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 On Beauty (2005)

  Nothing happened. He had come to the end of the line. He looked out and spotted Kiki, smiling into her lap. The rest of his audience were faintly frowning at the back wall. Howard turned his head and looked at the picture behind him. ‘ Hendrickje Bathing , ,’ croaked Howard and said no more. On the wall, a pretty, blousy Dutch woman in a simple white smock paddled in water up to her calves. Howard’s audience looked at her and then at Howard and then at the woman once more, awaiting elucidation. The woman, for her part, looked away, coyly, into the water. She seemed to be considering whether to wade deeper. The surface of the water was dark, reflective – a cautious bather could not be certain of what lurked beneath. Howard looked at Kiki. In her face, his life. Kiki looked up suddenly at Howard – not, he thought, unkindly. Howard said nothing. Another silent  on beauty and being wrong minute passed. The audience began to mutter perplexedly. Howard made the picture larger on the wall, as Smith had explained to him how to do. The woman’s fleshiness filled the wall. He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt’s love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, paint heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety – chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come. author’s note Thank you to Saja Music Co. and Sony/ATV Music Publishing Ltd for permission to quote from ‘I Get Around’ by Tupac Shakur. Thank you to Faber and Faber for permission to quote from the poems ‘Imperial’ and ‘The Last Saturday in Ulster’, and also for allowing the poem ‘On Beauty’ to be reprinted in its entirety. All three poems are from the collection To a Fault by Nick Laird. Thank you to Nick himself for allowing the last poem to be Claire’s. Thank you to my brother Doc Brown for some of Carl Thomas’s imaginary lyrics. There are a number of real Rembrandts described in this novel, most of them on public display. (Claire is right about The Shipbuilder Jan Rijksen and His Wife Griet Jans , . If you want to see that, you have to ask the Queen.) The two portraits that lead to trouble between Monty and Howard are Self-Portrait with Lace Collar , , Mauritshuis, The Hague, and Self-Portrait , , Alte Pinakothek, Munich. They are not as alike as the author suggests. The painting that Howard uses for his first class of the semester is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp , , Mauritshuis, The Hague. The painting that Katie Armstrong examines is Jacob

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  12Around Christmas she caught a bad chill and was examined by a friend of Miss Lester, a Dr. Ilse Tristramson (hi, Ilse, you were a dear, uninquisitive soul, and you touched my dove very gently). She diagnosed bronchitis, patted Lo on the back (all its bloom erect because of the fever) and put her to bed for a week or longer. At first she “ran a temperature” in American parlance, and I could not resist the exquisite caloricity of unexpected delights—Venus febriculosa—though it was a very languid Lolita that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace. And as soon as she was well again, I threw a Party with Boys. Perhaps I had drunk a little too much in preparation for the ordeal. Perhaps I made a fool of myself. The girls had decorated and plugged in a small fir tree—German custom, except that colored bulbs had superseded wax candles. Records were chosen and fed into my landlord’s phonograph. Chic Dolly wore a nice gray dress with fitted bodice and flared skirt. Humming, I retired to my study upstairs—and then every ten or twenty minutes I would come down like an idiot just for a few seconds; to pick up ostensibly my pipe from the mantelpiece or hunt for the newspaper; and with every new visit these simple actions became harder to perform, and I was reminded of the dreadfully distant days when I used to brace myself to casually enter a room in the Ramsdale house where Little Carmen was on. The party was not a success. Of the three girls invited, one did not come at all, and one of the boys brought his cousin Roy, so there was a superfluity of two boys, and the cousins knew all the steps, and the other fellows could hardly dance at all, and most of the evening was spent in messing up the kitchen, and then endlessly jabbering about what card game to play, and sometime later, two girls and four boys sat on the floor of the living room, with all windows open, and played a word game which Opal could not be made to understand, while Mona and Roy, a lean handsome lad, drank ginger ale in the kitchen, sitting on the table and dangling their legs, and hotly discussing Predestination and the Law of Averages. After they had all gone my Lo said ugh, closed her eyes, and dropped into a chair with all four limbs starfished to express the utmost disgust and exhaustion and swore it was the most revolting bunch of boys she had ever seen. I bought her a new tennis racket for that remark.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife was. At breakfast, in the depressingly bright kitchen, with its chrome glitter and Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute breakfast nook (simulating that Coffee Shoppe where in their college days Charlotte and Humbert used to coo together), she would sit, robed in red, her elbow on the plastic-topped table, her cheek propped on her fist, and stare at me with intolerable tenderness as I consumed my ham and eggs. Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia, but in her eyes it vied in beauty and animation with the sun and shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrigerator. My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love. My small income added to her even smaller one impressed her as a brilliant fortune; not because the resulting sum now sufficed for most middle-class needs, but because even my money shone in her eyes with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our joint account as one of those southern boulevards at midday that have solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the other, all the way to the end of a prospect, where pink mountains loom.

