Tenderness

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 Untrue (2018)

  Proof that female sexual fluidity and infidelity are more widespread than we might imagine, and happen in the most unexpected places and at every life stage, also presented itself in a conversation with my friend and colleague Deesha Philyaw, a writer and activist. She told me about a short-story collection she was working on, about sex and church ladies. Chapter Seven Significant OthernessDeesha Philyaw’s “Eula” is a short story full of beauty, surprise, tenderness, and disappointment. Set in the last hours of 1999 and early 2000, but ranging further back in time into the lives and relationship of its two main characters, Caroletta and Eula, it brings you in fast with its deft alternation between suggestive minimalism à la Joan Didion and the intimate mingling of recipes and sex that made you love Heartburn by Nora Ephron. But only if those artists were refracted through the sensibility of Zora Neale Hurston, a participant-observer of cultures of blackness, a storyteller with skin in the game. From the first sentences, you feel the immediacy of these characters and their connection: Eula books the suite in Clarksville, two towns over. I bring the food. This year, it’s sushi for me and cold cuts and potato salad for her. Nothing heavy. Just enough to sustain us. And I bring the champagne. This year, which like every year could be our last, I bring three bottles of André Spumante…and year 2000 glasses to wear. The lenses are the two zeroes in the middle. For all we know, the Y2K bug will have us sitting in the dark one second after Dick Clark counts down in Times Square. But that’s alright with me. Because that André sips just as well in the dark. After we get settled in, Eula digs into the potato salad…She’s real particular about what she eats. About most things really. She likes things just so…But she can’t tell that I bought the potato salad from Publix, added some chopped boiled egg, mustard, pickle relish, and paprika, then put it in my Tupperware bowl. She eats seconds, pats her belly, and tells me that I outdid myself. Eula and Caroletta are both schoolteachers, and “best friends for half our lives.” They met in tenth grade, we learn, “the only black girls in our Honors English class.” They were both diligent but also daydreamers, planning their double Hawaiian wedding in the margins of their math notebooks, connected and complicit. “Our husbands would be railroad men like our fathers. We’d teach at the high school, join the ladies auxiliary at church, and be next-door neighbors. Our kids would play together,” the narrator explains of the plans they nurtured as girls.

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

  But she had to get up and get out early in the morning so she learned to shove those feelings aside and put on a no-nonsense attitude. That attitude I remember real well. It’s helped me a lot to know now that her coldness was a cover-up in order to get her through the day. I began to clue in to how hard life had been for her when I was around eighteen. I realize now that she hadn’t meant for me to have been so unhappy and lonely when I was a kid. I’m beginning to realize, too, that she was really happy in her marriage until Dad fell apart financially, but then she was really trapped after the divorce. I was trapped with her. And then I trapped myself when I married Brad.” With grim humor she said, “I’m an expert on traps.” Few relationships are as complex as that between mothers and daughters in divorced families. The strands from both sides include love, longstanding anger, compassion, and guilt. But the fact remains that mothers and daughters in divorced families are more conflict-ridden than their counterparts in good intact families. Their relationship is less stable, fluctuates over the years, and reflects more ambivalence on behalf of both generations. The postdivorce relationship is complicated by the undiluted intensity of these feelings and each woman’s reciprocal need for love and approval. Fathers can buffer the mother-daughter relationship, helping the girl separate from her mother and move on to create her own career and new family. The stepfather can also serve this function in a divorced family. But if there is no one to play this role, the two women often engage in a prolonged push-pull, going from too much closeness to too much distance. While profoundly distressing to both, this situation also fails to help the girl resolve her conflicts and get on with her adult life. Paula spent her whole childhood and adolescence locked in conflict with her mother, which did not cool until she divorced and returned home at midnight with her child and was taken in. The two women then had the opportunity to reformulate their relationship. The mother took on an important supportive role as grandmother and the child consolidated the new bridge between mother and daughter. In general, the arrival of a baby drew mothers and daughters of divorce in this study closer together. Daughters who had kept their mothers at bay now welcomed any and all help with the child. As new mothers, they finally began to understand how much sacrifice is required to care for a baby and young child. Perhaps their mothers were not as bad as they thought. Maybe they had had good mothering before the breakup. As their anger at their moms receded, the daughters’ compassion emerged more strongly. The result was a greater understanding from which both women benefited.