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.

Page 68 of 145 · 20 per page

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  When sex with a decent woman was not an open provocation of another man, attitudes might be less exacting. One of the finest representations of quiet indulgence occurs at the end of the fifth book of Leucippe and Clitophon. The young “widow” Melite falls passionately in love with Clitophon, yet he artfully avoids physical consummation of their engagement. When Melite’s husband turns up alive, she makes one last effort to take Clitophon to bed. The seduction scene was the deliberate inverse of Leucippe’s heroic resistance against Thersander, Melite’s husband. Melite’s speech is the cri de coeur of a desperate young wife infatuated with another man. Clitophon’s response is tender. “Something human moved me, and I truly feared the god Eros too.… This would have to be reckoned not so much intercourse as a cure for an ailing soul.… Everything happened by the will of Eros.” In the dramatic final act, Melite would indeed find herself charged with adultery. The prosecutors note that one who corrupts a wedded wife steals what belongs to another man. Nevertheless, Achilles Tatius is humane, or subversive, enough to let Melite escape on a technicality, by vowing that she did not violate her marriage so long as she thought her husband was dead, when in fact she hurriedly cheated on him as soon as she learned that his return was imminent!42 The satisfaction of Melite demonstrates that sometimes eros transcended human rules, not that the rules were changing. Despite the episode’s undoubted charm, it cannot count as a winking acknowledgment of women’s liberation. Sometimes the Roman Empire is construed as a progressive moment in women’s history, rolled back in late antiquity by the regressive alliance of religion and patriarchy. The vociferous, if satirical, complaints about powerful wives, the frank depiction of feminine sexual pleasure in the visual arts, the greater presence of women in the public sphere—all of these are signs that point to a wider range of motion for the Roman matron. As with any such caricature, this one has only a certain admixture of truth. A number of structural factors worked in a woman’s favor. By the imperial era, older forms of marriage that placed the woman in the legal power of her husband had long fallen into desuetude. Roman rules that kept spousal property in separate funds meant that the woman’s dowry was, as men complained, a subtle source of leverage. The woman’s—or, more realistically, the girl’s—consent was formally required for the marriage, and liberal laws of divorce allowed women to end marriages, unilaterally and virtually without cause. The Augustan social legislation created a path for women to achieve an exceptional legal competence, the ability to act without a male tutor, by bearing three children. The Roman woman is hardly a naive and feeble creature hopelessly under her husband’s thumb.43

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Anthia’s escape from the brothel is a paradigm of the heroine’s chastity in the romance. Parallel endangerments from pimps and pirates, slave owners and other ruffians, recur throughout the entire genre. The most direct parallel, and the only rival to the Ephesian Tale in the transparency of its conventionality, survives in the popular History of Apollonius, King of Tyre. The History of Apollonius is a family romance rather than an erotic romance, but the pattern of separation, endurance, and reunion is structurally parallel. In this story, which survives in Latin, it is the protagonist’s daughter, Tarsia, who has been cast on the cruel winds of fate and endures lurid threats to her virginal purity. In the climactic scene of the History, Tarsia, like Anthia, is placed for sale in a slave market. The prince of the city and the town’s most notorious procurer enter a bidding war for the beautiful girl, with equally prurient interests. As the price escalates, the prince reckons that the purchase of this one creature would force him to sell off a number of his other slaves. With the dispassionate logic of a cost-cutting accountant, he reasons that he can let the pimp buy her, then pay to be the first customer for just a fraction of the girl’s sale price. “I’ll go in first and snatch the knot of her virginity at a low price and it will be the same as if I had bought her.” The deep material and ideological connection between the flesh trade and the sex trade was rarely exposed to such direct view. The demand for sex was a major impetus behind the circulation of human chattel in the Roman world.6 The pimp in this story, a monochromatic villain, ignores Tarsia’s pleas for compassion. “Don’t you know that supplications and tears have no force with pimps and executioners?” Like the executioner, the pimp is an agent of death. He sends her to the brothel. The prince, with his face covered, entered first. Tarsia prostrated herself at his feet and in the most desperate terms begged for his pity. “Listen to the misfortune that brought me to this unhappy state, weigh the fact of my respectable ancestry.” The prince was startled into compassion. He, too, had a virgin daughter, for whom he might fear a similar fate. He abandoned his lustful intentions and told Tarsia to implore future customers with the same sad recital, until she had earned enough to buy her own freedom. A train of suitors follows, and all are so moved by Tarsia’s story that they refrained from impairing her chastity. She endured, inviolate, until she was reunited with her father, who promised Tarsia to the noble prince as a bride (and incited the people of Mytilene to burn the merciless pimp alive). Tarsia’s preservation of her chastity was less elaborately contrived than Anthia’s. She relied on the bare compassion of strangers. But the underlying assumptions about the order of the universe were the same.7

