not at all. They all look different, smell different, taste different. Don't you ever take a close look at your own to know how good it looks?" "Um no, I never have," I say, thinking the last time I got a good look was probably when I caught an accidental, horrified glimpse in a mirror when I gave birth to Georgia seven years ago. "But now I'm intrigued."

• From Cultish (2021)

  Amway, which sells home goods and personal hygiene products like soap and toothpaste, is a portmanteau of “American Way.” Plenty of modern companies try to sell goods by associating them with larger identity benefits, like by buying this trendy lip gloss or that beach towel made out of recycled plastic, you will establish yourself as a hip, healthy, sexy, ecofriendly person in general. Sociologists call these “organizational ideologies,” and they’re not necessarily all bad. Most successful brand founders agree that having a “cultlike company culture” with intense values and ritual s is simply necessary to secure repeat customers and loyal employees in today’s dubious, transient market. These organizational ideologies should be taken with a grain of salt, of course, since basing one’s politics, healthcare decisions, and very identity on what profit-driven brands have to say, even (and especially) ones that self-identify as “ethical,” “sustainable,” etc., is risky business. “Woke capitalism” does not equal social justice, just as hawking diet pills to your Facebook friends does not make you heavenly blessed. By nature, MLMs take their organizational ideologies way further than most other companies, linking themselves not just to everyday earthly benefits but to the very meaning of lif e. Direct sales slogans boast spiritually charged promise s like “Being Younique is better than being perfect” and “Existing and living are not the same thing. Choose one.” A Pinterest graphic created by the essential oils MLM dōTERRA lists the recipe for a “forgiveness” blend that will allow consumers to “become empathetic, forgiving, freeing, light, loving, tolerant, understanding.” Before his death, one of Amway’s billionaire cofounders, Jay Van Andel, vowed that involvement with his company “gets people into a new life of excitement, promise, profit, and hope.” You might think that an industry as unhip and retro-seeming as direct sales might have gone out of style already. It’s hard to believe it’s survived the internet, where so many ex-MLMers put these companies on blast, spilling their stories of psychological abuse and money loss. Search “MLM scam” on YouTube, and endless pages of videos like “The MLM ‘Girl Boss’ Narrative Is a Lie,” “I Filed for Bankruptcy After LuLaRoe and Now Work 2 Jobs,” and “AMWAY: The Final Straw (with Audio EVIDENCE!)—How I Quit My MLM Cult” accumulate millions of views. Anti-MLMers occupy passionate nooks of Instagram and TikTok. In 2020, TikTok banned MLM recruiters from the platform altogether. There is no shortage of incriminating evidence against the #bossbabe industrial complex. And yet MLM rhetoric is such a successful assault on the human spirit, so consistently compelling and adaptable, that these companies only continue to thrive. In the 2010s, as ingredient-conscious millennials began overtaking the consumer market and demand for “all-natural” “nontoxic” personal care products increased, the shrewdest MLM founders accommodated. Direct sales wasn’t just for old-school Suzy Homemakers anymore, it was for the savvy youth.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Let’s go for a walk.” I felt nervous, as I invariably do when someone says my name twice with a hmm in between. But I got up, leaving my books behind, and walked toward the Smoking Hole. But as soon as we got to the edge of the woods, Takumi turned away from the dirt road. “Not sure the Hole is safe,” he said. Not safe? I thought. It’s the safest place to smoke a cigarette in the known universe. But I just followed him through the thick brush, weaving through pine trees and threatening, chest-high brambly bushes. After a while, he just sat down. I cupped my hand around my lighter to protect the flame from the slight breeze and lit up. “Alaska ratted out Marya,” he said. “So the Eagle might know about the Smoking Hole, too. I don’t know. I’ve never seen him down that way, but who knows what she told him.” “Wait, how do you know?” I asked, dubious. “Well, for one thing, I figured it out. And for another, Alaska admitted it. She told me at least part of the truth, that right at the end of school last year, she tried to sneak off campus one night after lights-out to go visit Jake and then got busted. She said she was careful—no headlights or anything—but the Eagle caught her, and she had a bottle of wine in her car, so she was fucked. And the Eagle took her into his house and gave her the same offer he gives to everyone when they get fatally busted. ‘Either tell me everything you know or go to your room and pack up your stuff.’ So Alaska broke and told him that Marya and Paul were drunk and in her room right then. And then she told him God knows what else. And so the Eagle let her go, because he needs rats to do his job. She was smart, really, to rat on one of her friends, because no one ever thinks to blame the friends. That’s why the Colonel is so sure it was Kevin and his boys. I didn’t believe it could be Alaska, either, until I figured out that she was the only person on campus who could’ve known what Marya was doing. I suspected Paul’s roommate, Longwell—one of the guys who pulled the armless-mermaid bit on you. Turns out he was at home that night. His aunt had died. I checked the obit in the paper. Hollis Burnis Chase—hell of a name for a woman.” “So the Colonel doesn’t know?” I asked, stunned. I put out my cigarette, even though I wasn’t quite finished, because I felt spooked. I’d never suspected Alaska could be disloyal. Moody, yes. But not a rat. “No, and he can’t know, because he’ll go crazy and get her expelled.

