Yearning

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 Querelle (1953)

  struct a daydream around a tragedy of love. To offer Querelle my entire devotion! When he would come, at the end of his tether with remorse and torment, his temples throbbing, his hair damp with sweat, hounded by his deed, to confide in me! Then I could be his confessor and give him absolution, hold him in my arms and console him, and finally go to prison with him! If only I could have made myself believe a little more in his being the murderer, then I could have denounced him, thus immediately gaining the opportunity to console him and to share his punish· ment! \Vithout knowing it, Querelle stood on the brink of in· credible peril. I came so very close to delivering him up into the hands of the cops! 260 I JEAN GENET 0 0 0 The Lieutenant had never worried about Querelle's ever blackmailing him for money. True, the crewman was a sarcastic fellow, but he seemed devoid of that kind of cynicism: No more was Seblon able to replace the gun-toting false sailor's image with Querelle:s, much as he would have loved it. He would have met him and joined him in a battle, and in the midst of the struggle, in the time it takes to take hold and then let go again, they would have reached an understanding that would have enabled them to be better adversaries in the future. In moments of solitude the Lieutenant constructed a heroic dialogue they might have spoken then : it would have conveyed his inmost beauty to Querelle, made it visible to the young man's dazzled eyes. It was a short, harsh exchange, reduced to essentials. Sovereign calm in his voice, the officer would have said: "Geo, you are mad. Put the revolver away. I won't tell anyone about this." ''Just hand over the dough and you'll be all right." "No." "I'll shoot you." "Go ahead." Nights, the Lieutenant took long solitary walks on deck, avoiding his fellow officers, haunted by this dialogue and by his inability to continue and finish it. "Cowed by me, he throws the gun away. But then my heroism remains unknown. Or, still cowed, nevertheless he fires the gun, exactly out of respect for me, and trying to match my stature. But if he kills me, I just die a stupid death by the roadside." After mulling it over for a long time, the Lieutenant chose this ending: "Querelle pulls the trigger, but in his excitement he misses, only wounding me." He would then return to the ship, but would not provide a description of Querelle (as he had given one of Gil) . Thus he would have shown his superior strength to Querelle, and Querelle would have loved him for it. 261 I QUERELLE - - "May I put in a request for forty-eight hours' leave, Lieutenant?"

• From Querelle (1953)

  To ask this question, pausing in the act of pouring the tea, Querelle raised his head and directed his smile at the Lieutenant's reflection in the mirror, but Seblon beat a quick retreat into himself. He replied, curtly: ''Sure, I'll sign it for you." A few days earlier he would have reacted differently. He would have asked Querelle a number of insidious questions, describing ever-narro,Ving circles round what was most essential, to the point of actually touching that center or even revealing parts, but never all of it. Querelle was getting on his nerves. His face, present, did not manage to dispel the image of that audacious gunman who had disappeared into the morning fog. "He was just a boy, but he had nerve." Smnetimes he thought, feeling a little ashamed, that it didn't need all that much to attack a fairy. Querelle had been insolent enough to say to his face, with a somewhat artificial undertone of threat directed against the unknown robber: "Those guys, do they know who they tangle with?" \Vell, it was clear that the "ravisher" had known the inconsistent nature of his victim. He hadn't been afraid. In every respect, Querelle felt the officer putting a distance between them, at the very moment he himself, if slowly and with a thousand reservations, would have been ready to let himself be taken in by the profound and generous tenderness only a homo was able to offer. As to the officer, his adventure generated some reflections and new attitudes we shall account for, and out of these he gained sufficient force to make it possible for him to conquer Querelle. Loved by Qucrelle, I would be loved by all the sailors of France. My lover is a compendium of aJJ their manly and naive virtues. 262 I JEAN GENET 0 0 0

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He’s got blood caked under his fingernails. “Fucking Abe,” Nolan says, a wet creak of sympathy in his voice. “Ah, well.” “You really did a number on him.” “Seems like I did.” “You all right?” “What do you think, Milton? I bashed Abe’s head in. How do you think I feel?” “I wish I knew,” Milton says, which makes Nolan sigh loudly. He picks up a loose rock and hurls it into the night. “Man, I’m tired. Would you just spit it out already?” “I’m leaving,” Milton says. “Well, fine. You smell like shit anyway.” “No, I mean I’m leaving this spring. My parents are sending me away.” “Fuck. Where?” “Idaho,” Milton says. “They’re sending me there because I get into all this shit here, and they want to fix my fucking life.” “Maybe then you’ll stop being such a little bitch,” Nolan says, and there’s a hint of levity in his voice. “Oh, great, can’t wait,” Milton says. “Cannot wait.” “Hey, come on, Milton. It’s been a terrible night already.” “I can’t be here anymore,” Milton says. “What does that mean?” “What I said. You coming? Staying? I can’t be here,” Milton says. But that isn’t exactly what he means. What he really wants to say: Come with me. Come with me. Let’s go. Let’s get away from here. Let’s go be by ourselves. Let’s go. But he cannot ask that. And if he cannot ask it, Nolan cannot and will not answer him. “I’ll stay a little longer,” Nolan says. There are still three or four cops in the distance, watching the last of the smoke trickle out of the barrels. They put out the fire. They sent everyone home. But Nolan wants to stay here among the wreckage of the night, this lost evening. There’s a kind of sadness on his face, a flicker of regret, but Milton is not sure if the regret is for what’s happened to Abe or because the evening’s been busted up early. Nolan spits off to the side, kicks a few stones down the hill. “Maybe I’ll hit you up later. We can try this birthday thing again.” “All right,” Milton says. “Or you could stay, too,” Nolan says. “No, I can’t,” Milton says. “I guess not,” Nolan says, giving Milton a long, slow smile that leaves Milton chilled. Milton turns, moves underneath the black-stubble cedar and pine trees, the scent of burning paper wafting after him. He cuts into the woods, which are cloaked in a sooty mist. Milton runs without thinking, without caring what he will emerge into on the other side. What he craves is the sensation of distance traveled, raw mileage. It suddenly seems to him, snapping twigs and getting whipped by lashing vines, that Idaho is not the worst thing that could happen to him, that even if he were to stay, Nolan would already be lost to him. Milton reaches the other side of the woods. The night is thickening overhead. The mountain looms.