Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  But perhaps half an hour passed before the Lapiduses and the Fields climbed into the Cadillac and headed toward Asbury Park. In the meantime there was small talk. Like his host, Mr. Field was an art collector, and the conversation drifted toward the subject of acquisitions. Mr. Field had his eye on a certain Monet up in Montreal, and he let it be known that he thought he could get hold of it for thirty, with a little luck. For a few seconds my spine turned into a pleasant icicle. I realized that it was the first time I had heard anyone made of flesh and blood (as opposed to some cinematic effigy) say “thirty” as a contraction for “thirty thousand.” But there was still another surprise in store. At this point the Pissarro was mentioned, and since I had not seen it, Leslie leaped up from the sofa and said I must come with her right away. Together we went toward the rear of the house to what was plainly the dining room, where the delectable vision—a hushed Sunday afternoon mingling pale green vines and crumbling walls and eternity—caught the last slant of summer light. My reaction was totally spontaneous. “It’s so beautiful,” I heard myself whisper. “Isn’t it something?” Leslie replied.

  Side by side we gazed at the landscape. In the shadows her face was so close to mine that I could smell the sweet ropy fragrance of the sherry she had been drinking, and then her tongue was in my mouth. In all truth I had not invited this prodigy of a tongue; turning, I had merely wished to look at her face, expecting only that the expression of aesthetic delight I might find there would correspond to what I knew was my own. But I did not even catch a glimpse of her face, so instantaneous and urgent was that tongue. Plunged like some writhing sea-shape into my gaping maw, it all but overpowered my senses as it sought some unreachable terminus near my uvula; it wiggled, it pulsated, and made contortive sweeps of my mouth’s vault: I’m certain that at least once it turned upside down. Dolphin-slippery, less wet than rather deliciously mucilaginous and tasting of Amontillado, it had the power in itself to force me, or somehow get me back, against a doorjamb, where I lolled helpless with my eyes clenched shut, in a trance of tongue. How long this went on I do not know, but when at last it occurred to me to reciprocate or try to, and began to unlimber my own tongue with a gargling sound, I felt hers retract like a deflated bladder, and she pulled her mouth away from mine, then pressed her face against my cheek. “We can’t just now,” she said in an agitated tone. I thought I could feel her shudder, but I was certain only that she was breathing heavily, and I held her tightly in my arms. I murmured, “God, Leslie... Les”—it was all I could summon—and then she broke apart from me. The grin she was now grinning seemed a little inappropriate to our turbulent emotion, and her voice took on a soft, lighthearted, even trifling quality, which nonetheless, by force of its meaning, left me close to an insanity of desire. It was the familiar tune but piped this time on an even sweeter reed. “Fucking,” she said, her whisper barely audible as she gazed at me, “fantastic... fucking.” Then she turned and went back toward the living room.

  Moments later, having ducked into a Hapsburg bathroom with a cathedral ceiling and rococo gold faucets and fittings, I scrambled through my wallet and got the end of a pre-lubricated Trojan sticking up out of its foil wrapper and placed it in a handy side pocket of my jacket, meanwhile trying to compose myself in front of a full-length mirror crawling at its edge with gilt cherubs. I was able to wipe the lipstick smear away from my face—a face which to my dismay had the cherry-red, boiled appearance of someone suffering from heat stroke. There was nothing at all I could do about that, although I was relieved to see that my out-of-fashion seersucker jacket, a little too long, more or less successfully concealed the fly of my trousers and the intransigent rigidity there.

  Should I have suspected something a little bit amiss when a few minutes later, as we were bidding the Lapiduses and Fields farewell on the gravel driveway, I saw Mr. Lapidus kiss Leslie tenderly on the brow and murmur, “Be good, my little princess”? Years were to pass, along with much study in Jewish sociology and the reading of books like Goodbye, Columbus and Marjorie Morningstar, before I would learn of the existence of the archetypal Jewish princess, her modus operandi and her significance in the scheme of things. But at that moment the word “princess” meant nothing more to me than an affectionate pleasantry; I was inwardly smirking at the “Be good” as the Cadillac with its winking red taillights disappeared into the dusk. Even so, once we were alone I sensed something in Leslie’s manner—I suppose you could call it a kind of skittishness—that told me that a certain delay was necessary: this despite the enormous head of steam we had built up and her onslaught upon my mouth, which now again suddenly thirsted for more tongue.