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I must admit that certain indiscreet stories whispered in my ear by my mistresses served to awaken in me some sympathy for these much mocked and little understood spouses. Such liaisons, agreeable enough when the women were expert in love, became truly moving when these women were beautiful. It was a study of the arts for me; I came to know statues, and to appreciate at close range a Cnidian Venus or a Leda trembling under the weight of the swan. It was the world of Tibullus and Propertius: a melancholy, an ardor somewhat feigned but intoxicating as a melody in the Phrygian mode, kisses on back stairways, scarves floating across a breast, departures at dawn, and wreaths of flowers left on doorsteps. I knew almost nothing of these women; the part of their lives which they conceded to me was narrowly confined between two half-opened doors; their love, of which they never ceased talking, seemed to me sometimes as light as one of their garlands; it was like a fashionable jewel, or a fragile and costly fillet, and I suspected them of putting on their passion with their necklaces and their rouge. My own life was not less mysterious to them; they hardly desired to know it, preferring to dream vaguely, and mistakenly, about it; I came to understand that the spirit of the game demanded these perpetual disguises, these exaggerated avowals and complaints, this pleasure sometimes simulated and sometimes concealed, these meetings contrived like the figures of a dance. Even in our quarrels they expected a conventional response from me, and the weeping beauty would wring her hands as if on the stage. I have often thought that men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself: they delight in fingers reddened with henna, in perfumes rubbed on the skin, and in the thousand devices which enhance that beauty and sometimes fabricate it entirely. These tender idols differed in every respect from the tall females of the barbarians, or from our grave and heavy peasant women; they were born from the golden volutes of great cities, from the vats of the dyers or the baths' damp vapor, like Venus from the foam of Greek seas. They seemed hardly separable from the feverish sweetness of certain evenings in Antioch, from the excited stir of mornings in Rome, from the famous names which they bore, or from that luxury amid which their last secret was to show themselves nude, but never without ornament. I should have desired more: to see the human creature unadorned, alone with herself as she indeed must have been at least sometimes, in illness or after the death of a first-born child, or when a wrinkle began to show in her mirror. A man who reads, reflects, or plans belongs to his species rather than to his sex; in his best moments he rises even above the human.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He appeared almost embarrassed to touch on the purely routine matters we were supposed to discuss. I liked him—austere, detached at first, fastidiously bachelorly—& was not surprised when keen feelings flashed under the surface of his conversation. At the end, after many formalities, he talked briefly about Meroe, & the first time he had seen the pyramids there. It was as if both of us, lightly warmed with drink, suddenly felt our spirits freed. For a moment we were very far away from Pall Mall, & though little was said we shared an exalted almost tender glance. June 23, 1925 : Last night a bizarre encounter. I was at Sandy’s studio in the afternoon when without a word he & Otto tore off their clothes & clambered on to the roof. I sat around reading about Lawrence of Arabia and Queen Marie of Rumania in the Times Literary Supplement until I had mustered the insouciance to join them. They are brown as what—Corsicans?—all over, but of course I need not have felt ashamed. Otto seemed to respect me more when he saw how sunburned I was. ‘We must go to the Tropics,’ he said to Sandy, ‘and run around like the darkies.’ I wished we were there too. It felt selfconscious & absurd lying up on the leads as if we were laundry, & there was something so prurient about the nudity when I compared it to days on tour when all our party wd stop at a river, & the men strip off their shirts & drawers to wash them & spread them on the boulders to dry. I nursed those little idylls to myself, & thought of sitting among the bushes with my pipe while the men dived & splashed, or roamed through the muddy shallows. Then we were many miles from civilisation; here I made strategic play with the tepee of the paper while Otto & Sandy brazened it out in a strange discipline of their own. In the evening we wandered down to Regent Street. All along by the Café Royal people were swarming around & there was a mood (which was quite oriental) of clamour & grime with underneath it a great passive summery calm. Life in England is so little of the streets that it was delicious to loiter. There were fantastical characters about, & several girlish young men, at intervals, waiting & waiting. One felt how this corner of Town has seen so much of that kind of thing. Across the road in the monumental mason’s showroom, the angels hovered with outstretched wings and lilies in their hands: they seemed to reproach us mutely through the plate-glass windows—or perhaps they cast some benediction over us.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The illumination of dawn was as nothing compared with the smile which arose on that overwhelmed countenance. Some days later I saw that same smile again, but more hidden, and ambiguously veiled: at supper, Polemo, who dabbled in chiromancy, wished to examine the hand of the youth, that palm which alarmed even me by its astonishing fall of stars. But the boy withdrew it and closed it gently, almost chastely. He intended to keep the secret of his game, and that of his end. We made a stop at Jerusalem. There I took occasion to study the plan for a new capital which I proposed to construct on the site of the Jewish city laid low by Titus. Good administration in Judaea and increasing commerce with the Orient showed the need for developing a great metropolis at this intersection of routes. I had in mind the usual Roman capital: Aelia Capitolina would have its temples, its markets, its public baths, and its sanctuary of the Roman Venus. My recent absorption in passionate and tender cults led me to choose a grotto on Mount Moriah as best suited for celebrating the rites of Adonis. These projects roused indignation in the Jewish masses: the wretched creatures actually preferred their ruins to a city which would afford them the chance of gain, of knowledge, and of pleasure. When our workmen approached those crumbling walls with pickaxes they were attacked by the mob. I went ahead notwithstanding: Fidus Aquila, who was soon