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

  I answer that, The perfection of the episcopal state consists in this that for love of God a man binds himself to work for the salvation of his neighbor, wherefore he is bound to retain the pastoral cure so long as he is able to procure the spiritual welfare of the subjects entrusted to his care: a matter which he must not neglect—neither for the sake of the quiet of divine contemplation, since the Apostle, on account of the needs of his subjects, suffered patiently to be delayed even from the contemplation of the life to come, according to Phil. 1:22–25, “What I shall choose I know not, but I am straitened between two, having a desire to be dissolved, and to be with Christ, a thing by far better. But to abide still in the flesh is needful for you. And having this confidence, I know that I shall abide”; nor for the sake of avoiding any hardships or of acquiring any gain whatsoever, because as it is written (Jn. 10:11), “the good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep.” At times, however, it happens in several ways that a bishop is hindered from procuring the spiritual welfare of his subjects. Sometimes on account of his own defect, either of conscience (for instance if he be guilty of murder or simony), or of body (for example if he be old or infirm), or of irregularity arising, for instance, from bigamy. Sometimes he is hindered through some defect in his subjects, whom he is unable to profit. Hence Gregory says (Dial. ii, 3): “The wicked must be borne patiently, when there are some good who can be succored, but when there is no profit at all for the good, it is sometimes useless to labor for the wicked. Wherefore the perfect when they find that they labor in vain are often minded to go elsewhere in order to labor with fruit.” Sometimes again this hindrance arises on the part of others, as when scandal results from a certain person being in authority: for the Apostle says (1 Cor. 8:13): “If meat scandalize my brother, I will never eat flesh”: provided, however, the scandal is not caused by the wickedness of persons desirous of subverting the faith or the righteousness of the Church; because the pastoral cure is not to be laid aside on account of scandal of this kind, according to Mat. 15:14, “Let them alone,” those namely who were scandalized at the truth of Christ’s teaching, “they are blind, and leaders of the blind.”

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

  JEROME. (in Matt. 27:55.) It was a Jewish custom, nor was it thought blameable, according to the ancient manners of that nation, that women should afford of their substance food and clothing to their teachers. This custom, as it might cause offence to the Gentiles, St. Paul relates he had cast off. (1 Cor. 9:15.) But these ministered unto the Lord of their substance, that He might reap their carnal things from whom they had reaped spiritual things. Not that the Lord needed the food of His creatures, but that He might set an example to masters, that they ought to be content with food and clothing from their disciples. BEDE. But Mary is by interpretation, “bitter sea,” because of the loud wailing of her penitence; Magdalene, “a tower, or rather belonging to a tower,” from the tower of which it is said, Thou art become my hope, my strong tower from the face of my enemy. (Ps. 61:3.) Joanna is by interpretation “the Lord her grace,” or “the merciful Lord,” for from Him cometh every thing that we live upon. But if Mary, cleansed from the corruption of her sins, points to the Church of the Gentiles, why does not Joanna represent the same Church formerly subject to the worship of idols? For every evil spirit whilst he acts for the devil’s kingdom, is as it were Herod’s steward. Susanna is interpreted, “a lily,” or its grace, because of the fragrance and whiteness of the heavenly life, and the golden heat of inward love. 8:4–154. And when much people were gathered together, and were come to him out of every city, he spake by a parable: 5. A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. 6. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. 7. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. 8. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. 9. And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be? 10. And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand. 11. Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. 12. Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Whereas face to face I had felt timid and unable to get enough of his body against enough of mine, now I was glued to him and he didn’t object—it was understood that this was my turn and I could do what I liked. I tunneled my lower arm under him and folded it across his chest; his ribs were unexpectedly small and countable, and now that he’d completely relaxed I could get deeper and deeper into him. That such a tough, muscled little guy, whose words were so flat and eyes so without depth or humor, could be so richly taken—oh, he felt good. But the sensation he was giving didn’t seem like something afforded by his body, or if so, then it was a secret gift, shameful and pungent, one he didn’t dare acknowledge. In the Chris-Craft I’d been afraid of him. He had been the usual intimidating winner, beyond excitement—but here he was, pushing this tendoned, shifting pleasure back into me, the fine hair on his neck damp with sweat just above the hollows the sculptor had pressed with his thumbs into the clay. His tan hand was resting on his white hip. The ends of his lashes were pulsing just beyond the line of his full cheek. “Does it feel good?” he asked. “Want it tighter?” he asked, as a shoe salesman might. “No, it’s