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Taha slid his hand shyly across the blanket & clasped my own. I scarcely faltered as I spoke of Ahmed’s arrow, which going so far was assumed to have vanished so that he lost the Princess to his brother Ali, but I felt a squeezing in my chest & throat & hardly dared look at him as, all unconsciously, I made our two hands more comfortable together, interweaving his long fingers with my own. By a simple gesture I wd never have dared to make & without words which neither of us cd have said, he conveyed his trust in me, & holding my hand held on to a simple faith that all wd be well with Ahmed, wretched though his current state now was. And when the others had all turned home, I went on, saying that the arrow wd never be found & that they must make haste for the wedding-feast of Prince Ali & the Princess Nur-al-Nihar, Ahmed went on alone & lo he encountered the radiant fairy Peri-Banou & fell in love with her & married her & lived in happiness with her all the days of his life. Then Hassan was scuffling & waiting at the door, & Taha with less than innocence drew his hand away— The phone was ringing. Phil, I knew, would never answer it, though it was at the bedside, and when I came in he was sprawled over the sheets, pale, bleary and tumescent. ‘Leave us out with the phone,’ he groaned. I half sat on him and picked up the receiver. ‘Darling, it’s James. You couldn’t come over, could you?’ ‘Sweetest, I’ve got a pretty frightful head and it’s only seven o’clock. Can’t it wait?’ ‘A bit, I suppose. I’m in a terrible mess. I’ve been arrested.’ 3 I did so regret it was the Central Line I used most. I couldn’t get any kind of purchase on it. It had neither the old-fashioned openair quality of the District Line, where rain misted the tracks as one waited, nor the grimy profundity of the Northern Line, nor the Piccadilly’s ingenious, civilised connexiveness. For much of its length it was a great bleak drain, and though some of its stops—Holland Park, St Paul’s, Bethnal Green—were historic enough, they were offset on my daily journeys by the ringing emptiness of Lancaster Gate and Marble Arch, and the trash and racket of Tottenham Court Road, where I got out. Somewhere, I knew, the line had its ghost stations, but I had given up looking out for their unlit platforms and perhaps, in a flash from the rails, the signboards and good-humoured advertisements of an abandoned decade.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e grace of sexual familiarity in marriage would breed philia, a blend of friendship and love. In the letters of Pliny the Younger, we read almost with embarrassment the eff usions of saccharine aff ection toward his wife (more than twenty years his ju nior), but the public nature of the letters reveals how far private emotional investment had become an acceptable ele- ment of the elite’s self- projection. Th e highest ideal of marriage was har- mony, homonoia, a charged term that located the peaceful partnership of husband and wife within the civic and cosmic order. Th e man who was going to harmonize the city, with its internecine squabbles and intense fac- tionalism, was expected to have a harmonious house. Like the “ceaseless circling dance of the planets,” companionate marriage was part of nature, “an image of order and harmony.”  Sex inevitably became enmeshed in the high ideals of conjugal harmony. “Where does eros more rightly belong than in the lawful marriage of man and wife?” It was a short step for Roman moralists to lay down rules of plea sure. Aphrodite, within the house hold, was to be subjected to “reason, harmony, and philosophy.” Injunctions of mutual sexual fi delity easily arose from the high spirit of companionate marriage. For Plutarch, sexual fi delity was advised on pragmatic grounds. Plutarch reminded a bride not to lose her modesty with her clothes off ; he counseled the groom to make the bed- room a “school of orderly behavior.” But nothing is more likely to render a stilted view of Roman marriage than exclusive focus on the stern counsels  FROM SHAME TO SIN of the moralists. Viewed in isolation, the moralizing literature on marital sex is too easily construed as a step toward a more repressed future, as though the conjugalization of sex might already achieve by boredom and grim routine half of what the preachers and prudes would later seek to con- trol by religious command. Nothing could be further detached from the original soil of Roman marriage. Th e advice complex sprang from a culture where companionate marriage and erotic investment were intertwined as never before.  