• From Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin (2017)

  Anaïs scanned another card. “I told Hugo that you had agreed to receive my mail at your Westwood apartment address and deliver it to me at the rest ranch along with my typing.” I used my notepad to take notes. It was an alternate history of my life! She carefully replaced that card and pulled out a card just behind it. “November 28, 1962. I rented a post office box at Flax Stationer’s in Westwood, four blocks from UCLA, in Tristine Rainer’s name.” She looked up at me. “I thought you were going to college at UCLA because Rupert studied forestry there, and I didn’t realize there was another university in Los Angeles.” She returned to scanning the card. “I picked up Hugo’s mail, sent in care of you at the stationer’s address. Did you know that at Flax’s you can put down a P.O. box number so it looks like an apartment number?” She told me to memorize my fictional previous address on Lindbrook Drive in Westwood. “This last trip to New York, I told Hugo that you had transferred colleges and now your rent was cheaper, so you could afford a phone.” I was taken aback that Anaïs had implicated me in her deception of Hugo over the past two years without my knowledge, yet tickled that, at least fictively, I’d been a part of her life. “This is beginning to make sense,” I said. “Because the letterhead on the invitation we sent was from USC and not UCLA, you had to tell Hugo that I’d transferred colleges, right?” “Yes, and you made the whole thing believable with your story about universities not wanting to take their own students. Is that true? Familiarity breeds contempt?” “It’s more like fear of incest.” “What!?” “Nepotism. Universities want diverse points of view, so they prefer students they haven’t taught.” “I will never understand those places, but it’s wonderful that you do.” She refastened the elastic band on her little lie box and returned it to a zippered pocket in her purse. “Hugo being able to reach me through you, and you reinforcing the validity of my trips out here, may restore his confidence in me.” Tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. “Please, help me, Tristine. I can’t change my story anymore; things are too unstable right now. I think Hugo’s having an affair. I have to go right back to New York because I’m afraid he’s going to divorce me!” She quickly wiped away tears that had leaked, leaving streaks of kohl on the sides of her face. My heart went out to her; I had felt bad for Hugo because she cheated on him, but if he had affairs, what else was she to do? Be a victim? Maybe she should just divorce Hugo and, like Lady Chatterley, marry Rupert for real. “I was wondering,” I asked her, “why Rupert introduced himself as your husband to me if he’s no longer with the Forest Service.”