to employ his genius for planning in the construction of Antino�polis, took up the work at Jerusalem. I refused to see in those heaps of rubble the rapid growth of hatred. A month later we arrived at Pelusium. I arranged to restore the tomb of Pompey there: the deeper I delved into affairs of the Orient the more I admired the political genius of that vanquished opponent of the great Julius. Pompey, in endeavoring to bring order to this uncertain world of Asia, sometimes seemed to me to have worked more effectively for Rome than Caesar himself. That reconstruction was one of my last offerings to History's dead; I was soon to be forced to busy myself with other tombs. Our arrival in Alexandria was kept discreetly quiet. The triumphal entry was postponed until the empress should come. Though she traveled little she had been persuaded to pass the winter in the milder climate of Egypt; Lucius, but poorly recovered from a persistent cough, was to try the same remedy.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I felt relieved that no one was in the main part of the house. He followed me wearily, the wet corduroy chafing his thighs; I looked down hastily at the turn of the stair and saw his blurred brown footprints on the carpet. In the flat, I helped him take off his clothes. He groaned and ached as I pulled his arm back to slide the shirt off. ‘My fucking shoulder, man,’ he half-shouted, and I passed my trembling fingertips gently over his back and he breathed in suddenly when I brushed a bruise that was mysteriously welling up in the blackness of his skin. He was shivering and chilled, his lower lip hanging miserably. I pulled off his shoes and stood them on the doormat, becoming more practical, concerned only with immediate necessities. At the same time he grew more passive and inert. I pulled down his zip and tugged his tight, rain-slimed corduroys and his little briefs down over his ass and thighs; he managed to lift each foot as I pulled the wet, resisting trousers off, kneeling in front of him and glancing at his shrunken cock and his scrotum shrivelled up tight with cold and fear. I propelled him to the bathroom and sat him down before attempting to clean and dress his wound. It was very painful, but he said nothing beyond the occasional ouch. I used some lint that I found in the cupboard, and stuck it down with several small Band-Aids. When James was back I would ring him. I ran a hot bath and got Arthur to sit in it whilst I gently sponged water down his back, washed his flat muscular chest, lifted his arms and soaped his armpits and sides. Then I slid my hand between his legs and stroked his cock and balls. He lay back in the long, deep tub as if relaxing. ‘Darling, what happened?’ ‘I got in a fight.’ He looked at me crossly but sorrily. ‘I wouldn’t have come back here, only I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t see why you should get mixed up with all this.’ ‘Who did you get in a fight with?’ ‘My brother—Harold. My big brother. He got this knife, he cut me with it—the fucking bastard cut me with it.’ He looked at me with a kind of tired outrage. ‘I can’t go back there no more, my brother’ll murder me. Only he don’t know where I am, ’ere. I’ll have to stay ’ere—for a bit, Will.’ He splashed his hands down in the water. Blood was seeping out again through the lint of his dressing.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I wasn’t allowed to join in these dances: like the little circuits through the flat they had a secret, child’s logic of their own, and to come near was to risk being kicked or jabbed by his swinging limbs. Then he would give up and fall recklessly on top of me on the sofa, panting in my face, kissing me, full of clumsy humour and longing. We were so close that I was disturbed every time he span off into his own world: the sudden detachment, a spell broken, a faint fear of losing him altogether. On occasion he would laugh very loudly at something mildly funny, and keep on laughing as he slapped himself and pointed at my puzzled, cross expression. I couldn’t understand where this laughter came from; it seemed to me some new nihilistic teen thing I was already too old for. I had seen kids in Oxford Street or on Tottenham Court Road laughing in the same cold, painful, helpless way. In the end I would go out of the room and after a few moments he would follow me, suddenly silent. He would approach me intently, licking whatever part of me he came to first. Then he was no longer the dead soul from the amusement arcade or the windswept corner, and I had the infinitely touching sense of him quite apart from the crowd, slipping off to clubs and bars in pursuit of his own romantic destiny. I was moved by his singleness, and then wanted to smother it in sex and possessiveness. He was most out of hand when we drank. Before he met me he had got through his evenings on a few Cokes and cans of beer, or whatever the men—terrible, he made them sound, as he nostalgically described them—bought for him as they chatted him up. Now he was exposed daily to my raw intake of wine, whisky and champagne. Whisky he sipped at suspiciously, and still had not got an adult taste for; but wine he loved, and he put back champagne as if it were lager, with awful belches and chuckles after each glass. Then his priority was to keep me informed of his condition: ‘I’m a wee bit tipsy, William,’ he would say almost at once. Then, ‘Will? Will? You could call me pissed.’ And a glass or two later, ‘Man, I am wrecked, man.’ It was when he grew quiet and gazed into the air, muttering ‘Drunk again’ as if in recollection of a mother chiding a father, that he was liable to change.