William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  I don’t want to overdo my first reactions to the Lapidus house, and what it presented in contrast to this preconclusion. But the fact is (and after these many years the image is as brilliant as a mint copper penny) the home in which Leslie lived was so stunningly swank that I walked past it several times. I could not conceive that the place on Pierrepont Street actually corresponded to the number that she had given me. When I finally identified it with certainty I halted in almost total admiration. A gracefully restored Greek Revival brownstone, the house was set back slightly from the street against a little green lawn through which ran the crescent of a gravel driveway. On the driveway there now rested a spanking clean and polished Cadillac sedan of a deep winy maroon, flawlessly tended; it could have been standing in a showroom.

  I paused there on the sidewalk of the tree-lined and civilized thoroughfare, drinking in this truly inspired elegance. In the early-evening shadows lights glowed softly within the house, radiating a harmony that reminded me suddenly of some of the stately dwellings lining Monument Avenue down in Richmond. Then in a vulgar dip of my mind, I thought the scene could have been a glossy magazine advertisement for Fisher Bodies, Scotch whiskey, diamonds, or anything suggesting exquisite and overpriced refinement. But I was chiefly reminded of that stylish and still-beautiful capital of the Confederacy—a cockeyed Southern association perhaps, but one that was underscored in quick succession by the half-crouched cast-iron nigger jockey that grinned pink-mouthed up at me as I approached the portico, and then by the sassy little trick of a maid who let me in. Shiny black, uniformed in ruffles and flounces, she spoke in an accent which my ear—unerringly cued—was able to identify as being native to the region between the Roanoke River and Currituck County in the upper eastern quadrant of North Carolina, just south of the Virginia line. She verified this, when I inquired, by saying that she was indeed from the hamlet of South Mills—“smack dab,” as she put it, in the middle of the Dismal Swamp. Giggling at my acumen, she rolled her eyes and said, “Git on!” Then with an effort at decorum she pursed her lips and murmured in a slightly Yankeefied voice, “Miss Law-peedus will be with you direckly.” Anticipating expensive foreign beer, I found myself already slightly intoxicated. Next, Minnie (for this, I learned later, was her name) led me into a huge oyster-white living room strewn with voluptuous sofas, portly ottomans and almost sinfully restful-looking chairs. These were ranged about upon deep wall-to-wall carpeting, also white, without a spot or stain. Bookcases everywhere were filled with books—genuine books, new and old, many with a slightly nicked look of having been read. I settled myself deep into a cream-colored buckskin chair planted halfway between an ethereal Bonnard and a Degas study of musicians at rehearsal. The Degas was instantly familiar, but from where precisely I could not tell—until all of a sudden I recalled it from the philatelic period of my late childhood, reproduced on a postage stamp of the Republic of France. Jesus Christ Almighty was all I could think.

  I had of course been all day in a state of erotic semi-arousal. At the same time I was totally unprepared for such affluence, the likes of which my provincial eyes had glimpsed in the pages of The New Yorker and in movies but never actually beheld. This cultural shock—a sudden fusion of the libido with a heady apprehension of filthy but thoughtfully spent lucre—caused me a troubling mixture of sensations as I sat there: accelerated pulse, marked increase in my hectic flush, sudden salivation and, finally, a spontaneous and exorbitant stiffening against my Hanes Jockey shorts which was to last all evening in whatever position I found myself—seated, standing up, or even walking slightly hobbled among the crowded diners at Gage & Tollner’s, the restaurant where I took Leslie somewhat later for dinner. My stallionoid condition was of course a phenomenon related to my extreme youth, seldom to reappear (and never at such length after aet. thirty). I had experienced this priapism several times before, but scarcely so intensely and certainly never in circumstances not exclusively sexual. (Most notably there had been the occasion when I was about sixteen, at a school dance, when one of those artful little coquettes I have mentioned—of which Leslie was such a cherished antithesis—took me over all possible fraudulent jumps: breathing on my neck, tickling my sweaty palm with her fingertip, and insinuating her satin groin against my own with such resolute albeit counterfeit wantonness that only an almost saintly will power, after hours of this, forced me to break apart from the loathsome little vampire and make my swollen way into the night.) But at the Lapidus house no such bodily aggravation was needed. There was simply combined with the thought of Leslie’s imminent appearance a stirring awareness—I confess without shame—of this plentitude of money. I would also be dishonest if I did not admit that to the sweet prospect of copulation there was added the fleeting image of matrimony, should it turn out that way.