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  "I want to ask you a question, something I've been pondering lately." "Sure," he says, "go ahead." "Why do men love oral sex so much? I don't mean receiving it, I mean giving it. Every man I've been with finds it a huge turn-on, and many love it or seem to need it more than intercourse. Why is that? What is it about it that you find so alluring?" I ask. "Isn't it obvious?" he says. "No. Don't get me wrong, I really love having sex. I like being the recipient of oral sex and like giving it, but it's not the main attraction for me. I always wonder why men love to be that up close and personal with a woman's pussy," I say. "Well, first of all, it's not every pussy. They're not all the same. Some aren't appealing at all. You just happen to have a really nice one," he says and a short, loud laugh escapes my lips. "Why? What about it?" I ask. "The way it smells. The smell is very important. The way it feels. Yours is wet and soft and inviting. The way it tastes, like nothing else in the world," he tells me. "Fascinating," I say. I am amazed. I could not say these things back to him if he asked me what I find enticing about giving blow jobs. Mostly what I like about them is that men like them and it seems so easy to please them. Maybe, I think with growing concern, I don't love giving them because I'm not good at it.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Soon after we got together, we attended a dinner party at which a (presumably straight, or at least straight-married) woman who’d known Harry for some time turned to me and said, “So, have you been with other women, before Harry?” I was taken aback. Undeterred, she went on: “Straight ladies have always been hot for Harry.” Was Harry a woman? Was I a straight lady? What did past relationships I’d had with “other women” have in common with this one? Why did I have to think about other “straight ladies” who were hot for my Harry? Was his sexual power, which I already felt to be immense, a kind of spell I’d fallen under, from which I would emerge abandoned, as he moved on to seduce others? Why was this woman, whom I barely knew, talking to me like this? When would Harry come back from the bathroom? There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna Barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she “just loved Thelma.” Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it’s politically maddening, but I’ve also always thought it a little romantic—the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one. The story brings to mind art historian T. J. Clark’s defense of his interest in the eighteenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin from imaginary interlocutors: “Calling an interest in Poussin nostalgic or elitist is like calling the interest one has, say, in the person one cares for most deeply ‘hetero- (or homo-) sexist,’ or ‘exclusive’ or ‘proprietorial.’ Yes, that may be right: those may be roughly the parameters, and regrettable; but the interest itself may still be more complete and human—still carry more of human possibility and compassion—than interests uncontaminated by any such affect or compulsion.” Here, as elsewhere, contamination makes deep rather than disqualifies. Besides, everyone knows that Barnes and Stein had relationships with women besides Thelma and Alice. Alice knew, too: she was apparently so jealous upon finding out that Stein’s early novel Q. E. D. told the coded story of a love triangle involving Stein and a certain May Bookstaver that Alice—who was also Stein’s editor and typist—found all sorts of weasely ways to omit every appearance of the word May or may when she retyped Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, henceforth an unwitting collaboration. By February I was driving around the city looking at apartment after apartment, trying to find one big enough for us and your son, whom I hadn’t yet met. Eventually we found a house on a hill with gleaming dark wood floors and a view of a mountain and a too-high rent. The day we got the keys, we slept together in a fit of giddiness on a thin blanket spread out over the wood floor of what would become our first bedroom.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  About thirty different plates appeared in the course of the four-hour experience. The kitchen itself defies convention: cool, quiet, elegant, and modern, with large picture windows and works of sculpture placed throughout. A crew of thirty-five to fifty-five cooks serve one seating per night to an equal number of customers. It is a serious, relatively serene environment, light years away from the fiery mosh pits and sweaty submarinelike spaces most cooks are familiar with. Voices are seldom raised. There are no shouts or curses, no clatter of pots, no oven doors being kicked closed. The chef and I ate at a plain, white-covered table devoid of elaborate setups or floral arrangement. Whether it was more "experience" or "dinner" I will probably spend the rest of my life figuring out. The evening was a long gastro-thrill ride ranging from the farthest reaches of chemistry class (a single raw egg yolk shellacked in caramel and encased in gold leaf) to the stunningly simple (two pristine, fresh prawns cooked in their own sauce—no other ingredient). Mr. Adria, who insists he can tell everything important about people by watching them eat, set the pace, eating every course along with me (and in some cases ahead of me), explaining which striking-looking objects to eat first, which second, and how. "Eat in one bite! Quickly!" Pace and rhythm are important, he insisted. "One musn't eat too slowly or one gets sluggish and tired." "Snacks" arrived first. A green "pine frappe cocktail," artichoke chips, an austere black plate with toasts, sea salt, finely chopped peanuts, and a white toothpaste tube of homemade peanut butter hit the table at the same time as "raspberry lily pads," hazelnut in "textures," lemon tempura with licorice, rhubarb with black pepper, a terrifically tasty row of salty sea cucumber "cracklings" arranged on a tiny black rack, and large puffs of pork scratchings with a yogurt dipping sauce. "Jamon de toro" arrived next. A pun on the word toro (bull), it was in fact fatty tuna belly cured like Iberico ham, served with silver pincers to pick up the ethereally thin slices without bunching or tearing them. The pincers looked (intentionally) like a surgical implement.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Adria watched me. eat each course as it appeared, his face lighting up again and again as my expression registered surprise. "Cherries with ham" looked like fondant-covered cherries but were in fact cherries glazed entirely in ham fat. The "golden egg," a tiny golden pillow of egg yolk wrapped in caramel and gold leaf, confronted the palate with flavors in distinct sequence: shock, disorientation, then comforting reassurance. A tiny "Parmesan ice cream sandwich" was an extreme example of a play on comfort food: a salty-sweet remembrance of a childhood that never happened, one of many throughly delicious practical jokes. Apple "caviar"—tiny globules of unearthly apple essence—were served in a faux Petrossian tin. Two crepe courses, one made with chicken skin and the next made, improbably, entirely of milk (!), were a pleasure to eat. Pea "ravioli" was a seemingly impossible concoction in which the bright green, liquidy essence of baby peas was wrapped only in itself with no pasta or outer shell to contain it: a ravioli filling miraculously suspended in space. Carrot "air" was an intensely flavored, truly lighter-than-air froth of carrot and tangerine served in a cut-glass bowl. I accidentally inhaled while bringing the spoon to my mouth—aspirating some into my lungs—and struggled to maintain composure as I coughed and turned red. The inconceivable-sounding iced powder of foie gras with foie gras consomme was one of those revelatory concepts for which Adria is famous. A hot, perfectly clear consomme of foie shared a bowl with a just-fallen snow of foie gras "powder." Instructed to eat from one side of the dish then the other, alternating between hot and cold, I was awestruck by the fact that the frozen, finely ground powder somehow maintained its structural integrity in a bowl of hot broth. It defied all known physical properties of the universe. And it was as good as anything cooked anywhere—a direct rebuke to centuries of classical cooking, miles out in front of all the "foie gras cappuccinos" and stacks of "pan-seared foie gras with chutney and microgreens" one sees everywhere these days. I thought it the strongest, best argument for what Adria says he's trying to do. "Every night is like opening night," he says. "It has to be . . . magic."