  I made a direct pass at Leslie as soon as we were back inside the front door, insinuating my arm around her waist, but she managed to slip away with a tinkly little laugh and the observation—too cryptic for me to quite get straight—that “Haste makes waste.” Yet I was certainly more than willing for Leslie to assume control of our mutual strategy, to set the timing and the rhythm of our evening and thus to allow events to move in modulated degrees toward the great crescendo; as passionate and yearning as she was, mirror-companion of my own blazing desire, Leslie was, after all, no coarse slut I could merely have for the asking right then and there on the wall-to-wall carpet. Despite her eagerness and all her past abandon—I instinctively divined—she wanted to be cosseted and flattered and seduced and entertained like any woman, and this was fine with me, since Nature had clearly designed such a scheme to enhance man’s delight as well. I was therefore more than willing to be patient and bide my time. Thus when I found myself sitting rather primly next to Leslie beneath the Degas, I did not feel at all thwarted by the entrance of Minnie bearing champagne and (another of the several “firsts” I was to experience that evening) fresh beluga caviar. This provoked badinage between Minnie and me, very Southern in flavor, which Leslie obviously found charming.

  As I have already pointed out, I had been perplexed to discover during my sojourn in the North that New Yorkers often tended to regard Southerners either with extreme hostility (as Nathan had regarded me initially) or with amused condescension, as if they made up some class of minstrel entertainer. Although I knew Leslie was attracted by my “serious” side, I also fell into the latter category. I had almost overlooked the fact—until Minnie reappeared—that in Leslie’s eyes I was fresh and exotic news, a little like Rhett Butler; my Southernness was my strongest suit and I began to play it then and throughout the evening for all it was worth. The following banter, for instance (an exchange which twenty years later would have been unthinkable), caused Leslie to pat her lovely jersey-clad thighs in merriment.

  “Minnie, I’m just dying for some down-home food. Real colored folks’ food. None of these ole Communist fish eggs.”

  “Mmmm-huh! Me too! Ooh, how I’d love to git me a mess of salt mullet. Salt mullet and grits. Dat’s what I call eatint’!”

  “How ’bout some boiled chitlins, Minnie? Chitlins and collard greens!”

  “Git on!” (Wild high giggles) “You talk about chitlins, you git me so hongry I think I’ll jes die!”

  Later at Gage & Tollner’s, as Leslie and I dined beneath gaslight on littleneck clams and crabmeat imperial, I came as near to experiencing a pure amalgam of sensual and spiritual felicities as I ever would in my life. We sat very close together at a corner table away from the babble of the crowd. We drank some extraordinary white wine that livened my wits and untethered my tongue as I told the true story of my grandfather on my father’s side who had lost an eye and a kneecap at Chancellorsville, and the phony story of my great-uncle on my mother’s side whose name was Mosby and who was one of the great Confederate guerrilla leaders of the Civil War. I say phony because Mosby, a Virginia colonel, was not related to me in the slightest way; the story, however, was both passably authentic and colorful and I told it with drawling embellishments and winsome sidelights and bravura touches, savoring each dramatic effect and in the end turning on such slick medium-voltage cha
rm that Leslie, eyes ashine, reached up and grasped my hand as she had at Coney Island, and I felt her palm a little moist with desire, or so it seemed. “And then what happened?” I heard her say after I had paused for a significant effect. “Well, my great-uncle—Mosby,” I went on, “had finally surrounded that Union brigade in the Valley. It was at night and the Union commander was asleep in his tent. Mosby went into this dark tent and prodded the general in the ribs, waking him up. ‘General,’ he said, git up, I‘ve got news about Mosby!’ The general, not knowing the voice but thinking it was one of his own men, leaped up in the dark and said, ‘Mosby! Have you got him?’ And Mosby replied, ‘No, suh! He’s got you!’ ”