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  When I check on Rosie in Cookie’s room and hear Norm’s steady breathing on the sofa, I take the empty couch across from him. The kids sleep long and quietly—they look comfortable for the first time in weeks. I wait until the sun comes up before I feel safe enough to fall asleep. In the morning, Rosie wakes Norm and me by turning on the TV. “Can we have some cereal?” she asks me. “Of course,” I tell her, just grateful we made it through our first night alone. “It’s in the kitchen.” She hesitates a moment, then twirls her hair around her finger. “Gi, will you get it for us? Cereal always tastes the best when you make it.” I smile, and ruffle her hair as I head into the kitchen. After they eat, the three of us sit down to play our favorite card game to pass the time: five hundred rummy. I pretend to be engaged as the kids laugh and tease each other. There’s dust floating around us in the sunlight, collecting everywhere—on the wood floor; in the corners of the cabinets and shelves. Rosie and Norm look at me with lost eyes when I jump up from the game and yank a towel from inside one of the pillows. I open the front door to let air in and sigh. “I’m tired of being surrounded by filth.” Cookie always wants the place to be clean when she comes home, and chronic tidying up has become a means of keeping peace. Fortunately, I only have the downstairs to clean, because that’s the only part of the house Cookie will ever bother to see. My eyes are on the sink when I march into the kitchen. Dishes are perennially piled up and I hate doing them. My habit of putting this chore off until last is one of the causes of our cockroach problem, but I know that after they’ve been sitting for a while in the summer heat, this has to be a priority. I grab my bottle of Heinz white vinegar from under the sink. We always have it to clean with, but because it’s too bulky and heavy to steal, we have to spend food stamps on it. I splash some vinegar over the dishes, hoping a thorough washing will deflect the army of cockroaches. Upstairs, I gather our dirty clothes from the floors in our rooms, run them downstairs to the bathroom, and run the tub full of cold water. I hold a half-bar of Ivory soap underneath the faucet to create bubbles, then scrub the clothes with the soap and rinse them until they feel clean. Normally, I wash only a shirt or two at a time, but Cookie or the landlord could show up any minute, and if we have to take off, it could be weeks before we see another bathtub.

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  It is now I who search for him. Each night, very softly, I leave the house and I go by a long path, to his meadow, to see him sleeping. Sometimes I rest for a long time without speaking, happy merely in seeing him, and I approach my lips to his and kiss only his breath. Then suddenly I cast myself upon him. He awakens in my arms, and he cannot raise himself, for I struggle. He gives up, and laughs, and clasps me. Thus we play in the night. ... First dawn, O wicked light, thou already! In what ever-darkened cave, on what subterranean meadow, can we love so long that we may lose remembrance of thee.... XLIII CRADLE-SONG Sleep: I have sent to Sardis for thy toys, and for thy raiment to Babylon. Sleep, thou art the daughter of Bilitis and a king of the rising sun. The wood is the palace which was built for thee alone and which I have given to thee. The trunks of the pines are the columns; the high branches are the arches. Sleep. That he may not awaken thee, I will sell the sun to the sea. The breeze from the wings of a dove is less light than thy breath. Daughter of mine, flesh of my flesh, when thou openest thine eyes, say whether thou wishest the plain or the city or the mountain or the moon or the white cortège of the gods. XLIV THE TOMB OF THE NAIADS Through the woods covered with hoarfrost, I walked; my hair before my mouth glistened with little icicles, and my sandals were heavy with clinging and heaped-up snow. He said to me: “What seekest thou?--I follow the tracks of a satyr. His little cloven steps alternate like holes in a white mantle.” He said to me: “The satyrs are dead. “The satyrs and the nymphs also. For thirty years there has been no winter so terrible. The track thou seest is that of a buck. But let us rest here, where their tomb is.” And with the iron of his hoe, he broke the ice of the spring where once laughed the naiads. He lifted the great cold masses and, raising them toward the pale sky, he gazed about him. ELEGIACS AT MYTILENE Εὐμορφοτέρα Μνασιδίκα τᾶς ἁπαλᾶς Γυριννῶς. SAPPHO. “Mnasidika is more shapely than the tender Gyrinno.” (F. 76. Wharton.) XLV TO THE VESSEL Beautiful ship that has brought me here, along the shores of Ionia, I abandon thee to the glistening waves, and, with a light foot, I leap upon the beach. Thou wilt return to the country where the virgin is the friend of the nymphs. Forget not to thank those invisible counsellors, and carry them, as an offering, this branch plucked by my hands. Thou wert once a pine, and, on the mountains, the vast hot Notos shook thy branches with their squirrels and birds.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  But I was wrong. “I said What can we eat?” She sat up, her shoulder-length hair splayed out behind her like a cartoon character just blasted with TNT. She crawled over, squatted before the toy army men, picked one up from the pile, pinched it between her fingers, and studied it. Her nails, perfectly painted and manicured by you, with your usual precision, were the only unblemished thing about her. Decorous and ruby-glossed, they stood out from her callused and chapped knuckles as she held the soldier, a radio operator, and examined it as though a newly unearthed artifact. A radio mounted to his back, the soldier crouches on one knee, shouting forever into the receiver. His attire suggests he’s fighting in WWII. “Who yoo arrgh, messeur?” she asked the plastic man in broken English and French. In one jerking motion, she pressed his radio to her ear and listened intently, her eyes on me. “You know what they telling me, Little Dog?” she whispered in Vietnamese. “They say—” She dipped her head to one side, leaned in to me, her breath a mix of Ricola cough drops and the meaty scent of sleep, the little green man’s head swallowed by her ear. “They say good soldiers only win when their grandmas feed them.” She let out a single, clipped cackle—then stopped, her expression suddenly blank, and placed the radio man in my hand, closed it into a fist. Like that she rose and shuffled off to the kitchen, her sandals clapping behind her. I clutched the message, the plastic antennae stabbing my palm as the sound of reggae, muffled through a neighbor’s wall, seeped into the room. — I have and have had many names. Little Dog was what Lan called me. What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson a dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that’s who. As you know, in the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield. —