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Nolan lets out a snort. “Oh, thanks.” “Sure thing.” “Jesus,” Nolan says, shaking his head. Milton kicks one of the roots. “Think he’ll be okay?” “Some birthday.” Milton’s fingers are still sticky. He’s got blood caked under his fingernails. “Fucking Abe,” Nolan says, a wet creak of sympathy in his voice. “Ah, well.” “You really did a number on him.” “Seems like I did.” “You all right?” “What do you think, Milton? I bashed Abe’s head in. How do you think I feel?” “I wish I knew,” Milton says, which makes Nolan sigh loudly. He picks up a loose rock and hurls it into the night. “Man, I’m tired. Would you just spit it out already?” “I’m leaving,” Milton says. “Well, fine. You smell like shit anyway.” “No, I mean I’m leaving this spring. My parents are sending me away.” “Fuck. Where?” “Idaho,” Milton says. “They’re sending me there because I get into all this shit here, and they want to fix my fucking life.” “Maybe then you’ll stop being such a little bitch,” Nolan says, and there’s a hint of levity in his voice. “Oh, great, can’t wait,” Milton says. “Cannot wait.” “Hey, come on, Milton. It’s been a terrible night already.” “I can’t be here anymore,” Milton says. “What does that mean?” “What I said. You coming? Staying? I can’t be here,” Milton says. But that isn’t exactly what he means. What he really wants to say: Come with me. Come with me. Let’s go. Let’s get away from here. Let’s go be by ourselves. Let’s go. But he cannot ask that. And if he cannot ask it, Nolan cannot and will not answer him. “I’ll stay a little longer,” Nolan says. There are still three or four cops in the distance, watching the last of the smoke trickle out of the barrels. They put out the fire. They sent everyone home. But Nolan wants to stay here among the wreckage of the night, this lost evening. There’s a kind of sadness on his face, a flicker of regret, but Milton is not sure if the regret is for what’s happened to Abe or because the evening’s been busted up early. Nolan spits off to the side, kicks a few stones down the hill. “Maybe I’ll hit you up later. We can try this birthday thing again.” “All right,” Milton says. “Or you could stay, too,” Nolan says. “No, I can’t,” Milton says. “I guess not,” Nolan says, giving Milton a long, slow smile that leaves Milton chilled. Milton turns, moves underneath the black-stubble cedar and pine trees, the scent of burning paper wafting after him.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Ben, for example, has a new girlfriend every six months, and each time he’s convinced he’s found “the one.” But when the erotic intensity wanes even slightly, he panics and bails, thinking, “It’s all downhill from here. I guess it wasn’t love after all.” He talks a lot about wanting a stable relationship—he wants commitment, he’s ready to pair up—but his tolerance for sexual ennui is nil. In Ben’s experience, commitment and excitement are mutually exclusive. But in his fantasy, there is an omnipotent woman out there who can make it all come together. Her enchanting powers will ensure that the sex remains vibrant—the clearest sign of enduring love. She will be a woman who is so extraordinary, so amazing, that her sheer perfection will induce him to want to settle down (as if all this has nothing to do with him). Invariably, her unavailability is her single most attractive feature. He’s been saying the same thing for years, “I just haven’t found the right person yet. I’ve met loads of women. I just haven’t met the right one, the one I could really stay with. I ask my friends who they would set me up with, and they can’t think of anyone either. So you see?” Ben is in perpetual search for the ideal woman. Of course, he’s been looking for a long time: even the most idealized creature ultimately turns out to be merely human, and therefore flawed. At the beginning of each encounter he is swept away, and free from his inner turmoil. Invariably, when the initial ascent levels of, his phantoms reappear, as even the most beautiful princess will not deliver him from himself, or from the challenges of love. No matter how extraordinary she is, she can’t protect him from the tedium that comes with time and its disillusionments. After each failed relationship he falls into what Octavio Paz calls a “swamp of concupiscence”—what we more commonly refer to as a sex binge. These multiple encounters offer him Olympian pleasures at night, but only sea-level dialogue the next morning. So each encounter quickly starts to feel empty, and he again finds himself yearning for the fantasy of connection with a stable partner. Hungry after months of casual sex, he approaches his new conquest with no less panic. Every time Ben falls in love, he goes from zero to 100 in one swoop. He can’t pace himself. He can’t get enough. He incorporates her, and not just sexually. It’s the opposite swing of the pendulum—totally symmetrical and just as intense. People like Ben are easily disparaged for their extreme reactions, but they’re also a compelling topic of conversation. Ben is the one people like to gossip about with a mixture of pity (mainly the women) and envy (mainly the men). He’s a live version of the conflict that so many of us experience silently, or in a more subdued fashion.