A pessimistic view of the Roman marriage couch has become surpris- ingly entrenched. It is not impossible to fi nd indications that sex was mud- dled, perfunctory, and embarrassed. In what age could a diligent search not return indications of the most varied sensual experiences?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  You don’t seem very well kitted out if you are.’ He had on smartly pressed shorts with an elasticated waistband and a T-shirt advertising the previous year’s Proms. ‘No, I’m just going for a walk,’ he said. ‘It’s such a lovely day—one would hate to stay indoors!’ ‘One would indeed,’ I agreed. ‘Roops, this is my friend Phil, who’s staying with me for a bit.’ ‘Hello,’ he said breezily, and then gambolled along backwards in front of us, so as to get a good look at the two of us. I thought it must be like being filmed, walking towards an ever-receding camera, and I put on silly faces to make him laugh. When he decided he liked us he dropped into place between us, and we swung along hand-in-hand. He was as touching and confidential as ever, and I felt we must look like a young couple that by some dazzling agamogenesis had produced this golden-haired offspring. I was keeping an eye out for the house numbers and we were already nearly there. ‘We’re going in here, darling,’ I said, and Phil looked up a shade apprehensively while Rupert, disappointed that our meeting was over so soon, took on a serious air, not quite understanding what was going on, and glancing from one to the other of us, as though some decision had to be taken. ‘Why don’t you come round for tea one day?’ I suggested. ‘If old Pollywog will let you.’ ‘Yes, I will,’ he said. But something else was clearly worrying him and he tugged on my hand and led me off to several parked cars’ length away. He looked around carefully, and I knew what he was going to talk about. For a moment I thought he was going to tell me he had seen Arthur, and I felt that perhaps life would suddenly become quite different. ‘What ever happened to that boy?’ he asked. ‘Oh, he went away a bit ago,’ I said plausibly, as if it were a lie. ‘Did he manage to run away all right, then?’ ‘Oh yes—he got clean away.’ ‘Have you heard where he went to? Did he go abroad?’ ‘Funnily enough, old chap, I don’t know quite where he is. It was all top secret, you know. I hope you didn’t tell anyone about it?’ ‘No,’ he whispered, shocked that I could imagine that. ‘As a matter of fact,’ it struck me, ‘if you should see him I’d quite like to know. It would have to be really hush-hush, though. Keep your eyes skinned when you’re going for a walk or anything’ (here he rubbed his eyes quickly, carrying out my orders at once) ‘and if you do see him, and you’re really sure it’s him, why don’t you give me a ring?’ ‘All right,’ he said. I was glad I had made a little game or experiment out of it, and began already to look anxiously forward to it.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The next year, I had the opportunity to return to South America to work as a field assistant to a Princeton graduate student, Nina Pierpont, who was studying woodcreeper ecology at Cocha Cashu—a remote, Amazonian field station in southeastern Peru. My research at Cocha Cashu proved to be critical to my future life, for it was there that I met Ann Johnson, a Bowdoin College student who was working as an assistant for a Princeton undergraduate student, Jenny Price, on the social behavior of White-winged Trumpeters (Psophia leucoptera). Ann and I became sweethearts that summer, and we have been partners ever since. Ann is a producer and cinematographer of nature and science documentaries for television. We have three sons. In the fall of 1984, I started graduate school in evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan. Inspired by the diversity and complexity of manakin displays from Suriname, I proposed for my dissertation a grand, comparative analysis of the evolution of manakin behavior across the entire family. I wanted to use manakin phylogeny—their family tree—to study the evolution of manakin lek display behavior. This emerging scientific field combined phylogeny with the study of animal behavior, called ethology, into a vibrant new discipline—phylogenetic ethology. The goal was to investigate the evolution of behavior comparatively through its history. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this was my first step into the study of aesthetic radiation. During my first year in graduate school, my office mate, Rebecca Irwin, introduced me to the classic work of Ronald A. Fisher and to the revolutionary new papers on mate choice by Russell Lande and Mark Kirkpatrick. This was my first exposure to the science of mate choice and to the deep intellectual conflicts between the aesthetic/Darwinian and the adaptationist worldviews. But even then I could sense that the open-ended and arbitrary qualities of the Fisher hypothesis looked a lot more like how nature worked than the honest signaling theories did.