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As we went home and sank into unconsciousness gangs of these men, with lamps and blow-lamps, and long-handled ratchet spanners, moved out along the tunnels; and wagons, not made to carry passengers, freakishly functional, rolled slowly and clangorously forwards from sidings unknown to the commuter. Such lonely, invisible work must bring on strange thoughts; the men who walked through every tunnel of the labyrinth, tapping the rails, must feel such reassurance seeing the lights of others at last approaching, voices calling out their friendly, technical patter. The black was looking at his loosely cupped hands: he was very aloof, composed, with an air of massive, scarcely conscious competence—I felt more than respect, a kind of tenderness for him. I imagined his relief at getting home and taking his boots off and going to bed as the day brightened around the curtains and the noise of the streets built up outside. He turned his hands over and I saw the pale gold band of his wedding-ring. All the gates but one at the station were closed and I, with two or three others, scuttled out as if being granted an unusual concession. Then there were the ten minutes to walk home. The drink made it seem closer, so that next day I would not remember the walk at all. And the idea of Arthur, too, which I had suppressed to make it all the more exciting when I recalled it, must have driven me along at quite a lick. I was getting a taste for black names, West Indian names; they were a kind of time-travel, the words people whispered to their pillows, doodled on their copy-book margins, cried out in passion when my grandfather was young. I used to think these Edwardian names were the denial of romance: Archibald, Ernest, Lionel, Hubert were laughably stolid; they bespoke personalities unflecked by sex or malice. Yet only this year I had been with boys called just those staid things; and they were not staid boys. Nor was Arthur. His name was perhaps the least likely ever to have been young: it evoked for me the sunless complexion, unaired suiting, steel-rimmed glasses of a ledger clerk in a vanished age. Or had done so, before I found my beautiful, cocky, sluttish Arthur—an Arthur it was impossible to imagine old. His smooth face, with its huge black eyes and sexily weak chin, was always crossed by the light and shade of uncertainty, and met your gaze with the rootless self-confidence of youth.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  With the exception of that initial burst of writing and rare moment of stability in Santa Monica in the fall of 1974, I continued to be extremely restless back then, frantically moving from one place to the next, living on the edge, racing in cabs to the airport, flying from city to city on my monthly compensation check, suddenly showing up at friends’ houses in the middle of the night and sleeping on their couches—always carrying the manuscript with me and always frightened, desperately needing to escape the demons that were closing in on me. Over the next year and a half I wrote several additional chapters of Born on the Fourth of July. Some of the stories were ones I had told my mother when I first came home from the hospital and would lay on our couch in the living room when I couldn’t sleep, which was often back then. Night after night I would repeat the story of how I was wounded that day in Vietnam, describing every single detail. My dear mother would sit patiently in her chair, listening to her son who had come home paralyzed from the war, trying her best to understand. I attempted to write at my friends Skip and Ginny’s place on Mohegan Lake, in their laundry room, but couldn’t seem to get started. I wrote most of the chapter about my childhood at a little hotel not far from Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, and the ambush chapter, the most painful but one of the best, at Connie’s apartment in L.A. I wrote the Memorial Day chapter one afternoon in San Francisco at the Sam Wong Hotel on Broadway, just down the street from Enricos Café in North Beach. I can still remember the open window of my hotel room and the noise of passing cars and trucks in the street below, the fumes, the honking horns, but that became a very beautiful chapter and I still enjoy reading it to this day. I dictated the very first page of the first chapter to my friend Roger at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood, and the remainder of the chapter up in Mendocino where he and Mary were living at the time. I had driven all the way up in a used car I had just bought in L.A. and later abandoned in their driveway. It was deep in the woods, quiet and peaceful, so very different from the war and the hospitals and all that I had been through. The air was fresh and there was a pond behind their cottage where I dictated to Roger, and I remember feeling exhausted as he held me in his arms and I began to cry in the midst of all that stillness. It was a painful but beautiful birth.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The old man didn’t seem to hear her. He grabbed a warm washcloth and began scrubbing his son. The last thing he did was to connect the rubber tube that went into the boy’s penis to the long plastic tube that went into the bag on the side of the bed. That was what the nurses in the hospital had taught them to do. It was very important to connect the rubber tube in the boy’s penis to the plastic tube when he went to bed at night. So that everything would run okay. So that everything would be all right. So he did it just the way they had told them and after pulling the sheets and covers up over the body and just below the shoulders of his son, the old man walked out of the room.