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  For quite a while we lolled on the deck. One opulent drop of water rolled down his high, compact chest into the hollow between his nipples, the right one still small and white from the cold, the left fuller and just beginning to color. The other drops were not so heavy; studding his body impressionistically with light, they didn’t move; they slowly evaporated. His sides and childishly rounded stomach dried faster than the glossy epaulets on his shoulders. For a second a diamond depended from his nose. Three or four houses away, little kids were screaming in the water. One was impersonating a motorboat, another had comically lowered her voice. An older boy was trying to scare the younger ones; he was a bomber, they helpless civilians, and his way of imitating a plane was really very good. The kids were thrilled and squealed. Some of them were laughing, though their laughter contained no warmth, no irony and no humor. Kevin was restless; he belly-flopped into the water, spraying me, stood, turned and scudded more water at me with the heel of his hand. I knew I should shout “Geronimo!” and leap in after him, clamber up on his back and push him under. The horseplay would dissolve the tension and sexual melancholy; my body would become not a snare but a friendly sort of weapon. But I couldn’t go against the decorum of my own fantasies, which were all romantic. Kevin swam freestyle away from me, way out to the white diving raft. I watched, then rested my head on the board beside my arm. A tiny ant shaped like a dumbbell crawled through the flaring, glittering hairs on my forearm. The water flowing through the pylons under me gurgled. I propped myself up on my elbow and watched Kevin diving. After a bit he found what looked like the pink plastic lid of a bucket. He tossed it again and again into the air and swam to retrieve it. The late sun, masked once more by clouds, did not send its path across the water toward us but hollowed out beneath it a golden amphitheater. The light was behind Kevin; when he held up the disk it went as pale and seductive as a pink hibiscus. His head was about the same size as the lid. When he turned his face my way it was dark, indistinguishable; his back and shoulders were carving up strips of light, carving them this way and that as he twisted and bobbed. The water was dark, opaque, but it caught the sun’s gold light, the waves dragon scales writhing under a sainted knight’s halo. At last Kevin swam up beside me; his submerged body looked small, boneless. He said we should go down to the store and buy some Vaseline. “But we don’t really need it,” I said. “Let’s get it.”

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “Seven years ago I was in your class. It was the third week. I showed up stoned out of my mind. I giggled at everything you said. You threw me out with the line I’ll never forget: You’re not fit for my class. You wanna know why I had to get high before I went in your class? I was in love with you. I couldn’t just sit there at my desk and drool. Hell, I jacked off over you three times a day. Usually more. I wanted you so much.” “But why me? You’re handsome. You should stick to guys your age. Make your life easier.” “No,” he said softly. “You were what I really needed in my life.” “This is making me feel mighty uncomfortable.” “Dr. Devane, you changed my life for the better.” “How?” “That’s why we’re having dinner.” And he recounted the story of his young life. His father was an abusive drunk; his mother, a druggie. His aunts rotated their care of him. Once he graduated from high school, he met a wealthy older man and became a kept boy. But he wasn’t happy with how the man treated him, or made drugs so readily available. Still, he paid for the teenager’s tuition. He enrolled and showed up in my class. He really liked how strict I was. No one had truly stood up to him, and that scared him more than anything. When he left my class that day, he decided to quit college altogether. No one stopped him from spiraling down even deeper into a morass of drugs and promiscuity. Then he caught sight of himself, scraggly and zonked out, in a store window, scaring himself into blubbering his story to his first AA group. They listened. They took him to a treatment center. It took a while, but he sobered up, realized he wasn’t an alcoholic and now had an occasional glass of wine with dinner. By then his older lover had come down with pancreatic cancer. Tricks looted his house and disappeared. Rico was the only one who stayed with him through chemotherapy. They never discussed money, so he was surprised to learn, when the old man died, that he had willed him his entire estate. He paid someone to tutor him in how to carry himself better, how to shop for better clothes and how to appreciate the finer things in life. He enrolled in a university downstate and earned his degree in business administration and accounting. He invested his legacy wisely and was soon much more wealthy than even the old man had been. He now considered himself a fiscal conservative when it came to managing his own money. “Seems you’ve learned something from my course. Good for you. So why are you telling me all this?” “I never got the one thing that I always wanted, so when you gave it to this one girl in your class, I was so jealous. You just about killed me.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Sex now seemed a strange thing to me, a social rite that registered, even brought about shifts in the balance of power, but something that was more discussed than performed, a simple emission of fluid that somehow generated religious, social and economic consequences. What I daydreamed of was a lover who would be older than I, richer and more influential, but also companionable. He would prize me for my sexuality, which was at once my essence and also an attribute I was totally unfamiliar with, like the orphan’s true name, a magical identity he knows nothing of until the very moment of revelation. The name ennobles the orphan, just as one’s sexual nature confers a previously undivined but achingly anticipated human nature upon love’s candidate. I knew I was worthless and at the same time I was convinced somebody would find me worthy, would worship me for this sexual allure so foreign to my understanding yet so central to my