(Oh, André Gide, prie pour moi! This telling becomes well-nigh intolerable. How do I make sense of, make credible—much less human—the miseries of the next few hours? Upon whose shoulders rests the blame for this gratuitous torture—mine, Leslie’s, the Zeitgeist’s? Leslie’s analyst’s? Certainly someone has a lot to account for in turning poor Les out upon her cold and bleak plateau. For that is exactly what she calls it—a plateau—this forlorn limbo where she wanders solitary and freezing.)
We get started again at about midnight on a couch underneath the Degas. There is a clock somewhere in the house, striking the hour, and at two o’clock I am no further advanced than I was in the taxi. We have fallen into a pretty desperate but generally silent tug of war by now, and I have been working on every tactic in the book—trying to grope tit, thigh, crotch. No go. Except for that gaping oral cavity of hers and that prodigiously active tongue, she might as well be clad in breastplates, full armor. The martial image is apt in another way because soon after I begin making my more aggressive forays there in the semi-dark, fingering the arch of her thigh or trying to get my paw tucked in between her clamped knees, she yanks that flailing tongue out of my mouth and mutters things like: “Whoa there, Colonel Mosby!” Or: “Back up there, Johnny Reb!” All spoken in an attempt to approximate my Confederate accent, and in a light-hearted, giggly but Nonetheless I Mean Business voice that sweeps over me like icewater. Again, throughout this entire charade I really can hardly believe the actuality of what is happening, simply cannot accept the fact that after her absolutely breath-taking overture, all those unequivocal invitations and blazing come-hithers, she is falling back on this outrageous flimflam. Sometime after two o’clock, driven to the brink of madness, I resort to doing something which even while I am in the process of doing it I know will provoke a drastic reaction from Les—though how drastic I can scarcely predict. Still embroiled in our oceanic wrestle, I’m sure she is going to choke both of us on the gagged scream she gives as she realizes what she has got hold of. (This is after I silently unzip my fly and place her hand on my cock.) She sails off the sofa as if someone has lit a fire beneath her and at that moment the evening and all my wretched fantasies and dreams turn to a pile of straw.
(Oh, André Gide, comme toi, je crois que je deviendrai pédéraste!)
Later she bawls like a little baby as she sits beside me, trying to explain herself. For some reason her awful sweetness, her helplessness, her crestfallen and remorseful manner all help me to control my wild rage. Whereas at first I wanted to belt the living shit out of her—take that priceless Degas and ram it down around her neck—now I could almost cry with her, crying out of my own chagrin and frustration but also for Leslie too and for her psychoanalysis, which has so helped create her own gross imposture. I learn about all this as the clock ticks onward toward dawn and after I get my several querulous complaints and objections out of the way. “I don’t want to be nasty or unreasonable,” I whisper to her in the shadows, holding her hand, “but you led me to believe something else. You said, and I quote you exactly, ‘I’ll bet you could give a girl a fantastic fucking.’ ” I pause for a long moment, blowing blue smoke through the gloom. Then I say, “Well, I could. And I wanted to.” I halt. “That’s all.” Then after another long pause and a lot of snuffled sobs, she replies, “I know I said that, and if I led you on I’m sorry, Stingo;” Snuffle, snuffle. I give her a Kleenex. “But I didn’t say I wanted you to do it.” More snuffles. “Also I said ‘a girl.’ I didn’t say me.” At this instant the groan I give would stir the souls of the dead. We are both silent for an endlessly long time. At some moment between three and four o’clock I hear a ship‘s whistle, plaintive and mournful and far off, borne through the night from N.Y. harbor. It reminds me of home and fills me with inexpressible sorrow. For some reason that sound and the sorrow it brings makes it all the more difficult to bear Leslie's overheated and blooming presence, like some jungle flower, now so astonishingly unattainable. Thinking fleetingly of gangrene, I cannot believe that my staff still flaunts itself, lancelike. Could John the Baptist have suffered such deprivation? Tantalus? St. Augustine? Little Nell?