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

  She’s been through a lot and, well, on the trip down here she just kept saying over and over, ‘Lord, I can’t be scared of no dog, I can’t be scared of no dog.’ ” I was apologizing again to the daughter for what the court officials had done the day before when suddenly there was a commotion at the courtroom door. We both looked up and there stood Mrs. Williams. She was once again dressed impeccably in her scarf and hat. She held her handbag tight at her side and seemed to be swaying at the entrance. I could hear her speaking to herself, repeating over and over again: “I ain’t scared of no dog, I ain’t scared of no dog.” I watched as the officers allowed her to move forward. She held her head up as she walked slowly through the metal detector, repeating over and over, “I ain’t scared of no dog.” It was impossible to look away. She made it through the detector and stared at the dog. Then, loud enough for everyone to hear, she belted out: “I ain’t scared of no dog!” She moved past the dog and walked into the courtroom. Black folks who were already inside beamed with joy as she passed them. She sat down near the front of the courtroom and turned to me with a broad smile and announced, “Attorney Stevenson, I’m here!” “Mrs. Williams, it’s so good to see you here. Thank you for coming.” The courtroom filled up, and I started getting my papers together. They brought Walter into the courtroom, the signal that the hearing was about to begin. That’s when I heard Mrs. Williams call my name. “No, Attorney Stevenson, you didn’t hear me. I said I’m here.” She spoke very loudly, and I was a little confused and embarrassed. I turned around and smiled at her. “No, Mrs. Williams, I did hear you, and I’m so glad you’re here.” When I looked at her, though, it was as if she was in her own world. The courtroom was packed, and the bailiff brought the court to order as the judge walked in. Everyone rose, as is the custom. When the judge took the bench and sat down, everyone else in the courtroom sat down as well. There was an unusually long pause as we all waited for the judge to say something. I noticed people staring at something behind me, and that’s when I turned around and saw that Mrs. Williams was still standing. The courtroom got very quiet. All eyes were on her. I tried to gesture to her that she should sit, but then she leaned her head back and shouted, “I’m here!” People chuckled nervously as she took her seat, but when she looked at me, I saw tears in her eyes. In that moment, I felt something peculiar, a deep sense of recognition.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  and we finally end up at Cordwood Beach—the place we used to play for hours, writing our names in the sand, hunting the rocks for clams, and picking fistfuls of onion grass for our dinners. Arm in arm, my sister and I walk the beach, saying nothing. Under the gray December sky, we look out at the Long Island Sound to where the floating dock once was anchored; to the broken stone house that we used to climb on. “She did one thing right,” Camille says. “What?” “She gave us each other.” The lives Cookie gave us were only etched in sand; able to be erased and written all over again . . . better, with meaning. We’ve all made our stories into what we wanted for ourselves. Standing side by side on the cold beach, there’s just one thought keeping Camille and me from feeling total completion: Rosie. She doesn’t want us to be a part of her life or to know her family. Rosie got married and gave birth to a son, but by the time we knew about any of it, all the momentous events had passed. Occasionally, she mails Camille and me photographs, in all of which she’s clearly a loving, doting mother . . . but on the rare occasion the photos are accompanied by a letter, the communication is all very matter-of-fact. Everyone here is fine, she says. Hope you’re great. She wants us to be aware that she’s adjusted well as an adult, but she doesn’t want us to be present for it. In December 1999, a colleague tells me he’s venturing into Times Square to ring in the new millennium. “You used to work for the City, right?” he asks. “What’ll be the best way to navigate the streets?” I call someone whom I heard now works as the special assistant to the NYC police commissioner: Todd Ciaravino, the handsome, stoic aide to Giuliani whom I knew from my years at the comptroller’s office. After sharing the layout of the security route, Todd remembers my burgeoning golf hobby and says it might be nice to hit the driving range at Chelsea Piers when the weather warms up a little. Todd is sensitive to my guardedness—unlike other guys I’ve been attracted to, he’s consistent, mild-mannered, and kind . . . not at all overbearing or arrogant. Instead of what so many former partners and people from my childhood promised—You can trust me —Todd shows me he deserves my trust. He looks out for me, and coming from the same field, he doesn’t give me a hard time about how busy my work keeps me. By late spring, we’ve entered potentially-serious-romance territory when Todd begins traveling with the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign. At the same time, I’m transitioning from my position on Wall Street back to working with the public sector and, as a hobby, I begin to appear on Fox News, supporting the Democratic presidential ticket.