William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (226 page)

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!’
”

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.”