Leslie is—literally and figuratively—totally lingual. Her sex life is wholly centered in her tongue. It is not fortuitous therefore that the inflammatory promise she has been able to extend me through that hyperactive organ of hers finds a correlation in the equally inflammatory but utterly spurious words she loves to speak. While we sit there I recall the name of a ludicrous phenomenon I read about in a Duke Univ. course in abnormal psychology: “coprolalia,” the compulsive use of obscene language, often found in young women. When at last I break our silence and banteringly broach the possibility that she may be a victim of this malady, she seems not so much insulted as hurt, and softly begins to sob again. I seem to have opened some painful wound. But no, she insists, it’s not that. After a while she stops sobbing. Then she says something which only hours before I would have considered a joke but I now accept placidly and with no surprise as the stark, aching truth. “I’m a virgin,” she says in a bleak small voice. After a long silence I reply, “No offense, understand. But I think you’re a very sick virgin.” As I say this I realize the acerbity of the words but somehow don’t regret them. Again a ship’s horn groans at the harbor’s mouth, touching me with such longing and nostalgia and despair that I think that I too might burst into tears. “I like you a lot, Les,” I manage to say, “I just think it was unfair of you to string me along this way. It’s tough on a guy. It’s terrible. You can’t imagine.” After saying this I simply cannot tell whether her words make up a non sequitur or not, when she replies in the most desolate voice I’ve ever heard, “But oh, Stingo, you can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up in a Jewish family.” She fails immediately to elaborate on this.
But finally, when dawn breaks and deep fatigue floods through my bones and muscles—including that doughty love-muscle which at last begins to flag and droop after its tenacious vigil—Leslie re-creates for me the dark odyssey of her psychoanalysis. And of course her family. Her horrible family. Her family which, despite the cool and civilized veneer, according to Leslie, is a waxwork gallery of monsters. The ruthless and ambitious father whose religion is molded plastics and who has spoken a bare twenty words to her since childhood. The creepy younger sister and the stupid older brother. Above all, the ogreish mother who, Barnard enlightenment or no, has dominated Les’s life with bitchery and vengeance ever since the moment when she caught Leslie, then three, diddling herself and forced her to wear hand-splints for months as prophylaxis against self-abuse. All this Leslie pours out to me in a terrible rush as if I too were momentarily only another in that ever-changing phalanx of practitioners which has attended her woes and wretchednesses for over four years. It is full sun-up. Leslie is drinking coffee, I am drinking Budweiser, and Tommy Dorsey is playing on the two-thousand-dollar Magnavox phonograph. Exhausted, I hear Leslie’s cataract of words as if through muffled layers of wool, trying without much success to piece it all together—this scrambled confessional with its hodgepodge of terms like Reichian and Jungian, Adlerian, a Disciple of Karen Horney, sublimation, gestalt, fixations, toilet training, and other things I have been aware of but never heard a human being speak of in such tones, which down South are reserved for Thomas Jefferson, Uncle Remus and the blessed Trinity. I am so tired that I am only barely aware of what she is driving at when she speaks of her current analyst, her fourth, a “Reichian,” one Dr. Pulvermacher, and then alludes to her “plateau.” I make flutters with my eyelids denoting an urgent need for sleep. And she goes on and on, those moist and precious Jewish lips, forever lost to me, driving home the sudden awareness that my poor dear joint for the first time in many hours is as shrunken and as small as that Worm whose replica hangs behind me, there in the papal bathroom. I yawn, ferociously, loud, but Leslie pays this no mind, seemingly intent that I should not go away with ill feelings, that I should somehow try to understand her. But I really don’t k
now if I want to understand. As Leslie continues I can only reflect despairingly on the obvious irony: that if through those frigid little harpies in Virginia I had been betrayed chiefly by Jesus, I have been just as cruelly swindled at Leslie’s hands by the egregious Doktor Freud. Two smart Jews, believe me.