  I was shortly to learn in a casual manner—from Leslie and from a middle-aged friend of the Lapiduses, a Mr. Ben Field, who arrived with his wife that evening practically on my heels—that the Lapidus fortune derived primarily from a single piece of plastic no bigger than the forefinger of a child or an adult’s vermiform appendix, which as a matter of fact it rather resembled. Bernard Lapidus, according to Mr. Field as he fondled his Chivas Regal, had prospered through the Depression years of the thirties manufacturing embossed plastic ashtrays. The ashtrays (Leslie later elaborated) were of the type everyone was familiar with: usually black, circular, and stamped with such inscriptions as STORK CLUB, “21,” EL MOROCCO or, in more plebeian settings, BETTY’S PLACE and JOE’S BAR. Many people stole these ashtrays, so there was a never-ending demand. During those years Mr. Lapidus had produced the ashtrays by the hundreds of thousands, his operation from a smallish factory in Long Island City allowing him to live very comfortably with his family in Crown Heights, then one of the tonier sections of Flatbush. It was the recent war which had brought about this transition from mere prosperity to luxury, to the refurbished brownstone on Pierrepont Street and the Bonnard and the Degas (and a Pissarro landscape I was to see soon, a view of a lost country lane in the nineteenth century wilds outside of Paris so meltingly serene and lovely that it brought a lump to my throat).

  Just before Pearl Harbor—Mr. Field went on in his quiet instructive tone—the Federal government opened bidding among fabricators of molded plastic for the manufacture of this dinky object, a bare two inches long, irregular in outline and containing at one end a squiggly bulge which had to fit into a similarly shaped aperture with absolute precision. It cost only a fraction of a penny to make, but since the contract—which Mr. Lapidus won—called for its production by the tens of millions, the midget device gave birth to a Golconda: it was an essential component of the fuse of every seventy-five-millimeter artillery shell fired by the Army and Marine Corps during the entire Second World War. In the palatial bathroom which I later had need to visit, there was a replica of this little piece of polymer resin (for of such, Mr. Field told me, it was made) framed behind glass and hanging on a wall, and I bemusedly gazed at it for long moments, thinking of the unnumbered legions of Japs and Krauts that had been blasted into the sweet by-and-by by grace of its existence, fashioned out of black inchoate gunk in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The replica was in eighteen-carat gold, and its presence struck the only note of bad taste in the house. But this might be excused, that year, with the fresh smell of victory still in the American air. Leslie later referred to it as “the Worm,” asking me in addition if it didn’t remind me of “some fat species of spermatozoa”—an arresting but chillingly contradictory image, considering the Worm’s ultimate function. We talked philosophically at some length about this, but in the end, and in the most inoffensive manner, she maintained a breezy attitude toward the source of the family wealth, observing with a sort of resigned amusement that “the Worm certainly bought some fantastic French Impressionists.”

  Leslie finally appeared, flushed and beautiful in a bituminous black jersey dress which clung and rippled over her various undulant roundnesses in the most achingl
y attractive way. She gave me a moist peck on my cheek, exuding a scent of some innocent toilet water that made her smell as fresh as a daffodil, and for some reason twice as exciting as the cock teasers I had known in the Tidewater, those preposterous virgins drenched in their odalisques’ reeking musk. This was class, I thought, real Jewish class. A girl who felt secure enough to wear Yardley’s really knew what sex was about. Soon afterward we were joined by Leslie’s parents, a sleek, suntanned and engagingly foxy-looking man in his early fifties and a lovely amber-haired woman so youthful in appearance that she might easily have passed for Leslie’s older sister. Because of her looks alone I could scarcely believe it when Leslie later told me that her mother was a graduate of Barnard, Class of 1922.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lapidus did not linger long enough for me to form more than a brief impression. But that impression—of a certain amount of learning, of casually expressed good manners, of sophistication—made me cringe at my raw ignorance and the benighted seizure I had had on the subway train, with my simple-minded premonition of squalid gloom and cultural deprivation. How little, after all, did I know about this urban world up beyond the Potomac, with its ethnic conundrums and complexities. Mistakenly, I had expected a stereotyped vulgarity. Anticipating in Lapidus père someone like Schlepperman—the comic Jew of Jack Benny’s radio program, with his Seventh Avenue accent and hopeless solecisms—I had discovered instead a soft-spoken patrician at ease with his wealth, whose voice was pleasantly edged with the broad vowels and lambent languor of Harvard, from which I discovered he had graduated in chemistry summa cum laude, carrying along with him the expertise to produce the victorious Worm. I sipped at the fine Danish beer I had been served. I was already getting a bit drunk, and felt happy—happy, contented beyond any earlier imagining. Then came another wonderfully pleasant revelation. As the conversation buzzed about in the balmy evening I began to understand that Mr. and Mrs. Field were joining Leslie’s parents for a long weekend sojourn at the Lapidus summer home on the Jersey shore. In fact, the group was leaving imminently in the maroon Cadillac. Thus I realized that Leslie and I would be left to frolic in this place, alone. My cup ran over. Oh, my cup turned into a spillway flooding across the spotless carpet, out the door down Pierrepont Street, across all the twilit carnal reaches of Brooklyn. Leslie. A weekend alone with Leslie...

  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 charm 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!’ ”