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Antinous removed the falcon's hood and for some moments caressed its little head, so sleepy and so wild, then handed it to the enchantress, who began a series of magic passes. The bird, fascinated, fell asleep again. It was important that the victim should not struggle, and that the death should appear voluntary. Rubbed over with ritual honey and attar of roses, the animal, now inert, was placed in the bottom of a tub filled with Nile water; in drowning thus it was to be assimilated to Osiris borne along on the river's current; the bird's earthly years were added to mine, and the little soul, issue of the sun, was united with the Genius of him for whom the sacrifice was made; the invisible Genius could hereafter appear to me and serve me under this form. The long manipulations which followed were no more interesting than some preparation for cooking. Lucius began to yawn. The ceremonies imitated human funerals in every detail: the fumigations and the psalm singing dragged on until dawn. The bird was finally enclosed in a casket lined with aromatic substances and the magician buried it in our presence at the edge of the canal, in an abandoned cemetery. When she had finished she crouched under a tree to count one by one the gold pieces which Phlegon paid her. We re-embarked. An unusually cold wind was blowing. Lucius, seated near me, drew closer the embroidered cotton coverlets with the tips of his slender fingers; for politeness' sake we continued to exchange remarks at broken intervals about business and scandal in Rome. Antinous, lying in the bottom of the boat, had leaned his head on my knees, pretending to sleep in order to keep apart from a conversation which did not include him. My hand passed over his neck, under his heavy hair; thus even in the dullest or most futile moments I kept some feeling of contact with the great objects of nature, the thick growth of the forests, the muscular back of the panther, the regular pulsation of springs; but no caress goes so deep as the soul. The sun was shining when we reached the Serapeion, and the melon merchants were crying their wares in the streets. I slept until time for the session of the local Council, which I attended. I learned later that Antinous took advantage of my absence to persuade Chabrias to go with him to Canopus. He went back to the house of the magician. The first of the month of Athyr, the second year of the two hundred and twenty-sixth Olympiad. . . . That is the anniversary of the death of Osiris, the god of the dying; along the river piercing cries of lamentation had resounded from all the villages for three days' time.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  If this man had not maintained peace in the world, and revived the economy of the empire, his personal fortunes and misfortunes would have moved me less. One can never give enough time to the absorbing study of relationships between texts. The poem on the hunting trophy consecrated by Hadrian at Thespiae to the God of Love and to the Uranian Venus, "on the hills of Helicon, beside Narcissus" spring", can be dated as of the autumn of the year 124; at about that same time the emperor passed through Mantinea, where, according to Pausanius, he had the tomb of Epaminondas rebuilt, and wrote a poem to be inscribed upon it. The Mantinean inscription is now lost, but Hadrian's act of homage is to be fully understood, perhaps, only if we view it in relation to a passage of Plutarch's Morals which tells us that Epaminondas was buried in that place between two young friends struck down at his side. If for date of the meeting of the emperor and Antinous we accept the stay in Asia Minor of 123-124, which is in any case the most plausible date and the best supported by iconographical evidence, these two poems then would form a part of what might be called the Antinous cycle; both are inspired by that same Greece of heroic lovers which Arrian evoked later on, after the death of the favorite, when he compared the youth to Patroclus. A certain number of persons whose portraits one would wish to develop: Plotina, Sabina, Arrian, Suetonius. But Hadrian could see them only in part, from the point of view at which he was standing. Antinous himself has to be presented by refraction, through the emperor's memories, that is to say, in passionately meticulous detail, not devoid of a few errors. All that can be said of the temperament of Antinous is inscribed in any one of his likenesses. "Eager and impassionated tenderness, sullen effeminacy": Shelley, with a poet's admirable candor, says the essential in six words, while most of the nineteenth-century art critics and historians could only expatiate upon the subject with righteous declamation, or else idealize about it, vaguely and hypocritically. We are rich in portraits of Antinous; they range in quality from the mediocre to the incomparable. Despite variations due to the skill of the respective sculptors or to the age of the model, or to differences between portraits made from life and those executed to commemorate the youth after death, all are striking and deeply moving because of the incredible realism of the face, always immediately recognizable and nevertheless so diversely interpreted, and because they are examples, unique in classical antiquity, of survival and repetition in stone of a countenance which was neither that of a statesman nor of a philosopher, but simply of one who was loved.