“Before I reached this plateau of vocalization,” I hear Leslie say, through the surreal delirium of my fatigue, “I could never have said any of those words I’ve said to you. Now I’m completely able to vocalize. 1 mean those Anglo-Saxon four-letter words that everyone should be able to say. My analyst—Dr. Pulvermacher—said that the repressiveness of a society in general is directly proportionate to its harsh repression of sexual language.” What I say in reply is mingled with a yawn so cavernous and profound that my voice is like a wild beast’s roar. “I see, I see,” I yawn, roaring, “this word vocalize, you mean you can say fuck but you still can’t do it!” Her answer is a blur in my brain of imperfectly registered sounds, many minutes in duration, out of what I am able to salvage only the impression that Leslie, now deep into something called orgone therapy, will in the coming days be seated in some sort of box, there to absorb patiently waves of energy from the ether that might allow her passage upward to the next plateau. Close to the brink of sleep, I yawn again and wordlessly wish her well. And then, mirabile ditcu, I drop off into slumberland even as she babbles on about the possibility of someday—someday! I dream a strange confounded dream in which intimations of bliss are transfused with lacerating pain. It could only be a few moments that I drowse. When I wake—blinking at Leslie in the full flight of her soliliquy—I realize I have been sitting ponderously on my hand, which I withdraw from underneath my ass. All five fingers are momentarily deformed and totally without sensation. This helps to explain my ineffably sad dream, where, hotly embracing Leslie once more on the couch, I managed at last to fondle one bare breast, which, however, felt like a soggy ball of dough beneath my hand, itself tightly imprisoned within the rim of a murderous brassiere made of wormwood and wire.
These many years later I am able to see how Leslie’s recalcitrance—indeed, her entire unassailable virginity—was a nice counterpoint to the larger narrative I have felt compelled to relate. God knows what might have happened had she really been the wanton and experienced playgirl she had impersonated; she was so ripely desirable that I don’t see how I could have failed to become her slave. This would certainly have tended to remove me from the earthy, ramshackle ambience of Yetta Zimmerman’s Pink Palace and thus doubtless from the sequence of events that were in the making and compose the main reason for this story. But the disparity between what Leslie had promised and what she delivered was so wounding to my spirit that I became physically ill. It was nothing really serious—nothing more than a severe bout of flu combined with a deep psychic despondency—but as I lay in bed for four or five days (tenderly taken care of by Nathan and Sophie, who brought me tomato soup and magazines) I was able to decide that I had come to a critical extremity in my life. This extremity took the form of the craggy rock of sex, upon which I had obviously though inexplicably foundered.
I knew I was presentable-looking, possessed a spacious and sympathetic intelligence, and had that Southern gift of gab which I was well aware could often cast a sugary (but not saccharine) necromantic charm. That despite all this bright dower and the considerable effort I had put forth in exploiting it, I was still unable to find a girl who would go to the dark gods with me, seemed now—as I lay abed feverish, poring over Life and smarting with the image of Leslie Lapidus chattering at me in the dawn’s defeated light—a morbid condition which, however painfully, I should regard as a stroke of dirty fate, as people accept any ghastly but finally bearable disability such as an intractable stammer or a harelip. I was simply not old sexy Stingo, and I had to be content with that fact. But in compensation, I reasoned, I had more exalted goals. After all, I was a writer, an artist, and it was a platitude by now that much of the world’s greatest art had been achieved by dedicated men who, husbanding their energies, had not allowed some misplaced notion of the primacy of the groin to subvert grander aims of beauty and truth. So onward, Stingo, I said to myself, rallying my flayed spirits, onward with your work. Putting lechery behind you, bend your passions to this ravishing vision that is in you, calling to be born. Such monkish exhortations allowed me sometime during the next week to rise from bed, feeling fresh and cleansed and relatively unhorny, and to boldly continue my grapple with the assorted faeries, demons, clods, clowns, sweethearts and tormented mothers and fathers who were beginning to throng the pages of my novel.
I never saw Leslie again. We parted that morning in a spirit of grave though rueful affection and she asked me to call her soon, but I never did. She dwelt often in my erotic fantasies after that, though, and over the years she has occupied my thoughts many times. Despite the torture she inflicted on me, I have wished her only the best of fortune, wherever she went or whatever she ultimately became. I always idly hoped that her time in the orgone box led her to the fulfillment she yearned for, hoisting her to a loftier plateau than mere “vocalization.” But should this have failed, like the other forms of treatment she had submitted to, I have never had much doubt that the ensuing decades, with their extraordinary scientific progress in terms of the care and maintenance of the libido, would have brought Leslie an ample measure of fulfillment. I may be wrong, but why is it that some intuition tells me that Leslie ultimately found her full meed of happiness? I don’t know, but anyway, that is how I now see her: an adjusted, sleek, elegantly graying and still beautiful woman ungrudgingly accommodating herself to middle age, very sophisticated now in her thrifty use of dirty words, warmly married, philoprogenitive and (I’m almost certain) multiorgasmic.