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I voice my hesitation, telling Steve, “If I accept this position, I’ll need to resign as a board member for You Gotta Believe—an organization that actually gets older foster kids adopted so they can avoid homelessness or worse. They have a contract with the county and that could be a conflict.” Steve assures me my job helping him run Suffolk County will even better position me to impact the lives of foster kids. “With the county’s resources, you can help lots of homeless kids,” he says. “And you’ll still be supporting me in the day-to-day operations of the county.” I start my new job as the chief deputy executive of Suffolk County on January 1, 2012. Eleven days into the new position, at the end of a senior staff meeting, one of my colleagues asks whether I read this morning’s Long Island Newsday . “Regina, you’ve got to read this,” she says. On the front page is a profile of Samantha Garvey, a seventeen-year-old student at Brentwood High School on the southern shore of Suffolk County. Samantha has been selected as a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search—she’s one of three hundred students up for the most prestigious high school science award in the United States. The challenge is that she lives in a homeless shelter with her family. When her family was forced from their home, their pit bull, Pulga, was put in an animal shelter. According to the story, the Garvey family is as worried about Pulga’s being euthanized as they are about how they’ll find a home. I go back to my desk and call the shelter where Pulga has been placed. I tell them confidently, “I’d like to give you my credit card to get the dog into a boarding home where it’s certain she won’t be put down, please.” She can stay in the boarding facility until we address the family’s housing needs. By one o’clock that afternoon, a dedicated team of county employees identifies the only vacant house the county owns and they put a plan in place for Samantha and her family to move into it within two weeks. When Steve announces that Samantha will have a home again, families, businesses, and contractors in the community contribute their energy, furniture, and labor. The county workers who work with Steve and me help us with renovations and setting the house up for the Garveys’ move-in, and my ten-year-old niece Christina accompanies me on a shopping trip to decorate the home. I save all the news clippings that feature Samantha’s family . . . and Pulga. Christina and I pick out frames for the news clippings, a pup-inspired welcome mat, dog bowls, and a leash for Pulga. We hang the leash on a hook near the entryway and, remembering how as a child I’d push it out of my mind anytime I wished for family photos on our walls, Christina and I place the frames with the news clippings throughout the house.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  On top of the clothes she placed my favorite games: Candy Land, Parcheesi, and Operation. If we were missing parts to the games, Gi, Cherie, and Camille would always compromise by using random chess and checker pieces or pebbles so that all three games were complete. In a fractured life, my sisters were always trying to make things whole again. We came downstairs. Norm sat silently on the couch in the living room, waiting to be told what the next move was. Cookie was still in the kitchen; she could hear us, but she couldn’t see us. There was an awkward bashfulness around Cookie after she’d let loose with one of her barbaric beatings. It was as if Cookie’s violence were a vicious animal caged inside her flesh and she had to be real still to keep it from busting out again. Of course, she’d never let that animal out in front of a social worker. Gi dropped the Hefty bag on the living room floor. I wrapped my arms around her leg again and turned away from Mrs. Brady. Camille came downstairs carrying Norm’s bag of clothes. She set his bag beside mine. “What’s in there?” Mrs. Brady asked. Her voice wasn’t like the mother’s on the TV show. This woman sounded hard, official, as if her throat was made of steel. “Their clothes,” Camille said. You could tell Camille