being. Although I lived surrounded by people and regularly visited a psychoanalyst, it never entered my mind to discuss with anyone my fantasies, those in which the Belgian soldier or a silver-haired stranger in a dove-gray suit seated in his Silver Cloud took me away and married me. For other boys, who can legally marry their fantasies, marriage itself must seem less magical. It is, after all, a ceremony they will eventually go through. But for me, who’d never even read about the sort of union I longed for, marriage became more and more impossible, a transubstantiation as eerie and irreversible as death. Perhaps by framing this ideal and funereal homosexual marriage in a prospect of poisonous flowers, I was making it more and more remote, thereby putting off the day when I’d have to decide whether I myself was a homosexual or not. Of course I wanted to love a man and to be heterosexual; the longer I could delay sorting out this antinomy the better. I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving but spent the long weekend with the Scotts. They took the opportunity to introduce me to Father Burke, their “confessor,” and spiritual guardian. Rachel had told me that he regularly wrote her long letters full of counsel and prayer, although he lived only some fifty or sixty miles away and she and DeQuincey saw him often. Father Burke also wrote Quince long letters, which Quince would never show to Rachel. Father Burke had taken over the poorest, oldest, most backward parish in the state: a mortification, I suppose. In his unheated, shabby little church he officiated at several services a day. He was famous, at least to the Scotts, for his short, lucid sermons—“Worthy of Boussuet,” DeQuincey assured me, “little miracles of theology and common sense.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Humbert’s is a nightmare vision of the ineffable bliss variously sought by one Nabokov character after another. For a resonant summary phrase, one turns to Agaspher (1923), a verse drama written when Nabokov was twenty-four. An adaptation of the legend of the Wandering Jew, only its Prologue was published. Tormented by “dreams of earthly beauty,” Nabokov’s wanderer exclaims, “I shall catch you / catch you, Maria my inexpressible dream / from age to age!”27 Near the end of another early work, the novel King, Queen, Knave (1928), an itinerant photographer walks down the street, ignored by the crowd, “yelling into the wind: ‘The artist is coming! The divinely favored, der gottbegnadete artist is coming!’ ”—a yell that ironically refers to the novel’s unrealized artist, businessman Dreyer, and anticipates and announces the arrival of such future avatars of the artist as the chessplayer Luzhin in The Defense (1930), the butterfly collector Pilgram in “The Aurelian” (1931), the daydreaming art dealer and critic Albert Albinus in Laughter in the Dark (1932), the imprisoned and doomed Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1935–1936), who struggles to write, the inventor Salvator Waltz in The Waltz Invention (1938), and the philosopher Krug in Bend Sinister (1947), as well as poets manqués such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955), and such genuine yet only partially fulfilled artists as Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift (1937–1938), Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and John Shade in Pale Fire (1962). When perceived by the reader, the involuted design of each novel reveals that these characters all exist in a universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of Vladimir Nabokov, the only artist of major stature who appears in Nabokov’s work. Some readers, however, may feel that works that are in part about themselves are limited in range and significance, too special, too hermetic. But the creative process is fundamental; perhaps nothing is more personal by implication and hence more relevant than fictions concerning fiction; identity, after all, is a kind of artistic construct, however imperfect the created product. If the artist does indeed embody in himself and formulate in his work the fears and needs and desires of the race, then a “story” about his mastery of form, his triumph in art is but a heightened emblem of all of our own efforts to confront, order, and structure the chaos of life, and to endure, if not master, the demons within and around us. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” says Humbert in the closing moments of Lolita, and he speaks for more than one of Nabokov’s characters.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She rode that wave, the friction of Sigrid’s hand and the scrunching heat of her panties. Sigrid’s mouth opening, slick and warm, the gentle pressure of Sigrid sucking on her tongue. And then she realized that her hands were still on the wheel, still at ten and two, just as she’d learned how to drive in high school. “Do you want to come in?” Sigrid asked. “Is it okay?” Marta asked back, looking nervously at the prim, white house. The light in the living room was on. “Come in,” she said. It was early April, and there was still snow on the ground, and the lakes were still frozen. In Sigrid’s room, there was a pink quality to the air. Sigrid had draped a diaphanous scarf over the top of her lamp. Marta lay back on Sigrid’s bed with her clothes still on, and Sigrid climbed over her. Marta was bigger than Sigrid, taller by a couple of inches and broader through the shoulders. Her hands were tough from the plant. But Sigrid smelled like sweat and work. Her forearms were firm, and her back had slender, excellent muscles. It was from the swimming, Marta thought. She knew that Sigrid swam five times a week, that in her younger years she’d been a competitive swimmer. But she’d injured something in herself. That’s when Sigrid had learned of her capacity for reading and remembering things. In those snowy days in her Minnesota town, tucked away in some dank library room, reading book after book, a cast on her arm (or leg? Marta could not remember). Under Sigrid’s body, Marta was aware of how soft her own body had become. She felt formless. Thick. But Sigrid unbuttoned her shirt and helped her out of it. When Sigrid’s fingers first entered her, Marta gasped because she had not expected their tips to be so hard and so kind. She gasped, and Sigrid kissed her forehead and then her neck and then the space below her navel. She kept whispering kind things to Marta. She kept saying that she was beautiful, that she smelled good, that she was so soft, so good. Marta clenched her eyes and knotted her fingers in the bedspread. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Sigrid. She tried to close her legs, but Sigrid opened them, and it was then that Marta felt most naked, most exposed. She wanted to cry again. She almost cried again. She put her arm over her face. “What’s wrong?” Sigrid said. She could feel Sigrid’s shoulders under her legs. “What’s wrong, Marta? Do you want to stop?” “No,” she said hoarsely. “I’ve just. I’ve never.” “Oh, Marta,” Sigrid said. She kissed Marta’s thigh and then her knee. “It’s okay.” “I’m afraid I’ll mess it up,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll see me.” Marta looked at Sigrid, who was looking up at her, those green eyes. “I see you,” Sigrid said. “You’re wonderful.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  During our field trips I’d sit beside him in a hardwood pew or stand close to him under a dusty chandelier as men’s voices chanted behind the iconostasis and I felt as though I were already Mr. Pouchet’s lover and why not, for he was as much a superfluous man as I was an excluded boy. Every morning at six he was out on the track running through the mist, stopwatch in hand, puffs of vapor issuing from his mouth, but surely he was running down. I had no idea how old he was (twenty-something), but doubtless he was declining physically. Here he comes, blood drained from his dark cheeks, lips purple and open to reveal wet, white teeth, legs lean and slightly bowed, the calves compact, not bulging, his whole body so intelligent that despite its hairiness nothing about it suggests an animal. He’s the cautious, isolated man who sleeps alone, rises before dawn, runs, irons his chinos, pares his beautiful nails that haven’t a single ridge or moon in them but that seem built up out of layer after layer of clear lacquer, who never seems to have a headache or hangover, who’s a well-maintained machine but idling, idling, who approaches each new experience (the iconostasis doors break open and the black nave floods over with candlelight: Christ is risen) in a spirit of mildly detached curiosity, and yet nothing has touched him. He is vulnerable and he’s untouched. He is a man to whom something is about to happen. In the meantime he sits under the buzzing fluorescent lamp over his desk in his dorm room and grades algebra quizzes. Between the first and second hour in the study hall in the evening the boys have ten free minutes. A bell rings, they explode out of their rooms, toilets flush, four guys are pounding a fifth where the stairs turn and Mr. Pouchet winds the gold wristwatch he received for high school graduation not so many years ago, stands and looks out his window across the courtyard at the opposite windows filled with yellow light and the coming and going of the upper formers. Mr. Pouchet is waiting. His mind is open, patient, expectant. Perhaps he’s the Buddhist, perhaps the Buddha, and if he doesn’t focus on this state of grace, then that oblivion is proof he’s blessed.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At that time I had a book on Rodin. Every afternoon I’d sit on my cot and look at a black-and-white photograph of an early sculpture, “The Age of Bronze,” a nude study of a Belgian soldier so realistic that the artist had been accused of casting it from life. I didn’t masturbate over that picture, nor did I imagine coupling with the statue or the soldier. No, I loved him and I told him so, again and again, in whispers that never sounded right because I could never figure out who I was—his son? wife? brother? enemy? husband? friend? And there was the other problem of the century that separated me from the long-dead model and of the continent from the distant replica. I told myself that if I ever found him I’d know how to love him, but I had mistaken yearning for talent and I’d neglected to sort out the most essential thing, my own identity. Perhaps that’s why I’d become so enamored of a statue, for with it the only amorous activity could be the circle of my steps around that still form. No encounter, no vying for position, no chance of perfect understanding or total confusion. That is, everything suspenseful and mutable about the society of lovers had been eliminated in favor of an embrace as simple and unvarying (as eternal) as it had necessarily to be cold. Or perhaps I worried that if I had a real, living lover I’d wound him, subject him to all the rage I’d been saving up. Yes, I spent my days thinking about male bodies, each of which was as varied, as sequential as a long Chinese scroll through which the minuscule pilgrim travels in his straw hat, followed by a servant and a horse, now standing back from the steaming falls, now meditating cross-legged under a grass roof held up by bamboo poles as he surveys the valley filling up with mist or as he throws his head back in wild spiritual hilarity in response to the grandeur of the mountain or here, down here, where he’s picking at his rice in the company of monks in the long, narrow hall opened up to the sweet, gasped Oh! of the full moon and the long exhaled Ah-h-h of its reflection in the pond. If I could have lain in a bed beside any of these boys I jostled past every day, whose feet I had to sit on while they did sit-ups or whom I sat beside, shoulder to shoulder, during chapel, I would have explored him just as the Chinese pilgrim traversed that majestic, intimidating terrain to whose rhythm he hoped to adjust himself and from which he expected to take a wisdom not quite tenable.