William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (228 page)

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.

T
HE 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 expert 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.
”

We forgot about Leslie. I did most of the drinking these evenings, downing my half-dozen glasses of beer or so. Sometimes we went to the bar before dinner, often afterward. In those days it was almost unheard of to order wine in a bar—especially a tacky place like the Maple Court—but Nathan, in the vanguard about so many things, always managed to have served up a bottle of Chablis, which he kept cold in a bucket by the table and which would last him and Sophie the hour and a half we usually spent there. The Chablis never did more than get both of them mildly and pleasantly relaxed, signaled by a fine sheen welling up through his dark face and the tenderest dogwood-blossom flush on hers.

Nathan and Sophie were like an old married couple to me now, we were all inseparable; and I idly wondered if some of the more sophisticated of the Maple Court habitués did not regard us as a
ménage à trois.
Nathan was marvelous, bewitching, so perfectly “normal” and so delightful to be with that were it not for Sophie’s wretched little references (sometimes made inadvertently during our Prospect Park picnics) to terrible moments during their past year together, I would utterly have erased from memory that cataclysmic scene when I had first glimpsed them battling, along with other hints I had had of another, blacker side of his being. How could I do otherwise, in the presence of this electrifying, commanding character, part magic entertainer, part big brother, confidant and guru, who had so generously reached out to me in my isolation? Nathan was no cheap charmer. There was the depth of a masterful performer in even the slightest of his jokes, practically all of them Jewish, which he was able so inexhaustibly to disgorge. His major stories were masterpieces. Once as a boy sitting in the Tidewater Theatre with my father as we watched a W. C. Fields movie (I believe it was
My Little Chickadee)
I saw happen what was supposed to happen only as a figure of speech, or in cornball works of fiction: I saw my father caught up in a rapture of such mind-dissolving laughter that he slid completely out of his seat and into the aisle. Laid out, by God, in the aisle! I did nearly the same in the Maple Court bar as Nathan told what I always remember as his Jewish country club joke.

It is like watching not one but two separate performers when Nathan acts out this suburban folk tale. The first performer is Shapiro, who at a banquet is attempting to propose once more his perennially blackballed friend for membership. Nathan’s voice grows incomparably oleaginous, gross with fatuity and edged with just the perfect trace of Yiddish as he limns Shapiro’s quaveringly hopeful apostrophe to Max Tannenbaum. “To tell what a great human being Max Tannenbaum is I must use the entire English alphabet! From A to Z I will tell you about this beautiful man!” Nathan’s voice grows silky, sly. Shapiro knows that among the club members is one—now nodding and dozing—who will try to blackball Tannenbaum. Shapiro trusts that this enemy, Ginsberg, will not wake up. Nathan-Shapiro speaks: “A he is Admirable. B he is Beneficial. C he is Charming. D he is Delightful. E he is Educated. F he is Friendly. G he is Good-hearted. H he is a Helluva nice guy.” (Nathan’s stately, unctuous intonations are impeccable, the vapid slogans almost unbearably hilarious; the back of my throat aches from laughter, a film blurs my eyes.) “I he is Inna-resting.” At this point Ginsberg wakes up, Nathan’s forefinger furiously stabs the air, the voice becoming magisterial, arrogant, insufferably but gloriously hostile. Through Nathan, the terrible, the unbudgeable Ginsberg thunders: “J joost a minute! (Majestic pause) K he’s a Kike! L he’s a Lummox! M he’s a Moron! N he’s a Nayfish! O he’s an Ox! P he’s a Prick! Q he’s a Queer! R he’s a Red! S he’s a Shlemiel! T he’s a Tochis! U you can have him! V ve don’t want him! W X Y Z—I blackball the
shmuck!
”

It was a grand display of wizardry, Nathan’s production-inspired mockery of such outrageous, runaway, sublime silliness that I found myself emulating my father, gasping, shorn of strength, collapsing sideways on the greasy banquette. Sophie, half choked on her own mirth, made weak little dabs at her eyes. I sensed the local barflies regarding us glumly, wondering at our delirium. Recovering, I gazed at Nathan with something like awe. To be able to cause such laughter was a god’s gift, a benison.

But if Nathan had been merely a clown, had he remained so exhaustingly
“on”
at all times, he would have, of course, with all his winning gifts, become a staggering bore. He was too sensitive to play the perpetual comedian, and his interests were too wide-ranging and serious for him to permit our good times together to remain on the level of tomfoolery, however imaginative. I might add, too, that I always sensed that it was Nathan—perhaps again because of his “seniority,” or maybe because of the pure electric force of his presence—who set the tone of our conversation, although his innate tact and sense of proportion prevented him from hogging the stage. I was no slouch at storytelling, either, and he listened. He was, I suppose, what is considered a polymath—one who knows a great deal about almost everything; yet such was his warmth, his wit, and with such a light touch did he display his learning, that I never once felt in his presence that sense of gagging resentment one often feels when listening to a person of loquaciously large knowledge, who is often just an erudite ass. His range was astonishing and I had constantly to remind myself that I was talking to a scientist, a biologist (I kept thinking of a prodigy like Julian Huxley, whose essays I had read in college)—this man who possessed so many literary references and allusions, both classical and modern, and who within the space of an hour could, with no gratuitous strain, weave together Lytton Strachey,
Alice in Wonderland,
Martin Luther’s early celibacy,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and the mating habits of the Sumatran orangutan into a little jewel box of a beguiling lecture which facetiously but with a serious overtone explored the intertwined nature of sexual voyeurism and exhibitionism.