fine.” “See, I can make it tighter,” and indeed he could. His eagerness to please me reminded me that I needn’t have worried, that in his own eyes he was just a kid and I a high school guy who’d done it with girls and one older lady and everything. Most of the time I had dreamed of an English lord who’d kidnap me and take me away forever; someone who’d save me and whom I’d rule. But now it seemed that Kevin and I didn’t need anyone older, we could run away together, I would be our protector. We were already sleeping in a field under a sheet of breezes and taking turns feeding on each other’s bodies, wet from the dew. “I’m getting close,” I said. “Want me to pull out?” “Go ahead,” he said. “Fill ’er up.” “Okay. Here goes. Oh, God. Jesus!” I couldn’t help kissing his cheek. “Your beard hurts,” he said. “You shave every day?” “Every other. You?” “Not yet. But the fuzz is gettin’ dark. Some guy told me the sooner you start shavin’, the faster it comes in. Do you agree?” “I think so. Well,” I said, “I’m pullin’ out. Your turn.” I turned my back to Kevin and I could hear him spitting on his hand. I didn’t particularly like getting cornholed, but I was peaceful and happy because we loved each other.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Brian’s room—one of six in that sprawling pied à terre—shared one wall with the boiler. That was the only heating facility. One wall was perpetually hot as blazes; the other was colder than a witch’s tit (Brian’s expression). You regulated the temperature only by opening the window (which faced on a kind of cement ravine one floor below sidewalk level) and letting the cold air in. Since the wind blasted in from the river, it was sufficiently frigid to counteract the heat of the boiler—but not our heat. It was in this romantic setting that we first enjoyed each other. We squeaked the springs of the secondhand bed which Brian, with trembling anticipation, had bought two weeks earlier from a Puerto Rican junk dealer on Columbus Avenue. In the end, of course, I had to seduce him. I’m sure that from Eden onward it has never been any different. Afterward I cried and felt guilty and Brian comforted me as men have probably comforted the virgins who seduced them throughout the centuries. We lay there in the candlelight (in his romanticism or perhaps innate sense of symbolism, Brian lit a taper on the night table before we undressed each other) and listened to the whining of alley cats in the cement well beyond the soot-blackened window. Sometimes one of the cats would leap on an overfull can of garbage and knock an empty beer can to the ground, and the sound of the hollow tin on the pavement would echo through the room. In the beginning our romance was fine and spiritual and adolescent. (In later times we were to sound more like the dialogue from a Strindberg play.) We used to read poetry to each other in bed, discuss the difference between life and art, ponder whether or not Yeats would have become a great poet if Maud Gonne had, in fact, married him. Spring found us taking a Shakespeare course together as I suppose all young lovers should. One brilliant but slightly chilly day in April we read The Winter’s Tale aloud to each other sitting on a bench in Riverside Park. When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! The doxy over the dale— Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year, For the red blood peers in the winter’s pale… The lark that tirra-lyra chants— With heigh! With heigh! The thrush and the jay— Are the summer songs for me and my aunts, While we lie tumbling in the hay. Brian was busy playing Florizel to my Perdita (“These your unusual weeds to each part of you/Do give a life—no shepherdess, but Flora/Peering in April’s front…”) when a whole tribe of urchins—black and Puerto Rican kids about eight or nine years old—were attracted by our reading and distributed themselves on the bench and the grass near us, seemingly entranced by our performance.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It was now Kiki’s turn to sigh. Hawaiian , for reasons private and old, was a euphemism for sex in the Belsey household. ‘Actually, we excelled at the Hawaiian,’ added Howard – he was out on a limb and he knew it. He put a hand to his wife’s coiled hair. ‘You can’t deny it.’ ‘I never did. You did. When you did what you did.’ This sentence – with its overabundance of ‘dids’ – was prob-lematically comic. Howard struggled to rein in a smile. Kiki smiled first. ‘Fuck you,’ she said. Howard took both his hands and put them under his wife’s cataclysmic breasts. ‘Fuck you ,’ she repeated. He brought his hands round to their summits, and massaged the handful he could manage. He touched his lips to her neck and kissed her there. And again on her ears, which were wet from tears. She turned her face to his. They kissed. It was a burly, substantial,  On Beauty tongue-filled kiss. It was a kiss from the past. Howard held his wife’s lovely face in both of his hands. And now the same journey of so many nights over so many years: the kiss trail down her throat’s chubby rings of flesh, down to her chest. He undid the buttons of her shirt, as she attended to the hardy clip of her bra. The silver-dollar-sized nipples, from which occasional hairs sprouted, were the familiar deep brown with only a hint of pink. They protruded like no other nipples he had ever seen. They fitted perfectly and properly into his mouth. They moved on to the floor. Both thought of the children and the possibility that one of them would come home, but neither dared go to the door to lock it. Any movement away from this spot would be the end. Howard lay on top of his wife. He looked at her.