and Gi were sisters—she was a lighter, more round-eyed version of Gi. “And some games,” Gi said. “Take the games out.” Mrs. Brady stood and smoothed out her beige skirt. “But these are their games that they love to play,” Gi said. “Take them out. There will be games there.” She looked toward the door. It was time to go. “But they have all the pieces,” Camille said. “They’re whole games.” “TAKE THE DAMN GAMES OUT!” Cookie shouted from the kitchen. We all startled at the sound of her voice. Two days earlier, on Tuesday, our mother had come home with a carton of milk and a box of macaroni and cheese. She was drunk and angry because her latest boyfriend had kicked her out. There were no hellos or kisses. Cookie dropped the bag of groceries on the ground, then dropped herself onto the couch and immediately fell asleep on her stomach. Her face was turned to one side, smashed up as if there were no bones. She snored so loudly and deeply that Norm and I laughed. “It sounds like a big old man,” I said, and we laughed even harder. Gi made the macaroni and cheese, and the three of us sat on the living room floor eating the pasta and drinking glass after glass of milk until the entire carton was gone. Gi and Norm finished their meals first and were in the kitchen cleaning up while I still ate. When I was done, I placed my glass on my plate and stood to clear my dishes.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  That afternoon, when Steve gives Samantha and her family the keys to their new home, in just one short month I see the rewards of my career and the power of government and community. I work from January through the fall focusing primarily on Suffolk County’s budget, but one morning in September, I’m pulled away from work after I read texts sent from Camille’s second daughter. Danielle Grace 7:13 a.m. Aunt Gina, Mom had a stroke! She’s in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. Please call! 7:35 a.m. Aunt Gina, where are you? Please call! I call her older sister, Maria. “Aunt Gi, Mom had a massive stroke. She was paralyzed when the paramedics took her away. We’re driving behind her ambulance to the hospital. Please hurry.” I leave home and drive the forty minutes to Stony Brook University Hospital, where Maria meets me in the doorway of the waiting room. “She’s just had a second stroke,” she says . . . and by the time Cherie arrives moments later, she’s experienced two more. Our forty-eight-year-old sister—a mother of five—has just experienced four strokes. “You’re a very lucky baby,” her doctor tells her. “No one this young has the strokes that you have and regains all their cognition and function the way you have.” Surrounded by Frank, their five kids, and Cherie and me, Camille’s body takes a few days to recover from paralysis. Just before the following weekend, she’s released and sent home. As a birthday gift, I buy her fresh exercise clothes, sneakers, and a heart monitor so she can begin to strengthen her heart, which was weakened by the strokes. A FEW WEEKS later, I take an afternoon off from work to honor the only other passion that has ever pulled me away from my career: my family, which is growing again. No longer a baby, but still full of unconditional love, Camille’s son Frankie is getting married. Cherie, Rosie, Norman, and I are there to celebrate his marriage and support Camille, who is now well enough to walk her eldest son down the aisle . . . and to dance at the wedding. From the dance floor she catches my eyes and waves me to join her as the DJ cues up a special request: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Rosie, Cherie, and Norman follow me out and the five of us huddle in tight and sing to one another with all our hearts. Epilogue IN LATE OCTOBER , the National Weather Service forecasts a “Superstorm”—a hurricane they’re referring to as Sandy. For the first time ever, the NWS sends a representative out to Long Island to prepare us county leaders and our first responders for how serious this storm will be. “Death and devastation,” they tell us repeatedly. “Your residents have got to take this storm seriously. The devastation won’t be because of the wind or the rains, but because of the storm surge.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  She lurches out of the driver’s seat while the car lets up beneath her weight. We all watch her hulking five-foot-two, size-18 figure stagger around the front of the car and toward the gray house with a six-pack of Schlitz beer stuffed under her arm. I rest my hands on my hips and look around, relieved there are no neighbors outside. The dampness of Cookie’s white Hanes T-shirt exposes her quadruple-D over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders and, for God’s sake, too much of the boulders—they’re struggling to stay in the cups. Her appearance gives me a sudden urge to cover the little ones’ eyes, but by now, for them, the sight of our mother’s unmentionables holds no shock . . . instead Norman and Rosie are shaking in silent giggles. An old pair of cutoff jean shorts that should be six inches longer and wider in the thighs completes her look. She peers inside the house’s window from the front stoop then pushes open the door, which obviously bears no lock. Hastily she turns and waves—“Come on, kids!”