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was starting school in the middle of the year and knew no one. Two other fourth-formers were also entering between semesters, and they became my companions. One, whose room was just next door, had a Spanish mother. I once caught a glimpse of her trim body in a black suit, her glossy, painted red lips barely visible through the bouquet of violets she was sniffing to distract herself during a dull sermon in the school chapel, her eyes lifting and hanging there like amber worry beads bright from having been told so often. Heberto had those same fine eyes and his mother’s olive skin and those teeth as white as the apples he was always eating. He was just fourteen and still at times a silly kid, especially just before lights out. We had half an hour (if you please) of “free” time after evening study hall before we had to submit to silence, a rustling, Argus-eyed silence (if Argus was a lonely, horny tribe of kids) intensified by wide-awake yearning. In that brief spasm of freedom before lights-out, competing radios would blare out, tuned to a dozen different stations, and pent-up athletes, sore from two hours of immobility at their desks, would explode into shouting football matches in the corridors. Toilets flushed, steam from showers crept out of the bathrooms into the unheated corridors. In one room five boys were sitting around in the dark lighting farts. One expert—fully clothed of course—was lying on his back, legs above his head, holding a lit match to the seat of his pants. A quick spurt of blue flame was his reward. The whole building trembled with the thundering of boys climbing up and down stairs or now shrieking in a water fight by the cooler. Heberto was also full of energy. Look at the vein pulsing in his neck, the aimless trills his long fingers are playing, the weird ululations hooting out of his mouth—until after the fact he invents an explanation of all this spontaneity by resolving himself into an airplane, the hoots modulating into the drone of jets, his flickering hands freezing into rigid wings, the ticking vein force-feeding fuel into the engine as he runs and runs, hysterical with youth, up and down the halls. After such an outburst he could be visited. I’d sit on his bed and watch him carve bits of balsa wood with an X-Acto knife. His eyes would dart up from his task. Everything about him was high-strung, tentative, off course. I never found out why he’d been shunted off to Eton in the middle of the year.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  I put a palm to his cheek and turned his head to me. Silver shafts of light in the onyx corneas made them gleam like black fire. “I didn’t know,” I whispered. “Remember how I used to feel your muscles after we worked out? I always hoped you’d feel mine back, but you never did.” “Didn’t mean I didn’t want to.” “Did you?” he asked, flopping on his side to face me. “Yeah, but I didn’t have the nerve. If I had touched you, something would have happened, and you were too young. Hell, you probably didn’t even know anything about things like that.” “Then how come I’d go home and play with my pecker afterward? The first time I came, Daniel, I was thinking of you.” I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut. “I waited for you,” he added. “I mean I haven’t done it with anybody. Three guys wanted to get with me, but I turned them down.” “Three guys in Victor?” I asked incredulously. There couldn’t have been three gays in that little burg, but, of course, it wouldn’t just be gays trying to climb this guy’s butt. Markey could make straights cream in their britches by just blinking those sable lashes...and he probably didn’t even know it. “Yeah, in Victor and, you know, on football trips. But I always said no because I was afraid it would make the picture I had of you…of us…go away.” “What about girls?” “Well, I sort of did it to one.” I laughed aloud. “How do you sort of do it to a girl?” His giggle was a release of nervous energy. “By trying it in the backseat of a car and not getting it in her very good. I came all over both of us.” “And you never went back to give it a proper try?” His eyes glistened. “Too embarrassed. And besides, it wasn’t like I thought it would be…like it would be with us. You know, you’n me.” “Kid, do you know what you’re saying?” “Making a fool out of myself, I guess. But, Daniel, I know what I want.” “And if you get it, it’ll be like with that girl, a disappointment. You’ve got this romantic picture painted in your head, and that’s not the way it will be. There’ll be smells and emissions and sweat and grunting and—” “Oh, man, I hope so! But that doesn’t mean it won’t be good, does it?” That gave me pause. “Kid, it’ll be earth-shaking for me, but I’m not sure how it will turn out for you. Nobody can know… not up front. And remember one thing. We could end up not being friends anymore.” He wrinkled his nose in the darkness. “How come? Why wouldn’t we be friends? I mean, after something that awesome?” “You might be so disgusted you won’t want to lay eyes on me again.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Sometimes now when I pass dozing suburban houses I wonder behind which window a boy waits for me. After a while I realized I wouldn’t meet him till years later; I wrote him a sonnet that began, “Because I loved you before I knew you …” The idea, I think, was that I’d never quarrel with him, nor ever rate his devotion cheap; I had had to wait too long. I’d waited so long I was almost angry, certainly vengeful. My father’s house was a somber place. The styleless polished furniture was piled high and the pantry supplies were laid in; in the fullness of breakfront drawers gold flatware and silver tea things remained for six months at a time in mauve flannel bags that could not ward off a tarnish bred out of the very air. No one talked much. There was little laughter, except when my stepmother was on the phone with one of her social friends. Although my father hated most people, he had wanted my stepmother to take her place in society, and she had. She’d become at once proper and frivolous, innocent and amusing, high-spirited and reserved—the combination of wacky girl and prim matron her world so admired. I learned my part less well. I feared the sons of her friends and made shadows among the debs. I played the piano without ever improving; to practice would have meant an acceptance of more delay, whereas I wanted instant success, the throb of plumed fans in the dark audience, the glare off diamonded necks and ears in the curve of loges. What I had instead was the ache of waiting and the fear I wasn’t worthy. Before dressing I’d stand naked before the closet mirror and wonder if my body was worthy. I can