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Kiki stuck her arm into a deep box and pulled out a little painted half-mask, the kind you would wear to a masquerade ball. She smiled at it fondly and turned it over. Some of the glitter around the eyes came off in her hands. ‘Venice,’ she said. Jerome nodded quickly. ‘That time we went?’ ‘Hmm? Oh, no, before then. Before any of you were born.’ ‘Some kind of romantic holiday,’ said Jerome. He tightened his tense grasp on the edge of the door. ‘The most romantic.’ Kiki smiled and shook her head free of some secret thought. She put the porcelain mask carefully to one side. Jerome took a step into the storeroom. ‘Mom . . .’ Kiki smiled again, her face upturned to listen to her son. Jerome looked away. ‘You . . . you need some help, Mom?’ Kiki kissed him gratefully. ‘ Thanks , honey. That’d be so great. Come and help me move some stuff out of Levi’s. It’s a nightmare in there. I can’t face it alone.’ Jerome put his hands out for Kiki and lifted her up. Together they crossed the hall and pushed Levi’s door open, working against the piles of clothes on its other side. Inside Levi’s room the smell of boy, of socks and sperm, was strong. ‘Nice wallpaper,’ said Jerome. The room was newly plastered with posters of black girls, mostly big black girls, mostly big black girls’ butts. Interspersed with these here and there were a few  On Beauty vainglorious portraits of rappers, mostly dead, and a massive photograph of Pacino in Scarface . But big black girls in bikinis was the central decorating scheme. ‘At least they’re not starving half to death,’ said Kiki, getting down on her knees to look under the bed. ‘At least they’ve got some flesh on their bones. OK – there’s all kinds of crap under here. You take that end and lift.’ Jerome hiked up his end of the bed. ‘Higher,’ requested Kiki and Jerome obliged. Suddenly Kiki’s right knee slipped and her hand went to the floor. ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered. ‘What?’ ‘Oh, my God .’ ‘ What? Is it porn? My arm’s getting tired.’ Jerome lowered the bed a little. ‘DON’T MOVE!’ screamed Kiki. Jerome, terrified, lifted the bed high. His mother was gasping, like she was having some kind of a fit. ‘Mom – what? You’re scaring me, man. What is it?’ ‘I don’t understand this. I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS.’ ‘Mom, I can’t hold this any longer.’ ‘HOLD IT.’ Jerome saw his mother get a grip on the sides of something. She slowly began to pull out whatever it was from under the bed. ‘What the . . . ?’ said Jerome. Kiki dragged the painting into the middle of the floor and sat next to it, hyperventilating. Jerome came up behind her and tried to touch her to calm her, but she slapped his hand away.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  This intransigence had now given way to a new optimism and tenderness and a gracious, civilized uncertainty. “I don’t know what to say about homosexuality,” he said to me as we kicked our way down a long hillside of autumn leaves that crackled like the bright, cast-off shells of boiled crustaceans. “But at least you have some sort of sexuality. And you’ve actually had some sex. Which is neat, if you think about it. Not many kids can claim as much.” We were heading toward a Japanese stone lantern half mossed over beside a bridge wreathed in mists rising from the stream that fed into the man-made pond, empty now but in warm weather the home of corpulent, whiskered white fish freckled with pale brown spots. “Now, as to these High Church Scotts of yours, they seem like fanatics to me. Of course, they’re fascinating, I can see why you like them.” He compared them to characters in Proust, but the names meant nothing to me. I envied him his Olympian sureness in placing people according to the typology of classic fiction. I, too, would read Proust someday, but only after I’d mastered Pound, Moore, Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donne, Dante and all the other poets the Scotts discussed every night. The talk with the Scotts was not exclusively literary. When we were alone, Rachel would confide in me how much she despised DeQuincey, how unworthy of her he was and how she longed to escape him and to remove little Tim from his debilitating influence. “DeQuincey’s just a creep, weak, ineffectual. You can see it for yourself. I hate him.” She lowered her head and her eyelids fluttered disquietingly as she spoke; she was ashamed of both her husband and her spleen.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Distinguished as Margaret was by her mental powers and graces, she was still more admirable for the warmth and tenderness of her affections. These, it is to be feared, were but inadequately requited, and would have been a source of unhappiness to her, were it not for that precious prerogative which loving natures enjoy, to find pleasure in self-sacrifice and suffering. There was little community of feeling between her and the Duke d'Alengon, and their mar- riage was childless. The husband of her choice, Henry of Navarre, was a handsome, brave cavalier, of respectable ca- pacity, and passably good-humoured, but he had little sym- pathy with his wife's literary and theological tastes, and the difference in their ages was not favourable to connubial con- cord. It is even said that he treated her at times with a roughness unworthy of a preux chevalier. Hilarion de la Coste says that Henry, " having been informed that there was used in his wife's chamber some form of prayer and instruction contrary to that of his fathers, entered it with a resolution to punish the minister, but, finding they had con- trived his escape, the weight of his anger fell upon the queen, to whom he gave a box on the ear, saying to her, ' Madam, you