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Some people had come all innocently in shorts, and on the floor a trio of black boys had already removed their singlets, which swung, like waiters’ towels, from the loops of their jeans. I propelled Phil to the bar for the sharp, gassy lager, not in itself pleasant, which was the economy fuel of the place. We leant together at the counter, his arms bulgingly crossed, and I splurged my tongue up his jaw and into his ear—he turned to me with a grin and gave me, too close to be in focus, a look of the tenderest trust. We perched for a while by a little shelf, drinking quite fast, feet rocking to the music, more or less silent though I pointed people out to him and he looked and nodded in a factual sort of way, not feeling, perhaps, that it was quite right to rave adulterously about other men. Even so, he was enthralled when Sebastian Smith moved through the crowd at the heart of his own little crowd, who touched, supported and congratulated him. He had come fresh, exhausted, from Sadler’s Wells, was still on the serene, unpunctured high of adoration and acclaim, still sustained, as in some sugary Spanish Assumption, by the pink clouds of triumph and the tumbling black putti of his entourage. Still wearing, too, his leotards (though now with little patent, winking pumps), his torso rising in a naked black triangle to the glitter-sprinkled, ballerina-hefting shoulders. Everyone wanted him to dance, and he came forward, considering it, to the floor’s edge—one foot set before the other as if on a gym bar, the long, taut thighs chafing, all the effort instinctively keeping his body steady, as though it were his discipline to carry a glass of water on his head or to propel without obscene lurching the contents of his high, prancing basket. But he decided against it, paced back to a darkened corner, leaving me with a faint ache of adulation and inadequacy. Phil I found had that look of relished, vulgar curiosity which from time to time reminded me that he was as prone to sudden lusts as the next man. Not for you, dear, I thought, as I gestured ‘Let’s dance’, he carefully finished his drink, and we felt our way through the gay throng. I turned, we sculpted out a little area on the edge of the mass of dancers, and were drunk enough to be dancing already, Phil too (who I thought might selfconsciously jiggle), going into a kind of mood, hardly looking at me and swivelling chunkily to left and right in a tight, fashionable style he must have picked up somewhere.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He pointed out to me a number of relationships between the men, confirmed my suspicious interpretations of odd gestures and habits, and revealed what was fairly a structure of submerged bonds and loyalties. There were half a dozen longstanding affairs going on, and various other men and boys were available if properly approached, or shared their favours with a satisfactory polygamy between two or three of their companions. In a way what had happened was a comic reversal of the circumstances which had put us all in there in the first place, with the prison authorities bringing us together, admitting our liaisons, and protecting us from the persecution of the outside world. The screws themselves were by no means indifferent, it transpired, and two of them at least were having sex on a daily ration with prisoners—though those prisoners were treated with the greatest suspicion by their fellows as being probable grasses. One of them was provided with lipstick and other maquillage by his officer, and his femininity, at least, was tolerated as it would not have been outside. Bill drew me out too, and I have a clear and rather touching picture of him sitting opposite me, his powerful, stocky young frame transforming the stiff grey flannel of his uniform so that he looks like a handsome soldier in some poor, East European army. He concentrates on me closely as I tell him about my childhood, or about life in the Sudan; and he is interested to hear about my house and my servants. I have promised him that when he is released, early next year, I will find him something to do: a job in a gymnasium, if possible, where his feeling for men and physical exercise can be fulfilled, rather than baulked and denied in some clerkly work. It was rather desperate to see him toiling for weeks over detective novels from the prison library: he doggy-paddled through books in a mood of miserable aspiration, but they were not his element. I took to the prison library with more duck-like promptness. It was a bizarre collection, made up almost entirely of gifts. Ordinary well-wishers and a number of voluntary bodies gave miscellaneous fiction and popular encyclopaedic works on technology and natural history; an outgoing governor had presented a collection of literary texts, some deriving from his own schooldays but also including French classical drama and the complete works of Wither in twenty-three volumes; and the Times Literary Supplement had charitably for some years sent to the prison all those books it felt no interest in reviewing, a body of work ranging from bacteriology to handbooks on historic trams. I picked on something which must have come from the ex-governor’s bequest: a schools edition of Pope, with notes by A. M. Niven, MA—one of those frustrating near-palindromes with which life is strewn. It had seen active service, and words such as ‘zeugma’ filled the margins in a round, childish script.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  You’re the only one she won’t dare to grill.” When Camille and I arrive at the airport at seven thirty, we establish our post at the arrivals area. Camille looks around to make sure we’re not being watched or targeted, while I check and recheck the television monitor to make sure their flight is on time. When they finally deplane, Cherie’s carrying only her purse. Both she and Rosie—now with a modest feminine shape and taller than any of us—have their wigs tugged down tight on their heads. Rosie’s wig is thick and dramatic, a cartoonish contrast to the tired, blank stare on her face. It’s impossible for me to tell if she’s numb from the unexpected plane ride or the trauma of what she’s been living through with Cookie and Clyde. The four of us walk fast to short-term parking, finally huddling in the car to embrace Rosie the second we’re all inside Camille’s backseat. “My bambina ,” I whisper in her ear. The car fires up with the turn of Camille’s ignition, and Cherie and I stay hugging Rosie. I imagine the tighter we hold her, the faster she’ll heal; but in response, Rosie does nothing. She utters no sound; she makes no expression. “Are you in shock?” I ask her. She shakes her head. No. “What is it then? You’re afraid Cookie’s going to come after you?” She sits silently, then nods slowly. Yes. “No,” Cherie says. “We’re going to do everything we