—signaling urgency for us to unpack the car. While our younger siblings remain in the backseat, Camille leans over from the front passenger side of the car, reaches down toward the steering wheel, and fingers the keys Cookie left in the ignition. She looks back at me, and we understand the significance of the keys’ position. As usual, Cookie doesn’t plan to stick around our new home long. We spring into action. The faster we unpack the car, kids and all, the quicker our mother will head out on another long binge. We have to move with speed, convincing Cookie our motive is all about setting up our new home. She’d beat us senseless if she ever found out how eager we are to get rid of her. Through the backseat window I peek at Norman, who’s used to my Moving Day choreography. “Take her inside with you,” I tell him. He helps Rosie climb out from the middle; his brown, bowl-cut hair uncombed, his face calm. Camille and I work hard to raise him like one would raise any curious, carefree, twelve-year-old boy. His sweet, slanted brown eyes are barely visible below his uneven haircut, and I pledge him a silent promise: I’ll find new scissors for next time. Sometimes I reason that if I’ve gotta raise a kid who’s only a year and a half younger than I am, then surely I have the right to experiment my self-taught salon techniques on him . . . but that Dorothy Hamill look on a preteen boy is just plain cruel. Norm shuffles into the house with Rosie, still wearing her pink pajamas, close behind. I pause from unloading the car to take in her presence; a little flash of life scampering barefoot across this gray scene. Her innocence pierces my heart.

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

  We were driving in his car to a conference center in upstate New York. Divorced three years earlier, the father, who was a busy pediatrician, traveled a thousand miles twice a month to visit his daughter. Typically he called during the week, made plans for the weekend, and then took two rooms at a residential hotel. When his daughter had her tenth birthday, he thought that it might be hard or boring for her to spend the weekend alone with her father so he invited her to bring a friend. The child was very happy to do so. I asked the father whether he had ever thought of asking his daughter to fly to his home. He said sharply, “I don’t want my little girl alone on an airplane.” I was very impressed with his sensitivity and concern and so I said, “Your child is very fortunate to have you for her father.” As I glanced at the man, I was startled to see tears rolling slowly down his cheek. “Doctor, you’re crying!” “You’re the only person in the whole world who has ever said that to me,” he said. “Everyone else tells me that I’m a fool.” There may be many sensitive, loving fathers or mothers who would be willing to make the necessary sacrifice in order to fly to visit their children. Perhaps no one ever asked them. SEVENTEEN The Vulnerable Child T he next few chapters concern a group of children who have not been studied in the context of divorce. They are vulnerable children who suffer from a wide range of disabilities or problems, including birth defects, learning disorders, diabetes, cancer, and other diseases. After talking to physicians, teachers, clinicians, and others who treat these children, I learned that marital distress and divorce are high among families with such children. The job of raising a child who needs round-the-clock nursing, frequent doctor appointments, or special classes at school is daunting. Some parents thrive under the pressure, but alas, many cannot cope and find themselves blaming each other or the marriage for the strain they face each day. Billy’s story is about a child born with a congenital heart defect who was protected in his early years by a doting mother. But after his parents divorced, Billy’s world collapsed and he was never able to adjust to the changes demanded of him. Like Karen, Larry, and Paula, the divorce shaped his personality, but unlike the others, he grew more and more isolated and unhappy. What happened to Billy is another example of how the divorce experience in childhood can lead to changed lives and different outcomes in adulthood.

• 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.