want to be too knowing ; ' and immediately gave advice of it to King Francis." Brantome, having given some instances of matrimonial discord between princes, adds this : " And lately King Henry d'Albret, with Queen Margaret of Valois, as I have it from good hands, who treated her very ill, and would have done still worse had it not been for King Francis, her brother, who spoke home and roughly to him, and charged him with threats to honour the queen his sis- ter in regard to the rank she bore." The whimsical behaviour of this King of Navarre on the occasion of the birth of his grandson, afterwards Henry IV. of France, may enable us to guess how far he was capable of tenderness and delicacy of feeling in his conduct to his wife. On hearing that his daughter was pregnant, he recalled her from Picardy, where she was residing with her husband. The princess arrived in Pau on the 4th of December, after a journey of twenty da) s, xxxvi MEMOIR OF MARGARET,

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  *What's the matter?' 1 think a bedbug bit me.' Tou slob. You got bedbugs?' 1 think one bit me.' Tou ever have a bedbug bite you before?' "No: Well, go back to sleep. You're dreaming.' He looked at me with his mouth open and his dark eyes very big. It was as though he had just discovered that I was an expert on bed- bugs. I laughed and grabbed his head as I had done God knows how many times before, when I was playing with him or when he had annoyed me. But this time when I touched him some- thing happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the Ught in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the 14 James Baldwin first time in my life, I was really aware of an- other person's body, of another person's smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astoimd- ing, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love. But that lifetime was short, was bounded by that night—it ended in the morning. I awoke while Joey was still sleeping, curled like a baby on his side, toward me. He looked like a baby, his mouth half open, his cheek flushed, his curly hair darkening the pillow and half hiding his damp round forehead and his long eyelashes glinting slightly in the summer sun. We were both naked and the sheet we had used as a cover was tangled around our feet. Joe/s body was brown, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I had ever seen till then. I would have touched him to wake him up but something stopped me. I was suddenly afraid. Perhaps it was because he looked so innocent lying there.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Zora too wandered away. Kiki heard a great splash from outside, and then glimpsed the dark, curled dome of Jerome’s head before it went under the water again. She opened the drawer at her end of the long kitchen table and, among many batteries and fake fingernails, found a pen. She went in search of paper. She recalled a pad that had been squeezed between two paperbacks on a bookshelf in the hallway. ‘Chess?’ Kiki heard Zora ask Howard. When she came back into the kitchen, she could see them setting up play in the lounge as if nothing at all had happened, as if they didn’t have a party to  kipps and belsey host, Murdoch happily ensconced in Howard’s lap. Chess? Is that what it’s like, wondered Kiki, to be an intellectual? Can the tuned mind tune everything else out? Kiki sat alone in the kitchen. She wrote a short note welcoming the Kippses to town and expressing the hope they might attend a little gathering, any time after six thirty.  Turning the corner of Redwood, Kiki was already busy reading the signs. The size of the moving van, the style of the house, the colours of the garden. The light was fading and the streetlamps were not yet lit. It bugged her that she was unable to see more clearly the hanging baskets suspended like censers from the four storeys of balconies. Kiki was quite close to the front gate before she saw the outline of a tall woman sitting in a high-backed chair. Kiki put the letter she held in her hand back into her pocket. The woman was asleep. Kiki understood at once that she would never wish to be seen like this, with her thinning hair fanned out across her cheek, her mouth wide open and half of one fluttering, unseeing eyeball revealed to the world. It seemed rude to walk past her and continue to the doorbell, as if she were nothing more significant than a cat or an ornament. Equally, it didn’t seem right to wake her. On the porch now and hesitating, Kiki had the momentary fancy of placing the note in the woman’s lap and running away. She took another step towards the door; the woman woke. ‘Hi, hi – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you – I’m a neighbour here . . . are you . . . Mrs Kipps or . . .’ The woman smiled lazily and looked at Kiki, around Kiki, apparently assessing her bulk, where it began and where it ended. Kiki pulled her cardigan around herself. ‘I’m Kiki Belsey.’ Now Mrs Kipps made a jubilant sound of realization, beginning on a reed-thin high note and slowly making its way down  On Beauty the scale. She brought her long hands together slowly like a pair of cymbals.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Clotilde!’ came Kipps’s voice from somewhere deeper in the house. ‘Close the door – ferme´ – must we all freeze? C’est froid, c’est très froid . Oh, for goodness sake – ’ Kiki saw his fingers curl round the edge of the door; the door swung wide; he stood before her. He looked astonished and not quite as dapper as usual, although his three-piece suit was in place. Kiki sought the anomaly and found it in his eyebrows, which were wildly overgrown. ‘Mrs Belsey? ’ ‘Yes! I – I . . .’ His huge head, with its glossy pate and brutal, protruding eyes, proved too much for Kiki. She lost her words. Instead she held up the wrist of her left hand, around which one of the thick paperbags of Wellington’s favourite bakery hung. ‘For me?’ asked Monty. ‘Well, you were so . . . so kind to us in London and I . . . well, really I just wanted to see how you were and bring you – ’ ‘Cake?’ ‘ Pie . I just think sometimes when people suffer a – ’ Monty, having processed his astonishment, now took control.  On Beauty ‘Wait – come in – it’s Baltic outside – there is no point talking out here – come in – Clotilde, out of the way, take the lady’s coat – ’ Kiki stepped into the Kippses’ hallway. ‘Oh, thank you – yes, because I think when people suffer a loss, well, the temptation is for folk to stay away – and I know when my own mother died, everybody stayed away and I felt most resentful of that, and bottom line, I felt, you know, abandoned , and so I just wanted to come by and see how you and the kids were doing, bring some pie and . . . I mean, I know we’ve had our differences, as families, but when something like this happens I just really feel . . .’ Kiki saw that she was talking too much. Monty had snatched the briefest of glimpses at his pocket-watch. ‘Oh! But if this is a bad time – ’ ‘No, not at all, no – I am on my way into college, but . . .’ He looked over his shoulder, and then put a hand to her back, ushering Kiki forward. ‘But I am just in the middle of something – if you could possibly – could I leave you here, for two minutes only, while I . . . Clotilde will make you some tea and . . . yes, just make yourself comfortable here,’ he said, as they stepped on to the cowhide rug of the library. ‘ Clotilde! ’ Kiki sat down on the piano stool as she had before and, with a sad smile to herself, checked the shelf nearest to her. All the N’s were in perfect order.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] NOW ONE of the hard margins bears us on, and the smoke of the rivulet makes shade above, so that from the fire it shelters the water and the banks. As the Flemings between Wissant and Bruges,1 dreading the flood that rushes towards them, make their bulwark to repel the sea; and as the Paduans, along the Brenta, to defend their villages and castles ere Chiarentana2 feels the heat: in like fashion those banks were formed, though not so high nor so large, the master, whoever it might be, made them. Already we were so far removed from the wood, that I should not have seen where it was, had I turned back, when we met a troop of spirits, who were coming alongside the bank; and each looked at us, as in the evening men are wont to look at one another under a new moon; and towards us sharpened their vision, as an aged tailor does at the eye of his needle. Thus eyed by that family, I was recognized by one3 who took me by the skirt, and said: “What a wonder!” And I, when he stretched out his arm to me, fixed my eyes on his baked aspect, so that the scorching of his visage hindered not my mind from knowing him; and bending my face to his, I answered: “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” And he: “O my son! let it not displease thee, if Brunetto Latini turn back with thee a little, and let go his train.” I said: “With all my power I do beseech it of you; and if you wish me to sit down with you, I will do so, if it pleases him there, for I go with him.” “O my son,” he said, “whoever of this flock stops one instant, lies a hundred years thereafter without fanning himself when the fires strikes him. Therefore go on; I will follow at thy skirts; and then will I rejoin my band, that go lamenting their eternal losses.” I durst not descend from the road to go level with him; but kept my head bent down, like one who walks in reverence. He began: “What chance, or destiny, brings thee, ere thy last day, down here? and who is this that shows the way?” “There above, up in the clear life, I lost myself,” replied I, “in a valley, before my age was full.” Only yester morn I turned my back to it; he appeared to me, as I was returning into it, and guides me home again by this path.” And he to me: “If thou follow thy star, thou canst not fail of glorious haven, if I discerned rightly in the fair life; and if I had not died so early, seeing Heaven so kind to thee, I would have cheered thee in the work. But that ungrateful, malignant people, who of old came down from Fiesole,4 and still savours of the mountain and the rock,

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Levi released the intercom and tried to get both his feet on the thin doorstep, which afforded him about three inches of cover from the overhang of the roof. When Choo opened the door, Levi practically fell on top of him. Together they stepped into a concrete stairwell that smelled bad. Choo met Levi’s fist with his own. Levi noticed that his friend’s eyes were red. Choo jerked his head upwards to signify that Levi should follow him. They began to climb the stairs. ‘Why did you come here?’ asked Choo. His voice was dull and quiet, and he did not turn to look at Levi as he spoke. ‘You know . . . I just thought I’d pay you a call,’ said Levi awkwardly. It was the truth. ‘I don’t have a phone.’ ‘No, I mean,’ said Levi, as they reached a landing and a damaged door, patched up with a panel of unpainted wood, ‘ pay a call . It’s like in America when you go visit someone to see how they are, you know.’ Choo opened his front door. ‘You wanted to see how I am?’ This too was true, but Levi now acknowledged that it sounded a little weird. How to explain it? He wasn’t sure himself. Simply: Choo had been on his conscience. Because . . . because Choo wasn’t  On Beauty like the other guys in the team. He didn’t travel with the pack, didn’t screw around or go dancing, and he seemed, by contrast, lonely, isolated. Basically, Levi figured that Choo was just plain smarter than all the people around him, and Levi, who lived with people similarly cursed, felt that his own experience in this area (as a carer of smart folk) made him especially qualified to help Choo out. And then the book on Haiti had conspired in Levi’s mind with the little he had surmised about Choo’s personal life. The tatty clothes he wore, the way he never bought a sub or a can of Coke like the others. His raggedy hair. His unfriendliness. That scar along his arm. ‘Yeah . . . basically . . . I was thinking, well, we down , ain’t we? I mean, I know you don’t talk too much when we be working, but . . . you know, I consider you my friend. I do. And brothers look out for each other. In America.’ For what felt like an awful long time, Levi thought Choo was about to kick his ass. Then he began to chuckle and put his hand heavily on Levi’s shoulder. ‘You have nothing to do, I think. You need to be more busy.’ They came into a reasonably sized room, but now Levi noted that the kitchen units, the bed and the table were all compressed into this one space. It was cold and it stank of marijuana. Levi slipped off his rucksack. ‘I brought you some stuff, man.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Here was Murdoch, curled in on himself. Howard bent down and stroked his little hound face, tugging the brown-pink skin of his jaw away from harmless, blunted teeth. Murdoch stirred crossly. When Jerome was a baby, Howard liked to go into the nursery and touch his son’s creˆpey head, knowing he would wake, wanting him to. He had liked that warm, talc-scented company resting in his lap, little baby fingers stretching for the keyboard. Was it a computer, back then? No: a typewriter. Howard lifted Murdoch from his stinking basket, hooked him under one arm and brought him to the book-case. He passed a restless eye over the rainbow of spines and titles. But every one met with resistance in Howard’s soul – he did not want fiction or biography, he didn’t want poetry or anything  on beauty and being wrong academic written by anyone he knew. Sleepy Murdoch barked softly and got two of Howard’s fingers in his mouth. With his free hand Howard took a turn-of-the-century edition of Alice in Wonderland off the shelf and brought it with Murdoch to the couch. As soon as he was released, Murdoch retreated to his basket. He seemed to look at Howard resentfully as he did so and, once he was in his former position, hid his head between his paws. Howard placed a cushion at one end of the couch and stretched out along it. He opened the book and was drawn to a handful of capitalized phrases.        -     He read a few lines. Gave up. Looked at the pictures. Gave up. Closed his eyes. The next thing was a soft, heavy mass, weighing down the couch by his thigh, and then a hand on his face. The porch light was on, bathing the room in amber. Kiki took the book from his hands. ‘Complex stuff. You staying down here?’ Howard shunted up a little. He brought his hand to his eye and dug from it a hard piece of yellow sleep. He asked the time. ‘Late. Kids are back – didn’t you hear them?’ Howard had not. ‘Did you get back early? I wish you’d told me – I would have asked you to walk the Doc.’ Howard shunted up further and grasped her wrist. ‘Nightcap,’ he said, and had to repeat it because the first time it was just a croaking sound. Kiki shook her head. ‘Keeks, please. Just one.’ Kiki pressed her palms into her eye sockets. ‘Howard, I’m real  On Beauty tired. I’ve had an emotional evening. And for me, it’s a little late to drink.’ ‘Please, darling. One.’ Howard stood and went over to the drinks cabinet by the stereo. He opened the little door and turned to see Kiki standing. He looked at her pleadingly.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Will you see me again in spite of this?” he pleaded. “You promise you won’t hold this against me?” “What kind of ghoul do you think I am?” I was astonished. All my maternal instincts had been roused by his helplessness. “What kind of creep would throw you out?” “The last one this happened with,” he moaned. “She threw me out and tossed my clothes to me in the hall. She forgot one sock. I had to go home on the subway with one bare ankle. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.” “Darling,” I said, rocking him. I guess I should have been tipped off about Charlie’s emotional instability by his sobbing and choking and shuddering—but not me. For me this only confirmed his sensitivity. The Prince and the Pea. It was understandable. Opening nights got him down. We could always sing Cole Porter together instead of fucking. But instead he fell asleep in my arms. He slept like no one I’ve ever known. He wheezed and sputtered and farted and thrashed. He groaned and shuddered. He even picked his pimples in his sleep. I stayed up half the night watching him in utter amazement. In the morning he woke up smiling and fucked me like a stud. I had passed the test. I had not thrown him out. This was my reward. For the next eight months or so we went together, usually spending nights either at his place or mine. I was in the process of getting an annulment from Brian, and was teaching at CCNY while finishing my M.A. at Columbia. I was still living in the same apartment where Brian had cracked up and I hated to stay alone nights, so when Charlie couldn’t stay with me, I followed him to the East Village and shared his narrow bed. He loved me, he said, he adored me, he said, and yet, he kept holding back. I sensed something funny in his declarations of love, something tentative and insincere. I was wild because it was the first time anyone had ever held back on me. I was used to having the upper hand and his tentativeness incensed me. It made me more and more crazy about him, which in turn made him more and more tentative. The old, old story. I knew there was another girl in Paris, an old girlfriend from Radcliffe now studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. According to Charlie, they were just friends. It was over, he said.