• From Like Family

  Oxygenated , I remembered from biology. Blood was never that bright inside the body. “I’m cured,” Jacy said, smiling. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] SOON AFTER JACY WAS parasite-free, our neighbor, Kevin Stringer, had a pool party. A Santa Ana wind blew that day, hot as a furnace, singed with chlorine and briquettes. I was trying to nap on the diving board but couldn’t get comfortable. My suit had dried to my body, pinching under my arms and at my hipbones, and the board felt like a stucco crucifix. Someone to my left whooped out “Marco!” but the voices answering “Polo!” were as muffled and distant as pings in a pop can. I hadn’t eaten all day, and my head buzzed, a hive. I was enjoying this feeling of hollowness; my bones felt closer to themselves, more private somehow. Just as I started to twitch into a sweaty sleep, someone found the stereo. Supertramp began to pulse from Kevin’s bedroom window: Good-bye, stranger, it’s been nice. Hope you find your paradise. We had this album memorized. When Valerie processed the lyrics of this song in particular, she worried that, in the singing, Amber was mourning her lost innocence. She needn’t have. Amber’s innocence was firmly intact. Like her breasts, Amber’s virginity preceded her into a room, a pink flag with its own gravity. She’d give it up for love, she insisted, but since none of us knew what that was, she might as well have been saying she’d give it up for Jesus or space aliens. Jacy thought Amber was a space alien. “What’s so precious about your pussy?” she challenged. “Do you want to die a nun or something?” I looked up from the board, blinking against a red, red sun, to see Jacy straddling Kevin’s shoulders. They were playing chicken with Amber and her brother Bo, but Amber’s weight kept Bo toppling over backward, water flooding his nose. Jacy did a victory wiggle, shaking her bikinied butt. She hadn’t slept with Kevin yet and was clearly working it. I was more worried about Rhonda Snelling, who had slipped out the side gate, some twenty minutes before, with Teresa’s boyfriend. Although Brian was relatively new on the scene—they’d been dating a few months—I knew Teresa really liked him. When she brought him around for the Caligula party, her hair was in sausage curls and she was laughing with one hand over her chipped tooth, the way she did when she wanted to be pretty. Now Rhonda was likely to ruin everything. Her predatory interest in other people’s boyfriends was legendary. When Wendy Prather confessed her crush on a boy she worked with at Foster’s Freeze, it wasn’t a week before Rhonda was in the shop in red pedal pushers and a tank top, licking her strawberry cone obscenely. The sun moved through its stations, and finally it was five o’clock.