possibly can to keep you here. You’ll live with me while Regina’s at school, then in the summer she’ll come and live with us. We’ll have a home together—Regina, Camille, you remember how good it was? Like in the Happy House, and the Bubble House, and the Glue Factory.” “And the Brady Bunch House,” Rosie says. “Yes! You remember the Brady Bunch House! All we need is us,” Cherie says. “We’ve done it before, when we were all much younger. We can do it so much better now.” Camille’s house is filled with the aroma of pasta and meatballs. “Grab a plate, ladies,” Frank says as we pile into the kitchen. “I’m just about to pull the baked ziti out of the oven.” When baby Frankie starts crying from his nursery, Frank whispers in Camille’s ear, braces his hand on her shoulder, and smiles. Then he walks quietly down the hall. When I finally break from staring after him, I notice Rosie’s doing the same. “Where’s he going?” Rosie asks. Never before have we seen a man so caring and capable. “He’s going to take care of Frankie so we can stay up together.” We lounge on the living room couch and love seat, gently taking note as Rosie begins to drop hints of a smile as I rest with my arm around her and play with her hair. The name Cookie never comes up. The word abuse is never spoken.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Camille changes from her jeans into her parachute shorts with lots of pockets, and a long top. I pull on a baggy T-shirt whose bottom falls in line with the hem of my gym shorts. We kiss the kids. “Stay put,” Camille tells them. “We’re going to find dinner.” For two teenage girls who don’t yet drive, Camille and I have developed a strong sense of direction. No matter where we are, either of us can access any main road on Long Island. Remembering the Pathmark grocery store we spotted on the drive out here, we hike down Washington Avenue and make a left on Middle Country Road. These outings to rummage for food are when I feel most connected to Camille—not just because we’re literally partners in crime but also because it’s during these moments away, just the two of us, that we can just be sisters. “After we feed the kids, I want to find a pay phone to call Doug. I haven’t seen him in a few days,” she says. “Why? You’re staying with us tonight, right?” “Hey, look,” Camille says. “We’re almost to Pathmark.” We wander into the store and immediately assume our roles. I head straight back toward the stockroom, where I locate a teenage stock boy and tell him the usual story: We’re moving, and my father sent me in to get boxes with lids on them. Do you have any extras laying around? By now Camille will be wandering the food aisles to see what she can slip down her shorts and into her pockets. Since the boxes need to appear empty as I wander through the store, I only slide light things into them: a loaf of bread, a carton of eggs, a few boxes of macaroni and cheese mix, a box of puffed rice cereal, and a package of toilet paper—which is impossible to steal without a box. Even one roll is too bulky to slip down our shirts. Our toilet paper and egg carton–lifting technique requires us to place the items between two stacked, empty cardboard boxes. Casually but carefully, I buzz straight out of the store as though I’m minding my own business with my armful of moving boxes. In the giant parking lot I meet up with Camille, who used the five-dollar food stamp to score peanut butter, jelly, and a half-gallon of milk. We have a strict system of purchasing anything we need that won’t fit in our clothes. Camille slides Kraft cheese slices out of her shorts and takes a thin box of Jiffy muffin mix from her pocket, while I shake two little boxes of Jell-O and pudding mix out of my underwear. “We can stretch this for at least two weeks,” she says. She places her treasures and grocery bag in one of the boxes, and we take off toward our new home, balancing the weight of our load between us.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I held you by the hand during the sacrifice which took place that year on the bank of the Tiber, and with tender amusement watched your childish face (you were only five years old at the time), frightened by the cries of the immolated swine, but trying bravely to imitate the dignified demeanor of your elders. I concerned myself with the education of this almost too sober little boy, helping your father to choose the best masters for you. Verus, the Most Veracious: I used so to play on your name; you are perhaps the only being who has never lied to me. I have seen you read with passion the writings of the philosophers, and clothe yourself in harsh wool, sleeping on the bare floor and forcing your somewhat frail body to all the mortifications of the Stoics. There is some excess in all that, but excess is a virtue at the age of seventeen. I sometimes wonder on what reef that wisdom will founder, for one always founders: will it be a wife, or a son too greatly beloved, one of those legitimate snares (to sum it up in a word) where overscrupulous, pure hearts are caught? Or will it be more simply age, illness, fatigue, or the disillusion which says to us that if all is vain, then virtue is, too? I can imagine in place of your candid, boyish countenance your weary visage as an older man. I am aware that your severity, so carefully acquired, has beneath it some sweetness, and some weakness, perhaps; I divine in you the presence of a genius which is not necessarily that of the statesman; the world will doubtless be forever the better off, however, for having once seen such qualities operating in conjunction with supreme authority. I have arranged the essentials for your adoption by Antoninus; under the new name by which you will one day be designated in the list of emperors you are now and henceforth my grandson. I believe that I may be giving mankind the only chance it will ever have to realize Plato's dream, to see a philosopher pure of heart ruling over his fellow men. You have accepted these honors only with reluctance; your rank obliges you to live in court; Tibur, this place where to the very end I am assembling whatever pleasures life has, disturbs you for your young virtue.