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  8. I couldn’t be a rebel (or, at very least, a pariah) by marrying Bennett because my mother would think that was “at any rate, not ordinary.” What possibilities remained open to me? In what cramped corner could I act out what I so presumptuously called my life? I felt rather like those children of pot-smoking parents who become raging squares. I could, perhaps, take off across Europe with Adrian Goodlove, and never come home to New York at all. — And yet...I also have another mother. She is tall and thin, but her cheeks are softer than willow tips, and when I nuzzle into her fur coat on the ride home, I feel that no harm can come to me ever. She teaches me the names of flowers. She hugs and kisses me after some bully in the playground (a psychiatrist’s son) grabs my new English tricycle and rolls it down a hill into the playground fence. She sits up nights with me listening to the compositions I have written for school and she thinks I am the greatest writer in history even though I am only eight. She laughs at my jokes as if I were Milton Berle and Groucho Marx and Irwin Corey rolled into one. She takes me and Randy and Lalah and Chloe ice-skating on Central Park Lake with ten of our friends, and while all the other mothers sit home and play bridge and send maids to call for their children, she laces up all our skates (with freezing fingers) and then puts on her own skates and glides around the lake with us, pointing out danger spots (thin ice), teaching us figure eights, and laughing and talking and glowing pink with the cold. I am so proud of her! Randy and I boast to our friends that our mother (with her long flowing hair and huge brown eyes) is so young that she never has to wear makeup. She’s no old fuddy-duddy like the other mothers. She wears turtlenecks and ski pants just like us. She wears her long hair in a velvet ribbon just like us. And we don’t even call her Mother because she’s so much fun. She isn’t like anyone else. On my birthday (March 26, Aries, the Rites of Spring), I awaken to find my room transformed into a bower. Around my bed are vases of daffodils, irises, anemones. On the floor are heaps of presents, wrapped in the most fanciful tissue papers and festooned with paper flowers. There are Easter eggs, hand painted by my mother to look like Fabergé eggs. There are boxes of chocolates and jelly eggs (“for a sweet year,” she says, hugging me), and there is always a giant birthday card, painted in water colors and showing me in all my glory: the most beautiful little girl in the world, long blond hair, blue eyes, and masses of flowers in my arms.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At breakfast, in the depressingly bright kitchen, with its chrome glitter and Hardware and Co. Calendar and cute breakfast nook (simulating that Coffee Shoppe where in their college days Charlotte and Humbert used to coo together), she would sit, robed in red, her elbow on the plastic-topped table, her cheek propped on her fist, and stare at me with intolerable tenderness as I consumed my ham and eggs. Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia, but in her eyes it vied in beauty and animation with the sun and shadows of leaves rippling on the white refrigerator. My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love. My small income added to her even smaller one impressed her as a brilliant fortune; not because the resulting sum now sufficed for most middle-class needs, but because even my money shone in her eyes with the magic of my manliness, and she saw our joint account as one of those southern boulevards at midday that have solid shade on one side and smooth sunshine on the other, all the way to the end of a prospect, where pink mountains loom. Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the activities of as many years. The poor woman busied herself with a number of things she had foregone long before or had never been much interested in, as if (to prolong these Proustian intonations) by my marrying the mother of the child I loved I had enabled my wife to regain an abundance of youth by proxy. With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to “glorify the home.” Knowing as I did its every cranny by heart—since those days when from my chair I mentally mapped out Lolita’s course through the house—I had long entered into a sort of emotional relationship with it, with its very ugliness and dirt, and now I could almost feel the wretched thing cower in its reluctance to endure the bath of ecru and ocher and putty-buff-and-snuff that Charlotte planned to give it. She never got as far as that, thank God, but she did use up a tremendous amount of energy in washing window shades, waxing the slats of Venetian blinds, purchasing new shades and new blinds, returning them to the store, replacing them by others, and so on, in a constant chiaroscuro of smiles and frowns, doubts and pouts. She dabbled in cretonnes and chintzes; she changed the colors of the sofa—the sacred sofa where a bubble of paradise had once burst in slow motion within me. She rearranged the furniture—and was pleased when she found, in a household treatise, that “it is permissible to separate a pair of sofa commodes and their companion lamps.”