  Leslie’s response to this was gratifying—a throaty, deeply appreciative contralto whoop which caused heads to turn at adjoining tables, along with an admonitory look from an elderly waiter. After her laughter died away, we both fell silent for a moment, gazing down into our after-dinner brandy. Then finally it was she, not I, who broached the subject which I knew had been uppermost in her mind as well as my own. “You know, it’s funny about that time,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean about the nineteenth century. I mean, one never thinks about them fucking. All those books and stories, and there’s not a word about them fucking.”

  “Victorianism,” I said. “Sheer prudery.”

  “I mean, I don’t know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I’ve had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you’re able to read.” She paused and squeezed my hand. “I mean, doesn’t it just do something to you to think of one of those ravishing girls with that crinoline all in a fabulous tangle, and one of those gorgeous young officers—I mean, both of them fucking like crazy?”

  “Oh yes,” I said with a shiver, “oh yes, it does. It enlarges one’s sense of history.”

  It was past ten o’clock and I ordered more brandy. We lingered for another hour, and again, as at Coney Island, Leslie gently but irresistibly seized the conversational helm, steering us into turbid backwaters and eerie lagoons where I, at least, had never ventured with a female. She spoke often of her current analyst, who, she said, had opened up a consciousness of her primal self and, more important, of the sexual energy which had only needed to be tapped and liberated in order to make her the functioning, healthy brute (her word) she now felt herself to be. As she spoke, the benign cognac allowed me to run my fingertips very gently over the edges of her expressive mouth, silver-bright with vermilion lipstick.

  “I was such a little creep before I went into analysis,” she said with a sigh, “hyped-up intellectual with no sense at all of my connection with my body, the wisdom my body had to give me. No sense of my pussy, no sense of that marvelous little clit, no sense of anything. Have you read D. H. Lawrence? Lady Chatterley’s Lover?” I had to say no. It was a book which I had longed to read but which, incarcerated like a mad strangler behind the wires of the locked shelves of the university library, had been denied me. “Read it,” she said, her voice husky and intense now, “get it and read it, for the sake of your salvation. A friend of mine smuggled a copy from France, I’ll lend it to you. Lawrence has the answer—oh, he knows so much about fucking. He says that when you fuck you go to the dark gods.” Uttering these words, she squeezed my hand, which was now entwined with hers a scant millimeter from the straining tumefaction in my lap, and her eyes gazed into mine with such a galvanized look of passion and certitude that it took all my self-command to avoid, that very instant, some ludicrous, brutish, public embrace. “Oh, Stingo,” she said again, “I really mean it, to fuck is to go to the dark gods.”

  “Then let’s go to the dark gods,” I said, practically beyond control now as I urgently signaled for the check.

  Some pages back I touched upon André Gide and the Gidean diaries I had been trying to emulate. As a student at Duke, I had read the master laboriously in French. I had admired his journals inordinately, and had considered Gide’s probity and relentless self-dissection to be part of one of the truly triumphant feats of the civilized twentieth-century mind. In my own journal, at the beginning of the final part of my chronicle of Leslie Lapidus—a Passion Week, I realized later, which began on that palmy Sunday at Coney Island and ended with my time on the Cross in the small hours of Friday morning back on Pierrepont Street—I brooded at some length on Gide and paraphrased from memory a few of his exemplary thoughts and observations. I won’t dwell on this passage here, except to note my admiration therein not only for the terrible humiliations Gide had been able to absorb, but the brave honesty with which he seemed always determined to record them: the more catastrophic the humiliation or the disappointment, I noted, the more cleansing and luminous became Gide’s account in his Journals—a catharsis in which the reader, too, could participate. Although I can no longer remember for certain, it must have been the same sort of catharsis I was trying to attain in this last section on Leslie—following my meditation on Gide—which I include here. But I have to add that there was something a little freaky about these particular pages. At some point not long after their writing I must have torn them out in despair from the ledger-like book in which I kept my journal, stowing them away in a clumsy wad at the back of the ledger, where I ran across them by luck even as I was re-creating the denouement of this goofy masquerade. What still amazes is the handwriting: not the placid, diligently legible schoolboy script I habitually used, but a savage scurrying scrawl indicating the breakneck speed of distraught emotions. The style, however, as now can be seen, continues to possess an unruffled, wryly sardonic, self-anatomizing quality which Gide might have admired had he ever been able to peruse these humiliated pages:

  I might be tipped off to what is going on when we get into the taxi after Gage & Tollner’s. Naturally by then I am so beside myself with plain old hog lust that I simply wrap Leslie in my arms even before the cab gets moving. Right off it is a repetition of the moment when we went to look at the Pissarro. That foraging tongue of hers is inside me like some shad thrashing upstream for dear life. Never before have I known that kissing can be so major, so expansive. Obviously, though, the time has come for me to reciprocate, and so I do. As we ride down Fulton Street I “give tongue” back to her and she clearly loves it, responding with little groans and shudders. By this time I am so hot that I do something I have always wanted to do when kissing a girl but never dared to down in Va., because of its rather blatant suggestiveness. What I do is to slowly and rhythmically move my tongue in and out of her mouth in long copulatory movements, ad libitum. This causes Leslie to groan again and she draws her lips away long enough to whisper, “God! Your guess what in my guess what!” I am not deflected by that odd coyness. I am semi-deranged. It is almost impossible to reproduce my condition at this moment. In a sort of controlled frenzy I decide that now is the time to make the first truly direct move. So very delicately I slip my hand up in a way that will allow it to begin to cup the underpart of her luscious left breast, or right one, I forget which. And at that instant, to my almost total disbelief, with a firmness and a resolve that match my own delicate stealth, she moves her arm protectively into a position which clearly means: “Nothing doing.” It is absolutely dumfounding, so completely dumfounding that I think one of us has made a mistake, gotten our signals crossed, that she is joking (a bad joke), something. So, shortly after this, while my tongue is still rammed down her gullet and she continues to make these little moaning sounds, I move toward her other knocker. Wham! The same thing again: the sudden protective movement, the arm flung down like one of those barriers at a railroad crossing. “Do not pass!” It is utterly beyond belief.

  (Writing now at 8 P.M. Friday, I consult my “Merck’s Manual.” From “Merck” I can assume I am suffering from a case of “severe acute glossitis,�
�� an inflamed condition of the tongue’s surface which is of traumatic origin but doubtless aggravated by bacteria, viruses and all sorts of toxicity resulting from five or six hours of salivary exchange unprecedented in the history of my mouth and I daresay anyone’s. “Merck” informs me that this is a transient state, becoming palliated after a number of hours of the tongue’s gentle rest, which is a great relief to know, since it is sheer murder to eat anything or to take more than a few sips of beer. It is nearly nightfall, I am writing at Yetta’s, alone. I cannot even face Sophie or Nathan. In plain truth I am suffering from a desolation and letdown such as I have never known, or thought possible.)

  Back to Stingo’s Progress. Naturally, almost to preserve my reason, I have to think of some rationale to explain her bizarre behavior. Obviously, I think, Les simply and with logic does not wish to have anything of an overt nature take place in a taxicab. Perfectly proper indeed. A lady in a taxi, a whore in bed. With this consideration in mind, I content myself with more labyrinthine tongue-work until the taxi arrives at the brownstone on Pierrepont Street. We disembark and enter the dark house. As Leslie unlocks the front door she remarks that, it being Thursday, it is Minnie’s night off, and I construe this to lay emphasis on the privacy we will have. In the soft light of the foyer my membrum, betrousered, is truly rampant. Also a spot of “dogwater” there, pre-coital seepage, as if a puppy had peed in my lap.