still picture that pale skin stretched over ribs, the thin, hairless arms and sturdier legs, the puzzled, searching face—and the slow lapping of disgust and longing, disgust and longing. The disgust was hot, penetrating—nobody would want me because I was a sissy and had a mole between my shoulder blades. The longing was cooler, less substantial, more the spray off a wave than the wave itself. Perhaps the eyes were engaging, there was something about the smile. If not lovable as a boy, then maybe as a girl; I wrapped the towel into a turban on my head. Or perhaps need itself was charming, or could be. Maybe my need could make me as appealing as Alice, the woman who worked the Addressograph machine with me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Using the same ill-fated parchment on which I’d written Helen, I indicted a love poem to Mr. Pouchet. I didn’t sign it and I was careful to disguise my handwriting, to imitate laboriously the long, lean eccentricities of an italic script I traced out of a copybook. His compliance in going to church with me every Sunday and his reluctance to talk to me about his private life (if he had one) had enabled me to fancy he was quite prepared to love me—his compliance and reticence were the soft wax I impressed with the intaglio of my daydreams. In the afternoon, when I knew he’d be with the track team, I flew by his room and pushed the poem under his locked door. Now it was done. Would he read it and search me out after supper, invite me to drive with him into town where we’d sit in a dirty hamburger joint and feed nickels into the miniature jukebox at our table? Would he frown and pretend to be studying the song titles on the movable cards revolving under the smudged glass while he muttered his love for me, almost as though he were angry at me or embarrassed? Or would he really be angry? Would he grab my arm as I came out of the dining hall and sadistically dig his nails into my biceps as he steered me down brick walkways glittery with ice and gritty with cast sand until we reached the deserted gymnasium, where he would unlock door after door, pushing me ahead of him onto a varnished, echoing, suddenly floodlit basketball court and would order me to do hundreds of pushups and jumping jacks in expiation, hours and hours of exercise as punishment and cure? But he never lifted his long-lashed eyes at dinner except to wisecrack with one of his kids and to hand out the pudding. I kept looking at him from my table. He was illegible. Had he, come to think of it, been able to read my fancy writing? Was he so dim he didn’t recognize, in spite of my flimsy precautions, that I was the author of this great love poem? Did he—oh, many questions, one fear: he would hate me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Since Dad slept all day, he seldom put in an appearance at the office before closing time, when he’d arrive fresh and rested, smelling of witch hazel, and scatter reluctant smiles and nods to the assembly as he made his way through us and stepped up to his own desk in a large room walled off from us by soundproof glass. “My, what a fine man your father is, a real gentleman,” my colleague would sigh. “And to think your stepmother met him when she was his secretary—some women have all the luck.” We sat in rows with our backs to him; he played the role of the conscience, above and behind us, a force that troubled us as we filed out soon after his arrival at the end of the workday. Had we stayed late enough? Done enough? My stepmother usually kept my father company until midnight. Then she and I would drive back to the country and go to bed. Sometimes my father followed us in his own car and continued his desk work at home. Or sometimes he’d stay downtown till dawn. “Late at night—that’s when he goes out to meet other women,” I once overheard my real mother tell my sister. “He was never faithful. There was always another woman, the whole twenty-two years we were married. He takes them to those little fleabag hotels downtown. I know.” This hint of mystery about a man so cold and methodical fascinated me—as though he, the rounded brown geode, if only cracked open, would nip at the sky with interlocking crystal teeth, the quartz teeth of passion. Before the midnight drive back home I was sometimes permitted to go out to dinner by myself. Sometimes I also took in a movie (I remember going to one that promised to be actual views of the “orgies at Berchtesgaden,” but it turned out to be just Eva Braun’s home movies, the Führer conferring warm smiles on pets and children). A man who smelled of Vitalis sat beside me and squeezed my thigh with his hand. I had my own spending money and my own free time. I hypothesized a lover who’d take me away. He’d climb the fir tree outside my window, step into my room and gather me into his arms. What he said or looked like remained indistinct, just a cherishing wraith enveloping me, whose face glowed more and more brightly. His delay in coming went on so long that soon I’d passed from anticipation to nostalgia. One night I sat at my window and stared at the moon, toasting it with a champagne glass filled with grape juice. I knew the moon’s cold, immense light was falling on him as well, far away and just as lonely in a distant room. I expected him to be able to divine my existence and my need, to intuit that in this darkened room in this country house a fourteen-year-old was waiting for him.