Chapter Eight
THE WEATHER WAS generally fine that summer, but sometimes the evenings got hot and steamy, and when this happened Nathan and Sophie and I often went around the corner on Church Avenue to an air-conditioned “cocktail lounge”—God, what a description!—called the Maple Court. There were relatively few full-fledged bars in that part of Flatbush (a puzzlement to me until Nathan pointed out that serious tippling does not rank high among Jewish pastimes), but this bar of ours did do a moderately brisk business, numbering among its predominately bluecollar clientele Irish doormen, Scandinavian cabdrivers, German building superintendents and WASPs of indeterminate status like myself who had somehow strayed into the faubourg. There was also what appeared to me a small sprinkling of Jews, some looking a little furtive. The Maple Court was large, ill-lit and on the seedy side, with the faint pervasive odor of stagnant water, but the three of us were attracted there on especially sultry summer nights by the refrigerated air and by the fact that we had grown rather to like its down-at-the-heel easygoingness. It was also cheap and beer was still ten cents a glass. I learned that the bar had been built in 1933, to celebrate and capitalize upon the repeal of Prohibition, and its spacious, even somewhat cavernous dimensions were originally meant to encompass a dance floor. Such Corybantic revels as envisioned by the first owners never took place, however, since through some incredible oversight the raunchy entrepreneurs failed to realize that they had located their establishment in a neighborhood substantially as devoted to order and propriety as a community of Hard Shell Baptists or Mennonites. The synagogues said No, also the Dutch Reformed church.
Thus the Maple Court did not obtain a cabaret license, and all the bright angular chrome-and-gilt decor, including sunburst chandeliers meant to revolve above the giddy dancers like glittering confections in a Ruby Keeler movie, fell into disrepair and gathered a patina of grime and smoke. The raised platform which formed the hub of the oval-shaped bar, and which had been designed to enable sleek long-legged stripteasers to wiggle their behinds down upon a circumambience of lounging gawkers, became filled with dusty signs and bloated fake bottles advertising brands of whiskey and beer. And more sadly somehow, the big Art Deco mural against one wall—a fine period piece done by an ex
pert hand, with the skyline of Manhattan and silhouettes of a jazz band and chorus girls kicking up their heels—never once faced out toward a swirl of jubilant dancers but grew cracked and water-blotched and acquired a long horizontal dingy streak where a generation of neighborhood drunks had propped the backs of their heads. It was just beneath a corner of this mural, in a remote part of the ill-starred dance floor, that Nathan and Sophie and I would sit on those muggy evenings in the Maple Court.
“I’m sorry you didn’t make out with Leslie, kid,” Nathan said to me one night after the debacle on Pierrepont Street. He was clearly both disappointed and a little surprised that his efforts at matchmaking had come to naught. “I thought you two were all locked in, made for each other. At Coney Island that day I thought she was going to eat you up. And now you tell me it all went flooey. What’s the matter? I can’t believe she wouldn’t put out.”
“Oh no, it was all right in the sex department,” I lied. “I mean, at least I got in.” For a variety of vague reasons I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth about our calamitous stand-off, this scratching match between two virgins. It was too disgraceful to dwell upon, both from Leslie’s point of view and my own. I plunged into a feeble fabrication, but I could tell that Nathan knew I had begun to improvise—his shoulders were shaking with laughter—and I finished my account with one or two Freudian furbelows, chief among them being one in which Leslie told me that she had been able to reach a climax only with large, muscular, coal-black Negroes with colossal penises. Smiling, Nathan began to regard me with the look of a man who is having his leg pulled in a chummy way, and when I was finished he put his hand on my shoulder and said in those understanding tones of an older brother, “Sorry about you and Leslie, kid, whatever happened. I thought she’d be a dreamboat. Sometimes the chemistry just isn’t right.”
Sophie's Choice (Open Road) Page 25