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  All this aspiration, this promise of fellowship and equality, informed Tom’s songs. We worried a bit (just a bit) that we might be suburban twerps unworthy of the People. We already knew to sneer at certain folk singers for their “commercial” arrangements, their “slickness,” their betrayal of the heartrending plainness of real working folks. Although we strove in our daily lives to be as agreeable and popular as possible, to conform exactly to reigning fads, we simultaneously abhorred whatever was ingratiating. We were drawn to a club where a big, scarred Negro with lots of gold jewelry and liverish eyes ruminated over a half-improvised ballad under a spotlight before a breathless, thrilled audience of sheltered white teens (overheard on the way out from the newly elected president of our United Nations Club: “It makes you feel so damn phony. It even makes you Question Your Values”). Of course, the best thing about folk music was that it gave me a chance to stare at Tommy while he sang. After endless false starts, after tunings and retunings and trial runs of newly or imperfectly learned strums, he’d finally accompany himself through one great ballad after another. His voice was harsh and high, his hands grubby, and soon enough his exertions would make the faded blue workshirt cling to his back and chest in dark blue patches. Whereas when he spoke he was evasive or philosophical, certainly jokey in a tepid way, when he sang he was eloquent with passion, with the simple statement of passion. And I was, for once, allowed to stare and stare at him. Sometimes, after he fell asleep at night, I’d study the composition of grays poised on the pale lozenge of his pillow, those grays that constituted a face, and I’d dream he was awakening, rising to kiss me, the grays blushing with fire and warmth—but then he’d move and I’d realize that what I’d taken to be his face was in fact a fold in the sheet. I’d listen for his breath to quicken, I’d look for his sealed eyes to glint, I’d wait for his hot, strong hand to reach across the chasm between the beds to grab me—but none of that happened. There was no passion displayed between us and I never saw him show any feeling at all beyond a narrow range of teasing and joking.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  “Oh that’s just your sister. She’s so frustrated she has to pick on you. There’s nothing wrong with your nostrils. At least I don’t see anything wrong. Of course, I know you too well. If you like, we could consult a nose doctor.” A long pause. “Nostrils … Do people generally dwell on them? I mean, do people think about them a lot?” Small, high voice: “Are mine okay?” A hopeless silence. At last she began to snore delicately and I hurried to my own room. My sister’s door, next to mine, was closed but her light was burning resentfully. And I gave myself over to my reverie. I had a record player I’d paid for myself by working as a caddy and records I exchanged each week at the library, the music an outpost of my father’s influence in this unmusical female territory. I slipped out of my clothes as quickly as possible, though I tried to do everything beautifully, as in a movie of my life with Helen. In some way I felt it was already being filmed—not that I looked for hidden cameras but I simplified and smoothed out my movements for the lens. There were those, my mother and sister, who suffered too much and were too graceless to be film-worthy, but there were those others I aspired to join who suffered briefly, consolably and always handsomely, whose remarks were terse and for whom the mechanics of leaving a party or paying a bill had been stylized nearly out of existence in favor of highly emotional exchanges in which eyes said more than lips. Every detail of my room asked me to be solicitous. When the dresser drawer stuck I winced—this sequence would have to be reshot. I turned my sheets down as though she, Helen, were at my side. I rushed to snap off the lights. She and I lay side by side in the narrow boat and floated downstream. The stars moved not at all and only the occasional fluttering of a branch overhead or the sound of a scraping rock below suggested our passage. The moon was the wound in the night’s side from which magic blood flowed; we bathed in it. By dawn I’d made love to Helen four times. The first time was so ceremonial I had a problem molding the mist into arms and legs; all that kept flickering up at me was her smile. The second time was more passionate. I was finally able to free her breasts from their binding. By the third time we’d become gently fraternal; we smiled with tired kindness at each other. We were very intimate. At dawn she began to disintegrate. The certainty of day pulsed into being and all my exertions were able to keep her at my side only a few more moments. At last she fled.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  During our field trips I’d sit beside him in a hardwood pew or stand close to him under a dusty chandelier as men’s voices chanted behind the iconostasis and I felt as though I were already Mr. Pouchet’s lover and why not, for he was as much a superfluous man as I was an excluded boy. Every morning at six he was out on the track running through the mist, stopwatch in hand, puffs of vapor issuing from his mouth, but surely he was running down. I had no idea how old he was (twenty-something), but doubtless he was declining physically. Here he comes, blood drained from his dark cheeks, lips purple and open to reveal wet, white teeth, legs lean and slightly bowed, the calves compact, not bulging, his whole body so intelligent that despite its hairiness nothing about it suggests an animal. He’s the cautious, isolated man who sleeps alone, rises before dawn, runs, irons his chinos, pares his beautiful nails that haven’t a single ridge or moon in them but that seem built up out of layer after layer of clear lacquer, who never seems to have a headache or hangover, who’s a well-maintained machine but idling, idling, who approaches each new experience (the iconostasis doors break open and the black nave floods over with candlelight: Christ is risen) in a spirit of mildly detached curiosity, and yet nothing has touched him. He is vulnerable and he’s untouched. He is a man to whom something is about to happen. In the meantime he sits under the buzzing fluorescent lamp over his desk in his dorm room and grades algebra quizzes. Between the first and second hour in the study hall in the evening the boys have ten free minutes. A bell rings, they explode out of their rooms, toilets flush, four guys are pounding a fifth where the stairs turn and Mr. Pouchet winds the gold wristwatch he received for high school graduation not so many years ago, stands and looks out his window across the courtyard at the opposite windows filled with yellow light and the coming and going of the upper formers. Mr. Pouchet is waiting. His mind is open, patient, expectant. Perhaps he’s the Buddhist, perhaps the Buddha, and if he doesn’t focus on this state of grace, then that oblivion is proof he’s blessed.